The Inside Story on How Tech Billionaires Sparked San Francisco’s Moderate Backlash

In recent years San Francisco, widely regarded as America’s most progressive city, has experienced a far-reaching anti-progressive backlash. In 2022, voters recalled three progressive school board members and progressive DA Chesa Boudin. Then moderates took control of the city’s Board of Supervisors. Last year they won a majority on the city’s Democratic Party central committee, and in November San Francisco elected a new moderate mayor and decisively re-elected the centrist tough-on-crime DA who replaced Boudin. 

In a detailed, deeply reported piece in The New Republic titled “The Shadowy Millions Behind San Francisco’s ‘Moderate” Politics,” left-leaning journalist Laura Jedeed connects the dots to argue this remarkable political shift did not happen organically, but rather was sparked by a sustained, lavishly funded organizing campaign backed by a handful of tech industry titans. 

We invited Jedeed on to Blue City Blues to tell us what she found when she followed the money that helped to fuel San Francisco’s moderate backlash. While she sees this effort as fundamentally deceptive and illegitimate, we probe with her how much, big spending aside, voter unhappiness with progressive rule in San Francisco is rooted in something real, and how much San Francisco’s moderate backlash differs from the backlash experienced in other blue cities like Seattle.

You can follow more of Jedeed's writing at https://www.bannedinyourstate.com.

Our editor is Quinn Waller. 

About Blue City Blues 

Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.  

 America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.

But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. 

The Blue City Blues podcast aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them? 

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]