Chesa Buden won the 2019 election by a landslide, defeating contender Susie Loftus by less than 2%. San Francisco rejected Buden on Tuesday with a much bigger difference: Initial results show that about 60% of voters voted to recall the controversial DA
This is partly due to who showed up to vote this time, according to a Chronicle analysis of preliminary data at the neighborhood level. While turnout in Tuesday’s election is likely to be similar to that of Buden’s initial election, the areas where Budin had lower support in 2019 turned out to be larger than the neighborhoods that supported him.
The Chronicle looked at the share of electorate neighborhoods in the 2019 election and compared it to their share of the electorate on Tuesday. The neighborhoods that voted for one of Buden’s contenders in 2019, including Sunset, Marina and Pacific Heights, accounted for a larger share of the electorate in the 2022 election than in 2019.
West Twin Peaks and Sunset saw the largest increase in turnout, moving from a combined 16.7% of the electorate in 2019 to 18.7% in 2022. Both neighborhoods voted strongly in favor of the recall: 67% of voters the West Twin Peaks voted Yes to measure H, as did 70% of Sunset voters.
Meanwhile, neighborhoods seen as Budin’s strongholds – such as Mission, Hate and Northern Bernal Heights – all marked their share of the electoral decline in 2022. The Mission, the city’s largest pro-Buddhist district, saw the biggest decline in the share of turnout, growing from 6.3% to 5.1%.
These figures are still preliminary: they include only votes from postal ballots cast before election day and those cast in person on election day, which is probably almost 60% of the expected total number of votes, according to the Electoral Department. Another 40% or more remain to be counted from ballot papers received by post from the Election Department on election day or in the following days. To make our analysis as close as possible to apples to apples, we examined the number of turnout from the latest data reported on election nights in 2019 and 2022.
It is difficult to compare these two choices directly in terms of what they measure for public sentiment around Buden or overall public safety in the city. Unlike Tuesday’s election, which ultimately was about one candidate, the 2019 election required voters to vote for the mayor, prosecutor, city prosecutor, public defender, sheriff and several other contests in the year before the presidential election.
More about Chesa Boudin Recall
While turnout was initially expected to be very low based on early return rates, which measure how many people returned ballots by mail before election day, the Electoral Department now expects turnout among registered voters to reach 46%. high than the 42% observed in the 2019 elections, and much higher than the 36% percentage for the school council recall in February.
Just like in 2019, Buden’s support on Tuesday comes mainly from polling stations that have a high score in the Chronicle Progressive Voters’ Index, which uses each polling station’s voting history for different voting measures to give it a rating of the most -high to least “progressive”. The PVI index shows that neighborhoods in the city’s core – Hate, Mission and Bernal Heights – tend to vote more progressively than those on its outer edge, such as Lake Merced, the Visitation Valley and the port.
Those outer central neighborhoods that voted against Buden in 2019 also voted against him on Tuesday. But this time they were joined by several neighborhoods that voted for Buden in 2019, including Bayview, Tenderloin and Richmond.
Susie Nielson is a full-time writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, and Nami Sumida is a developer of data visualization at the Chronicle. Email: susan.neilson@sfchronicle.com, nami.sumida@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @susieneilson, @namisumida
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