Political change is coming to San Francisco Bay Area, a Democratic stronghold

Last year’s presidential election saw similar overwhelming majorities in the region for Vice President Kamala Harris — a product of Bay Area politics — over Donald Trump.

Accordingly, 100% of the Bay Area’s congressional and legislative seats are held by Democrats, and the party utterly dominates county boards of supervisors, city councils and the governing boards of school districts and other units of local government.

John Burton, a long-serving congressman and state legislator who died recently at age 92, personified the Bay Area’s history of Democratic hegemony.

The political organization he, his late brother, Phil Burton, and former Assembly Speaker and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown founded in the 1950s remains — at least as long as the 91-year-old Brown remains alive — a very potent player in regional, state and even national politics.

However, Democrats didn’t always dominate Bay Area politics. Until the 1960s, the region had many Republican officeholders and a few remained into the 1980s, particularly in the suburbs.

The Bay Area is not going to change its partisan stripes any time soon, and probably never. However, an interesting phenomenon is developing in the region — the rise of Democratic political figures who hew to the middle, much to the chagrin of those on the party’s left wing.

Two Democratic mayors, San Francisco’s Daniel Lurie and San Jose’s Matt Mahan, personify the drift, and an atmospheric change in San Francisco’s governing Board of Supervisors, long a bastion of progressive politics, is another indication.

Lurie, elected last year, comes from personal wealth and philanthropic engagement and shuns ideological conflicts while promoting fiscal responsibility and reform of his city’s notoriously restrictive regulatory processes.

His most recent effort is what he calls PermitSF, a package of “six ordinances with common-sense changes for those living, building housing, or operating a business in San Francisco.”

“Today, we are getting rid of the nonsense and focusing on common sense, with a new set of reforms that will make it easier for San Franciscans to live, grow, and invest in this city,” Lurie said as he revealed the package.

Progressives on the city’s governing board may resist Lurie’s actions but, as a recent  San Francisco analysis of voting records points out, “For the first time since 2019, the city’s left-leaning supervisors are outnumbered by a more centrist group that not only has more seats but also consistently votes together.”

Meanwhile, Mahan, who had careers in philanthropy and high technology before running for mayor in 2022, is also a nondoctrinaire Democrat. He broke with the party by endorsing Proposition 36, a 2024 ballot measure to crack down on crime, and recently published an article sharply criticizing Newsom for ignoring the state’s bad business climate.

Mahan said “the governor, and every elected official and leader, also need to own up to the truth. And the truth is that California has the highest unemployment rate in the nation, at 5.5%, and nearly half the nation’s unsheltered homeless people. We have the highest energy and housing costs in the continental United States, and, largely because of these high costs, the highest effective poverty rate in the nation.”

When one political party becomes dominant, it often fragments into factions defined by geography, culture, personality or ideology. What’s happening in the Bay Area exemplifies that pattern.

Dan Walters has been a journalist for more than 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. He began his professional career in 1960, at age 16, at the Humboldt Times. CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics. He can be reached at dan@calmatters.org.