Chesa Boudin won the 2019 election by the skin of her teeth, beating challenger Suzy Loftus by less than 2%. On Tuesday, San Francisco rejected Boudin by a much larger margin: Initial results indicate that about 60% of voters voted to remember the controversial DA.
This is due in part to who came forward to vote this time, shows an analysis of the Chronicle of Preliminary Data at the Neighborhood Level. Although turnout in Tuesday’s election was low in every way, the areas where Boudin had the least support in 2019 resulted in higher numbers relative to the neighborhoods that supported him.
The Chronicle examined the proportion of constituencies in the electorate, or the number of voters, in the 2019 election and compared it to its proportion of the electorate on Tuesday. Neighborhoods that voted for one of Boudin’s challengers 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, from 16.7% of the combined electorate in 2019 to 18.7% in 2022. Both neighborhoods voted firmly in favor of the withdrawal: the 67% of West Twin Peaks voters voted Yes. in Measure H, as do 70% of Sunset voters.
Meanwhile, neighborhoods considered Boudin’s strongholds — the Mission, Haight, and northern Bernal Heights, for example — saw their share of the electorate dwindle in 2022. The Mission, which is the most pro-Boudin neighborhood. The largest city in the city saw the largest decrease in turnout, from 6.3% of voters to 5.1%, a decrease of almost 1.2% in percentage points.
These figures are still preliminary: they only include the ballot votes cast by post before election day and those cast in person on election day, which typically account for between 70% and 80% of the total expected votes. Another 20% to 30% is left to count from the ballot papers by mail received by the Department of Elections on election day or in the coming days. In order to make our analysis as close as possible to the apples in the apples, we examined turnout figures based on the latest data reported on the nights of the 2019 and 2022 elections.
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It is also impossible to directly compare these two elections in terms of what they measure about public sentiment around Boudin, or public safety in general in the city. Unlike Tuesday’s election, which ended up being largely a single candidate, the 2019 election called on voters to cast their ballots for the mayor, the prosecutor, the lawyer for the city, the public defender, the sheriff and several other races the year before the presidential election.
It seems that these withdrawal elections have an unusually low turnout. SF’s overall turnout in the 2019 elections was 42%, while turnout for these elections is likely to be even lower than the 36% observed at the February school board withdrawal.
As in 2019, Boudin’s support on Tuesday came mainly from the districts that score highest in the Chronicle’s progressive voter index, which uses each district’s voting history in different voting measures to give it a score more or less “progressive”. The PVI index shows that the city’s core neighborhoods (Haight, Mission, and Bernal Heights) tend to vote more progressively than those on its outer shore, such as Lake Merced, Visitacion Valley, and the marina.
These outlying neighborhoods, which voted against Boudin in 2019, also voted against him on Tuesday. But this time, it was joined by several neighborhoods that voted for Boudin in 2019, such as Bayview, Tenderloin and Richmond.
This story will be updated with additional data as it arrives.
Susie Neilson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer and Nami Sumida is a Chronicle data visualization developer. Email: susan.neilson@sfchronicle.com, nami.sumida@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @susieneilson, @namisumida