The rich kids are fighting in the SF mayoral race, as the Republican-leaning money man behind the political group Neighbors for a Better San Francisco is not pleased with Daniel Lurie’s mailer attacks on Mark Farrell’s dubious campaign finances.

It’s no secret in the San Francisco mayoral race that there is uniquely bad blood between former supervisor Mark Farrell and Levi Strauss heir and nonprofit founder Daniel Lurie. It is not unusual for the two men with very similar legacy-wealth backgrounds to argue personally with each other on Twitter, and hmm, the topic is often money (or rather, measuring-stick contests about campaign donations).  

Being that both Farrell and Lurie come from moneyed backgrounds, it is not surprising that they earned the dual endorsement of SF’s wealthiest political pressure group Neighbors for a Better San Francisco. (We will remind you again that Neighbors for a Better San Francisco is curiously headquartered in San Rafael). That group is the one that largely bankrolled the Recall Chesa Boudin effort as well as the school board recalls, and also quietly paid Brooke Jenkins more than $175,000 during that recall campaign while she claimed she was a volunteer.  

And Neighbors for a Better San Francisco’s single largest donor is longtime Republican megadonor Bill Oberndorf, whose lavish contribution history skews massively toward the GOP. In fairness, Oberndorf is a Never Trumper who also gave to the Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden campaigns in 2016 and 2020, respectively. But his money is highly sought after by SF moderate candidates who are fine raking in those Oberndorf bucks that also go extravagantly to the likes of Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell.

And today, the Chronicle reports that Oberndorf is very angry with Daniel Lurie’s campaign mailers, as these mailers present relentless attacks on Mark Farrell. Presumably Oberndorf does not want the two rich guy mayoral candidates beating each other up, lest this might allow a ranked-choice win for Mayor Breed or even Aaron Peskin.

The Chronicle obtained emails between Oberndorf and Lurie regarding the attack ad mailers, with Oberndorf asking if the information on the mailers was “accurate and true.” Lurie was indignant in his response.

“If you are asking me on behalf of Neighbors to cover up this corruption and unethical behavior, I do not want to be affiliated with the organization,” Lurie reportedly responded. "I'm not going to be intimidated. San Francisco needs accountable, ethical and courageous leadership."

The Chronicle does not note which ad Oberndorf was complaining about, but there is no shortage of examples. Several are seen above, all from Lurie’s campaign, citing Farrell’s past history of ethical problems, highly questionable spending on luxury dinners and parties, and conflicts of interest with donations he steered to his wife’s nonprofit.  

Neighbors for a Better SF appears to be trying to broker some sort of peace between Farrell and Lurie. "When Neighbors made its dual endorsement of Daniel Lurie and Mark Farrell it was with the expectation that they would campaign based on facts dealing with the most pressing issues facing our city,” the organization’s executive director Jay Cheng told the Chronicle. “Neighbors believes there is no place for misstatements of fact, hearsay, or innuendo in our political discourse, let alone in a race where we have dual endorsed two candidates.”

Note that Cheng said “there is no place for misstatements of fact.” Meaning he does not actually accuse Lurie of inaccuracies in the ads, he tiptoes around this quite carefully.

But Oberndorf is clearly a Mark Farrell supporter. The Chronicle reports that Oberndorf and his investment firm have “given more than half a million dollars to Farrell’s campaign and a separate fundraising committee Farrell established to support Prop D.”

One of these Prop D donations is seen above (the emphasis added is ours), and this too appears to be an example of Farrell playing pretty fast and loose with campaign laws. The Prop D contributions are to an “independent expenditure” committee, or what we used to call a super PAC, called “Mark Farrell for Yes on Prop D.” Independent expenditure committees do not have the donation limits that mayoral campaigns have.  

Farrell has been accused of commingling this Prop D super PAC money with his own campaign, effectively using the Prop D money as his own campaign slush fund. A pretty obvious example of this is seen in the batch of ads above. On paper, these are technically Prop D ads. But just looking at them, those are very clearly also Mark Farrell ads.

These Farrell Prop D ads might well be illegal, but Farrell will likely suffer no consequence even if they are. The SF Ethics Commission would only hand out some paltry fine, probably months after the election is long over, if wrongdoing is determined.

But this may also show the real reason that Bill Oberndorf is upset with Daniel Lurie’s ads: because they call out suspicious Farrell campaign finance dealings that Oberndorf doesn't want called out.

Related: Daniel Lurie Campaign Paying Google to Run Fake, Anti-Mark Farrell Headlines on Real News Articles [SFist]

Images: Joe Kukura, SFist