The November 2024 election is on track to be the most expensive in the city’s history. Unheard of sums are being spent by San Francisco’s wealthiest as they work to push the city in a dangerously rightward direction. The results they hope to see will create a city friendlier to the top 1% at the expense of the rest of us.

An August 1st release of campaign-finance filings chronicles the money raised and the money spent for the upcoming election. The most important takeaway is this: A quarter of the money that’s been raised — $5.5 million out of $23.5 million — comes from a handful of donors, ten to be precise. They include billionaires Mimi Haas, mother of Levi Strauss heir and mayoral candidate Daniel Lurie, technology venture capitalist Michael Moritz and cryptocurrency mogul Chris Larsen. Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, the political group headed by Republican billionaire William Oberndorf, has spent nearly $3 million on the upcoming election.

The mayor’s race is seeing big-money donations flood into the campaign coffers of conservative candidates Mayor London Breed and Lurie. So far, $11.6 million has been raised with a staggering $5.2 million going to a PAC supporting Lurie. He has already spent $590,000 of his sizable fortune on his campaign. Others who gave big were his mother who contributed $1 million, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jan Koum and biotech investor Oleg Nodelman, who each gave $250,000.

Mayor Breed’s political action committee raised $850,120 with nearly half of it coming from longtime supporter Larsen who showed his love for the mayor with a $400,000 donation. Breed counts another billionaire in her corner, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg who donated $200,000, presumably as a thank you to Breed for backing Bloomberg’s ill-fated 2020 campaign for President.. 

It may come as a surprise that former District 2 Supervisor Mark Farrell has raised a relatively meager $654,000 when compared to Lurie’s and Breed’s haul. Farrell can expect a boost from Neighbors for a Better San Francisco and Moritz’s TogetherSF, both of which have endorsed his candidacy. Neighbors for a Better San Francisco and TogetherSF have teamed up to create the Committee to Fix SF Government, PAC which is being used to support Farrell’s Commission’s reform ballot-measure committee. 

So far, TogetherSF’s November proposition capping the number of city commission as well as increasing the mayor’s authority will be the most lavishly funded measure on the ballot. To date, it has attracted an astonishing $4.6 million. Of that sum, $1 million came from TogetherSF’s Moritz, and $950,000 came from Neighbors for a Better San Francisco. About 25% of the money raised has gone to a committee supporting the measure led by Farrell, who has, in violation of the spirit and possibly letter of San Francisco’s campaign finance law, been using the money to defray expenses for his mayoral campaign.

In the supervisor races, two campaigns to unseat progressive office holders, District 1’s Connie Chan and District 5’s Dean Preston, have seen the most fund-raising action. Chan’s opponent Marjan Philhour, a one-time aide to Mayor Breed and veteran of two failed runs for a seat on the Board of Supervisors, has raised the most money of any supervisorial candidate in the coming election. Philhour has garnered $455,310 versus $368,995 for Chan. 

Among Philhour’s donors are the San Francisco Police Officers Association, and eight chapters of the Govern for California Courage Committee, an anti-union PAC. The practice of using different chapters to make multiple donations to a single campaign has roused the interest of state regulators. Bob Dockendorff, a San Francisco Ethics Commissioner from 1996 to 2000, told Mission Local: “It’s a problem, a big problem … It was never our intent to see that happen. That’s what we’re trying to avoid: Hiding dark money.”

That’s not the only ethics problems facing the Philhour campaign: She was hit with an ethics violation last spring for allegedly using the $245,000 raised for her Democratic County Central Committee run for her supervisorial campaign. Much of the money for Philhour’s DCCC campaign came from Garry Tan’s GrowSF and crypto billionaire Larsen. Philhour stands to benefit from GrowSF’s Clear Out Connie fund which has raised $72,101 to date.  

In District 5 Bilal Mahmood, a tech executive and leading challenger to Supervisor Dean Preston, has raised $182,174. Like Philhour, Mahmood is facing charges of ethics violations as he also received 8 donations from different chapters of the Govern for California Courage Committee and has been accused of mingling funds for his DCCC run with those of his supervisorial campaign. And, like Philhour, Mahmood stands to benefit from GrowSF’s Dump Dean PAC which has raised $297,346 to date.

The final three months of the election will likely see a faster rate of spending. Not only will money continue to swell the campaign coffers of billionaire-backed candidates, independent expenditure groups will spend on their behalf, financing a slew of advertising in the form of mailers, and print, television and online ads. 

Notably, Supervisor Aaron Peskin, the only mayoral candidate to publicly renounce billionaire backing, has raised money faster than any of his rivals since entering the race in April. One can only hope that it may be a sign that a significant number of San Franciscans aren’t ready to see their city bought by a handful of billionaires.