By Calvin Welch, HANC Board

The Haight-Ashbury kept its left liberal voting reputation in the June Primary, passing the CEO tax (Prop. D), defeating the lifetime term limit proposal of Supervisor Mahmood (Prop. B) and the billionaire funded corporate business tax cut (Prop. C). While giving Wiener a plurality of its vote for Congress some 48% of Haight-Ashbury voters favored either Chan or Chakrabarti.  But, like Citywide, voter turnout was higher in the more moderate voting precincts of the neighborhood than in the more progressive voting ones.

The analysis of the neighborhood vote centers on 12 precincts from three Supervisorial districts (1, 5 and 8) located in the three areas of the "core" Haight Ashbury: 4 precincts in the North Panhandle covering Stanyan to Baker, Fulton to Fell, 4 precincts in the “Flatland”, covering Stanyan to Baker, Oak to Frederick and finally, 4 precincts in the moderate voting "Hills” in the south of the neighborhood, bounded by Frederick to 17th, Stanyan to Delmar. In general, the 4 North Panhandle precincts tend to cast a "liberal” vote, the Flatland precincts tend to cast a "left/progressive” vote and the Hills tend to vote "moderate".

As can be seen from the Turnout table below, turnout in the Haight-Ashbury mirrored citywide turnout in that turnout was higher in moderate voting precincts than in liberal and left/progressive voting ones...Still neighborhood turnout was  above the Citywide average by nearly 10% and greatly exceeded statewide turnout.

The Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council (HANC) made endorsements on all four of the ballot propositions on the June Primary ballot. While HANCs' endorsements were, in fact, embraced by the neighborhoods voters, it would be less than accurate to claim that our endorsements were responsible for the vote.  Instead, HANC's endorsements simply reflect how representative of Haight-Ashbury voters HANC's board and membership are.

While making endorsements on ballot measures, HANC does not make endorsement on candidate races.

The impressive vote in the Haight-Ashbury (as well as the City) for Steyer for governor shows the political "hunger" in this town for a Democrat with a Democrat agenda.  Steyer is a billionaire and as such could have taken any position he chose on any position he selected to advance.  The fact that he consistently chose to spend millions of campaign dollars on the left most set of positions made absolute sense to San Franciscans and they embraced him.  San Francisco gave Steyer his highest percent of the vote of any county in the State.  Becerra, whose last minute ad blitz was funded by the Chamber of Commerce and Realtors (!), represents all that's wrong with the Democrats who far too often talk left at election time and act right all the rest of the year. That too was not lost on San Francisco voters who gave him his lowest vote margin in any major county. Nor was Katie Porter's deep kiss on lips to YIMBY’s missed by both neighborhood and Citywide voters who gave the one time front runner a humiliating 8% of the vote. 

But Porters humiliation was not the only evidence of our neighborhood voters rejecting the local YIMBY slate this June. Both the rejection of Mahmood’s bogus term limits measure (B) and the support of the business tax increase (D) demonstrated Haight-Ashbury voters’ ability to think for themselves.

But in perhaps the key race of the local June ballot, the election for a new member of Congress to replace Nancy Pelosi, the willingness of Haight-Ashbury voters to oppose the YIMBY poster boy Scott Wiener was most significant.  While Wiener did receive a plurality of the neighborhood vote, and outright wins in three precincts, he failed to get 50% in 9 of the 12 precincts of the neighborhood.  Indeed, Wieners 46% of the neighborhood vote is below the combined Chan/Chakrabarti vote 48% shows the way forward for the November race for Chan: pick up the Chakrabarti vote, add more of your own and win in November.  Now that Chakrabarti has endorsed Chan and announced that his staff will work for her the first part of that plan has been achieved.  Wiener, claiming being the victim of a right wing conspiracy and unfair and dangerous attacks from the Trans community, does not sound like a winner already making up excuses for his loss.