San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s top billing at an event called Celebrating the Power of People at the SF County Fair Building Monday night was at least some measure of how far Marie Hurabiell’s star has risen.
Lurie was there to speak at a fundraiser for ConnectedSF, a political organization that portrays itself as moderate, grassroots, and determined to dismantle what Hurabiell, its executive director, describes as San Francisco’s dysfunctional progressive policies, and rebuild the city with electoral wins like Lurie’s. ConnectedSF supported Lurie early in his campaign, when he was a little-known candidate polling at 11 percent, Hurabiell said.
“We have a strong ground game, and we have tens of thousands of members, so we can get the word out pretty effectively,” Hurabiell told me. “I think we definitely had an impact, a very strong impact.”
“We picked him because he’s an outsider who wasn’t part of the problem,” she said of the mayor. “And that’s what we are. We’re the outsiders.” Getting Lurie to headline her event was simply a matter of asking. “He enjoys speaking to our people, because we’re the ones who supported him,” she said.
The name ConnectedSF, with its anodyne SF suffix, should raise a red flag for any San Franciscan. It is similar to the names of many of the pressure groups funded by wealthy donors such as William Oberendorf (TogetherSF); David Sacks (GrowSF); Michael Moritz (also TogetherSF). In January, TogetherSF merged with Neighbors for a Better SF. By now, the names of these groups mask their goal of moving the city rightward about as well as a pair of Groucho glasses.
Hurabiell says ConnectedSF is “not just one more SF group,” but her mission could not be more similar to the other organizations: “I want to move the city to the center, to where it’s functional,” Hurabiell said.
ConnectedSF identifies sponsors such as Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan (who served on GrowSF’s board and is a staunch anti-progressive activist), real estate developer TMG Partners, and Jim Sangiacomo of Trinity Properties.
Attendees paid $100 each to be present at Celebrating the Power of People. “Neighborhood Heroes,” as they were called, from each of the city’s 11 supervisorial districts were honored, their photographs projected on a large movie screen serving as a backdrop to the event. Eleven restaurateurs served food in front of banners representing political organizations from the districts they are located in. Every restaurateur I spoke to said they weren’t affiliated with, or even aware of, the organizations on the banners or ConnectedSF’s politics. Wine flowed freely.
Lurie took the stage with the text describing ConnectedSF’s heroes unintentionally projected onto him. He started by noting that about one year ago, 20 percent of San Franciscans thought the city was headed in the right direction, and more than 60 percent believed it was going in the wrong direction, and that those numbers are now inverted. (In other words, SF is back.)
“People have this sense of hope and optimism that we haven’t seen in a very long time in this city,” Lurie said. “What I am really excited to close with is, let’s go San Francisco, we’ve got this!”
The mayor seemed comfortable, clearly in his element, but the speech was rushed and thin on substance. ConnectedSF’s featured guest was done in exactly 6.5 minutes, and was then off to his next event.
The following day, Julie Pitta, president of The Phoenix Project, told me she thinks Lurie showed up at the fundraiser because he was being “very polite” to Hurabiell. To suggest a deeper motivation or affinity is to overrate ConnectedSF’s influence on City Hall. “Do I think that they got him elected?” Pitta asked. “No, I think Lurie’s money got him elected.”
The Phoenix Project, a progressive organization that publishes blog posts and research aimed at exposing right-wing money and influence in local politics. The group has published stories highly critical of Hurabiell on its website. Hurabiell, who was appointed to a board position on the Presidio Trust by Donald Trump during the president’s first term, has been criticized by observers who question her ideology and anti-progressive tactics. (She told me that she has never spoken to the president).
ConnectedSF is “a son of the astroturf network,” Pitta said, using the term for the well-funded special interest groups designed to look like grassroots organizations. Hurabiell acknowledged that she gets money from Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, which is funded by Moritz, the mayor’s mother Mimi Haas, and Trump-aligned investor Chris Larsen. ConnectedSF is “a top-down organization run by a right wing political operative, Marie Hurabiell,” Pitta said.
Hurabiell’s political affiliations can be hard to pin down. In 2021, amid the back-and-forth battle over wokeness, she posted a critique of the idea of critical race theory on Twitter, and deleted it. In an interview with KQED in 2022, she apologized for it, despite still posting anti-woke rhetoric. That interview described her as a longtime Republican who switched her affiliation to the Democratic Party, and suggested she made the switch to run for a board position at the City College of San Francisco.
Hurabiell told me she changed parties because most of her friends and the people she works with in San Francisco are Democrats. She said she has “taken a lot of slings and arrows for having been a registered Republican most of my life in San Francisco. But you know, I stand true to my values.”
Tax filings show Hurabiell earned a salary of $240,000 from ConnectedSF in 2023 as its executive director. Asked about her compensation, Hurabiell said her salary is set by ConnectedSF's board, and is based on its research and comparisons with organizations. She declined to say what she was paid in 2024 or this year.
The question remains, why of all places he could’ve been, did Lurie choose to be at Celebrating the Power of People? (The mayor’s office didn’t respond to an email seeking comment). “Although it’s only his first year in office, his closest advisors are people from the business world — the wealthy,” Pitta said.
“What I’m gathering, and I don’t know the mayor well at all, is that he is most comfortable with the kinds of people he grew up with in Pacific Heights,” Pitta said. “And that’s disappointing.”
Editor’s note: This story’s display copy has been updated to reflect that while Mayor Lurie spoke for only six and a half minutes, he was at the event longer than that.
