San Francisco Young Republicans announce endorsements for Mayor of San Francisco
The San Francisco Young Republicans (“SFYR”) met this month to issue the organization’s endorsements for the City and County of San Francisco’s Mayor’s race. The three candidates endorsed by a supermajority were #1. Mark Farrell, #2. Ellen Lee Zhou, and #3. Aaron Peskin. The race uses ranked-choice voting, so voters are encouraged to rank all 3 in that order.
The three core values of the Republican Party are law & order, prosperity, and beauty. Each of these candidates’ campaign personifies one of those points.
First, our top endorsed candidate, former Mayor Mark Farrell is seen as the top law & order guy in the race. Unlike the YIMBY Democrats who perpetually try to force San Francisco to bear the brunt of providing housing to vagrants, the Farrell campaign takes a different approach.
Our #1 choice, Mark Farrell calls for using city-owned property 100 miles away in Santa Cruz as the location for “treatment to help people suffering from addiction.” This is the correct approach. Providing treatment in an isolated area protects San Franciscans from the externalities caused by vagrants, and by bringing them far away from their urban drug dealers it gives them a fair chance to get reformed. Farrell isn’t perfect, but on law and order issues, he is the top candidate running. Moreover, in a close race between Farrell and Breed, Farrell is the better choice. To wit, his hardline stance on deploying the National Guard to mitigate the drug markets operating with impunity in downtown San Francisco may be heavy-handed but necessary. Breed has had years to take such a strong position and has failed, while Farrell has publicly declared it as a viable option on the table. This election may come down to a few hundred votes, and we need a changing of the guard. We need a mayor that is friendlier to commerce, capital and small businesses, and much tougher on the armed gangs selling drugs to the homeless and organizing retail theft.
Number 2 pick, social conservative Ellen Lee Zhou makes waves in San Francisco as being the only Republican on the ballot for Mayor. Democrat-run media outlets often lie to their readers, pretending that she is not in the race. But she is, and she will make an impact on election day. We would have liked to have ranked her higher, but SFYR wanted to see a candidate who showed the fundraising diligence needed to get past the election department’s matching funds threshold in our top spot. For a Republican to win in San Francisco, they need to be serious about cultivating both volunteers and donors.
Ellen’s campaign has prosperity as a central issue: She promises to “[b]ring business back and create jobs”, and to “[c]reate a free market for landlords and tenants, win-win to help both parties.” A former City worker, she understands that for San Francisco to have an efficient economy, our residents’ and business owners’ goals can’t be stalled forever in the permitting department. Ellen promises “Full staff [for] each department [to] ensure the quality of life for San Franciscans.”
Our number 3 choice, District-3 Supervisor Aaron Peskin is the most experienced candidate in the race. Peskin, for all his faults, does not seem beholden to developers and real-estate interests. He has publicly stated he wants to drive new construction but within reason, and without ignoring building restrictions that improve our quality of life. YIMBY Democrats (aka those who falsely call themselves “Moderates”) utterly loathe Peskin. For decades Aaron has been a thorn in their bosses’ side, as Aaron champions the interests of his neighborhood’s homeowners, renters, workers, and small business owners. Few things cause a meltdown in a YIMBY Democrat quite like saying positive words about their faction’s arch-nemesis Aaron Peskin.
Over 90% of our Young Republicans membership are renters. We were relieved to see that Supervisor Aaron Peskin convinced the Board of Supervisors to push for ethical AI, banning landlords from using tools based upon non-public competitor rental data. Landlords can still use AI, but now the data they use must be public, so as to put renters on a more fair bargaining position for negotiating contracts based upon free market conditions. Peskin expressed that “[b]anning algorithmic price gouging is pro-housing policy . . . Let’s build housing for renters, not for real estate investors.”
A friend of the arts, our #3 choice Aaron believes in a beautiful San Francisco, and his policies over the decades have promoted that. This is very important to us. As we stated last month in our opposition to CA Assembly Bill 2580, Young Republicans believe in the importance of preserving San Francisco’s historical heritage and the unique and ornate styles that have inspired residents and attracted visitors.
The GOP is the party of physical fitness, so we appreciate Peskin’s athletic drive: his near-daily swims at Aquatic Park Cove in the icy Bay, and annual swims from Alcatraz to San Francisco.
Plus, we’re not going to forget that during the dark days of Mayor London Breed’s unconstitutional vaccine passport era, District-3 was the friendliest to groups like ours. Venues in D-3 knew that Aaron would have their back against anything that Breed tried to throw at them.
Don’t get us wrong, we wouldn’t back either Farrell or Peskin for Congress, and we would have preferred to see a Republican run with sufficient coalition and organizational support to pass the matching-funds threshold and to achieve the fundraising needed to win city-wide. But for this Mayor’s race, Farrell, Zhao, and Peskin are our picks. To that point: As the window to file as a write-in candidate has not yet closed, San Francisco Young Republicans further notes that if former Supervisor Tony Hall declares as a write-in candidate, voters are encouraged to write him in as #1, and rank the others as #2, #3, and #4. Hall would be a more conservative choice than the other three endorsed candidates, but as of this time Supervisor Hall is not planning to run.
San Francisco Young Republicans is the third largest Young Republicans organization in California. We are an educational organization devoted to getting youth (ages 18-40) involved in San Francisco and Bay Area politics, and to provide the education and mentorship needed to get started in our region’s civic life. Learn more about us at sfyr.io or on our X at @sfyrxeets.
