The latest political campaign money end-around is setting up a state-level committee to prop up local DA Brooke Jenkins, and slather her face and name all over ads for next month’s statewide Proposition 1.

There are only two statewide measures on your March 5 primary ballot (though in true California fashion, the voter guide they send you in the mail to explain these two measures is still 110 pages long). One of the issues is the election for Dianne Feinstein’s former Senate seat, and the other is Proposition 1, a proposed $6.38 billion behavioral health services bond to fund housing for the homeless, and add more mental health, drug addiction, and alcoholism treatment facilities. It is not a terribly partisan proposal.  

But boy, the latest ad for the statewide Prop. 1 sure does feature a whole lot of San Franciso DA Brooke Jenkins. Jenkins narrates the ad, it shows her doing very important District Attorney things like talking on the phone while walking out of City Hall in a trenchcoat, and Jenkins’s name is on-screen for pretty much the entire 30-second ad. It feels more like an ad for Brooke Jenkins than an ad for Prop 1!

That’s not an accident. Mission Local reports it’s the work of six wealthy campaign donors who created a supposedly statewide committee, ostensibly just to promote Jenkins’s November reelection bid while skirting San Francisco’s $500 limit on campaign donations. That Mission Local article, published the day before the new ad dropped, describes this as "an apparent effort to plaster the DA’s face and name on flyers and mailers across the city.”

Now that the ads are out there, we see this plastering of Jenkins’s name and face all over the ads is confirmed.      

And you’re likely to recognize some of these wealthy donors' names. State campaign filings show that this committee called SF District Attorney Brooke Jenkins Ballot Measure Committee for Yes on Prop 1 has a $100,000 donation for longtime tech industry election influencer Ron Conway, another $100,000 from Ripple Labs co-founder Chris Larsen (who paid for those surveillance cameras all over town), and another $25,000 from high society maven Dede Wilsey, who’s hosted a Donald Trump fundraiser or two.

In all, that Jenkins committee has only six donations, but they totaled $272,500 in just a six-day span.

It’s not a new thing for a local elected official to establish a purported statewide election committee that basically just makes local advertisements to get that San Francisco official elected. Ed Lee did it in 2017, and then-City Attorney Dennis Herrera did it in 2013.

“It’s tried and true,” campaign attorney Jim Sutton told Mission Local. “It happens all the time.”

Related: DA Jenkins’s Office Disqualified From Murder Case, and Boy Is She Upset at the Chronicle’s Coverage [SFist]

Image: SF District Attorney Brooke Jenkins Ballot Measure Committee for Yes on Prop 1