Editor’s note: Supervisor Dean Preston conceded the race to challenger Bilal Mahmood on Sunday in an Instagram post.
In one of the city’s most contentious Board of Supervisors races, a de-facto alliance between three candidates is transforming a contest that initially started as a dead heat.
The election for District 5, which stretches from the Panhandle into the Tenderloin, remains a close one between incumbent Supervisor Dean Preston — the city’s most famous socialist politician — and Bilal Mahmood, an Obama-administration policy analyst who has since launched a number of philanthropic and civic projects.
In the last few days, Mahmood has gained a notable edge, thanks to the runoff votes from people who chose two moderate competitors, Scotty Jacobs and Autumn Looijen, as their first-place picks.
By the current count as of Friday morning, Mahmood earned only 13 more first-place ballots than Preston. However, he has collected more than 1,800 second-place votes after the elimination of Looijen, Jacobs, and a fringe candidate named Allen Jones. Preston, meanwhile, has gained just 664.
The race is far from over — there remain more than 140,000 uncounted ballots in total — and we won’t know the outcome until next week at the earliest. But Mahmood’s surge is a case study in how strategizing within the ranked-choice voting system could help dethrone an incumbent. In interviews with Gazetteer SF, both Jacobs and Looijen acknowledged they had urged supporters to throw their weight behind Mahmood in order to effect change in District 5.
“When I looked at the field before launching my campaign in June, I saw how critical it was to get new leadership in D5. And based on the existing candidates, I wasn’t sure we had fuel in the rockets to get it done, so to speak,” Jacobs said. “Of course I ran to win. But regardless of that, my No. 1 priority has always been for us to defeat Dean.”
(Preston did not respond by press time to Gazetteer’s questions about the race and the role of ranked-choice strategizing in it.)
Jacobs touts a background in corporate marketing and strategy, and gained attention with a quirky call to make San Francisco the “dance music capital of the West Coast.” He and Mahmood were in “regular communication” since the start of Jacobs’ campaign, and he says he convinced Mahmood to form an alliance to promote each other to supporters as the next-best choice.
“Every communications channel at my disposal was pushing a ranked-choice strategy. Printing it in mailers, emails, newsletters, videos on social media,” Jacobs said.
Looijen, meanwhile, is best known as a key architect of the 2022 school board recall. It’s what gave her name recognition in this year’s race, despite only having moved to the Bay Area in 2020. She told Gazetteer she had not made any kind of agreement with Mahmood and Jacobs, but did “talk up all the moderate candidates” during her door-to-door campaign, hoping it could lead to more effective leadership for the district, especially in the Tenderloin.
“Bilal is winning because there was a team of three candidates attacking Dean,” Looijen told Gazetteer. “It takes two or three in tandem to get an incumbent out.”
Some experts regard ranked-choice voting as an improvement over traditional “plurality” voting, in which each voter picks one candidate and the candidate with the most votes wins outright.
Ranked-choice systems encourage two things: Candidates working to appeal to a broader group of voters, and voters ranking their actual favorite candidates, instead of hedging risk by voting for a more “electable” alternative. In turn, this can improve voter satisfaction because more ballots directly affect the outcome of close races, according to research from the organization FairVote.
“Everyone’s trying to appeal to a majority of voters, and there’s a focus on shared values over mudslinging between ideologically similar candidates,” Deb Otis, director of research and policy at FairVote, told Gazetteer earlier this year.
Although he differs from Preston on a number of priorities, Mahmood affirmed that he is a “pragmatic progressive” who ran on a platform of detail-oriented policy solutions to the city’s ills. But he also claimed that ranked-choice support for a coalition of more moderate candidates reflects a broader sentiment in District 5: dissatisfaction with Preston’s priorities and style of governance.
“If you look at the policy perspective, what was consistent with me, Scotty and Autumn — particularly me and Scotty — was a focus on building all levels of housing and a fully staffed police department,” Mahmood said. “But there were very significant differences in our campaigns, too.”
Could Mahmood have beaten Preston in a straightforward plurality vote? It’s impossible to tell, but Looijen is glad the ranked-choice strategy is playing out as planned.
“It would’ve been a coin flip in a non-ranked-choice vote,” she said. “But now it’s looking like more of a sure thing than a coin flip.”
