It was literally a “lights out” performance, and not in a good way, on Monday night when the five major candidates running for San Francisco mayor debated at UC Law, and repeated technical glitches marred the night’s proceedings.

Since Monday night’s San Francisco mayoral election debate came just five nights after the last debate, you’d expect many of the candidates to repeat some of the exact same lines and arguments. You would not expect repeated lighting and microphone snafus. It was not a good night for the livestream host KRON4, host venue ​​UC Law San Francisco, or the SF Democratic Party that organized the debate, that technical snafus were the evening’s most memorable moments. “Can anyone hear?,” asked KRON4’s moderator Terisa Estacio, who repeatedly had to ask candidates to move microphones, while Mayor Breed’s opening statement contained a “Testing, one-two” because her mic was working so wonky.

And then the auditorium’s lights actually went out while candidate Daniel Lurie was speaking. The whole debate can be seen below, and the lights go out at the 1:15:57 mark.

“They’re really trying to shut me down, aren't they?,” Lurie cleverly quipped when the lights went out on him.

Yes, the auditorium literally looked like this at one point while Lurie was speaking, with little more than an exit sign and a screen visible.

The lights came back, but only partially at first. And the thing is, Lurie was actually on kind of a roll before the lights went out on him. “The City Hall insiders who are on the stage with me have built up a broken, ineffective and corrupt City Hall bureaucracy,” he was saying, before the lights died.

BrokeAssStuart.com reports that the broadcast used “anti-booing technology,” which is likely why you don’t hear any crowd noise, though you do hear the moderator shushing a crowd that you cannot hear. This anti-booing technology may have even played a role in some of the sound glitches.

We mentioned there were several times candidates regurged verbatim lines they used last week, including Supervisor Ahsha Safai’s dig at the wealthy heir Lurie whose campaign was bolstered by a $1 million PAC donation from his mother. Safai used the exact same line from last week that he, unlike Lurie, would fight for “not just the billionaires or the billionaire hairs, but all working families.” He added, “For contrast, my mother’s here, she gave me $150.”

But Safai also had the night’s biggest flub, when in answering a question, he said, “I’m sorry I just lost my train of thought for a minute, could you…?,” and prompted the moderator to repeat the question.

KTVU breaks down how Breed and former supervisor Mark Farrell duked it out over policing in the city.  “These guys here running against me, they want to take us backwards,” Breed said, referencing Farrell and Lurie’s Fox News-adjacent talking points on crime in San Francisco. “They want to make you feel bad about what San Francisco is, they are running against San Francisco.”

“This is not the Republican National Convention where every answer to public safety is police,” she said, and also cited how crime went up during Farrell’s brief tenure as mayor after Ed Lee died.

Farrell shot back. “The reason we don’t have enough police officers is because this current mayor can’t recruit police officers here in town, because she defunded our police department,” he said.

Supervisor Aaron Peskin also took to comparing his rivals to Republicans. “We also need to get Republican money out of our local elections,” Peskin declared onstage. “I’m talking about Better Neighborhoods for San Francisco [Note: he actually means Neighbors for a Better San Francisco], an organization that is run by a far-right billionaire.” [Note: he refers to Bill Oberndorf, who is the organization’s primary donor, but not its leader.]

But Peskin was largely sharp, particularly on housing issues that have dogged him “Some of the candidates on this stage will tell you that if we build a lot of housing, prices will drop. Well, that’s a bunch of horsepuckey,” Peskin said. “I will be a mayor who is devoted to building affordable housing.”

For his part, Farrell said that “We need to build more middle-income housing, without a doubt. But we also need to build more market-rate housing, because the city has failed to do that over the last few years.”

The SF Democratic Party hosted the debate, and as the Chronicle notes, they are expected to make an endorsement on July 24. With the moderate turn of that party’s governing body, and since some of those on the governing body working for these mayoral campaigns, the Chron speculates there may be multiple endorsees in ranked-choice fashion. And SFist speculates that if that happens, Aaron Peskin will certainly not be one of those endorsed.

Related: In First SF Mayoral Debate, Crowd’s Jeers are More Memorable Than Candidates’ Performances [SFist]

Image: SF Democratic Party via Facebook