Some strange bedfellows at opposite ends of the political spectrum have come together in the SF mayor’s race, as moderate Mark Farrell has made a puzzling partnership with Ahsha Safai in hopes of gaming the ranked-choice votes.
Well, this is one way for SF mayoral candidate Mark Farrell to try and knock a troublesome, unreported $675,000 loan scandal out of the headlines. The Chronicle reports today that Farrell and way-behind-in-the-polls candidate Ahsha Safai have formed a 1-2 alliance in the ranked choice vote, with both now encouraging their supporters to vote the other as their No. 2 choice on the November 5 ballot. As a reminder, you can vote for as many as ten candidates for mayor on the ranked-choice ballot.
At first blush, this is a highly illogical partnership. Farrell is a wealthy venture capitalist, Safai is mostly a labor union guy. Moreover, Farrell is polling at the top as first-choice candidate in the latest KRON4 poll at 20.6%, Safai is polling at an embarrassing 1.6%.
Still, Safai tells the Chronicle that “Regardless of what he did professionally for some time, [Farrell has] shown himself to be someone that will come out and partner with and support a lot of the different initiatives that I’m involved in.”
For his part, Farrell tells that paper that “While Ahsha and I do not agree on every issue, we share similar values and the shared belief San Francisco will be stronger without London Breed.”
Farrell mentions Breed there, but this move seems like far more of an attempted cockblock against Levi Strauss heir and nonprofit executive Daniel Lurie. Lurie and Farrell have formed a bitter personal rivalry, even though they’re both legacy-wealth guys likely to advocate for big-money tech and real estate interests, and there’s definitely overlap in their support. Lurie leads among second-choice candidates in that KRON4 poll, so yes, Lurie’s second-choice strength is a serious threat to Farrell.
So the apparent thinking here is that Farrell can convince his hard partisans to avoid ranking Lurie as their No. 2 choice, as he will specifically instruct them not to do so. And to whatever degree Safai has hard partisans, he’d swing a few second-choice votes to Farrell. But Safai certainly benefits from Farrell handing him a substantial number of second-choice votes for his struggling campaign.
Mayor Breed’s campaign could not hide their derision. “Mark Farrell’s campaign has reached desperation levels if his October surprise is announcing that he’s secured Ahsha’s 1%,” Breed spokesperson Breed spokesperson Joe Arellano remarked to the Chronicle. “Daniel Lurie carpet-bombing Farrell on TV every 15 minutes with his millions of dollars of attack ads must be having its intended effect.”
Peskin’s consultant Jim Stearns was even funnier. “If Ahsha goes public with an endorsement of Farrell, he will lose what few votes he already has right now,” he said to the Chron.
These 1-2 and 1-2-3 ranked-choice gambits don’t have a great history of outcomes in San Francisco. Back in 2015, the 1-2-3 to defeat Ed Lee campaign did seem to elevate three fringe candidates (among them Broke-Ass Stuart), but Lee still clobbered them all by about 75,000 votes or more. In 2018, YIMBY candidate Sonja Trauss and Planning Commissioner Christine Johnson pulled a 1-2 against Matt Haney in the District 6 supervisor race, and Haney still got far more votes than both of them combined.
But this five-way mayoral race is far more unpredictable, so who knows, maybe this move might pack a one-two punch.
Images: (Left) Mark Farrell via Facebook, (Right) Ahsha Safai via Twitter
