This is the first in a series by Joel Rosenblatt about San Francisco’s Republican Party.
As he gaveled the start of his political organization’s monthly meeting, John Dennis showed off to his fellow delegates a white ball cap with the group’s name emblazoned on the front: San Francisco Republican Party.
Established 1856, the back of the hat reads. Purchased from the group’s recently opened online store, Dennis told his colleagues that he’s been wearing it around town, so far without incident. “I haven’t been beaten up yet,” he said to laughter.
As the highest-profile Republican in a famously liberal city, Dennis has burnished his credentials with five Congressional campaigns (and defeats) against a higher-profile political foil, Nancy Pelosi. Though he says his philosophical leanings are libertarian — Senator Rand Paul is a good friend, he says — he is a staunch supporter of Donald Trump, and will serve as a delegate for the former president at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this July.
Dennis, 60, makes his living as a real estate owner and developer but his passion is politics. A volunteer for Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign, he was elected to the San Francisco Republican Party, or SFGOP, in 2010, serving as its chairman for the last five years.
The most interesting part of the job, he said, is the media he attracts as a reliable critic of left-leaning policies. He is regularly interviewed by national newspapers and magazines, for partisan sources like Newsmax and NewsNation, and local television stations seeking an opposing conservative viewpoint. He has appeared on Laura Ingraham’s and Megyn Kelly’s programs.
Earlier in the day, sitting in a plush lounge at the Olympic Club downtown, Dennis likened his role in San Francisco to that of Cassandra, the Greek priestess who foretold the future but wasn’t believed.
“It's totally liberating because I don't agree with this whole program here,” he said in a broad reference to the city’s politics that he said predictably produced its entrenched problems of crime and homelessness. “For years I’ve been saying this program is going to lead to this end.
“I'm vindicated, and there's a little bit of gratification and satisfaction in that. But standing against what you know is the wrong direction, the wrong way to do things, the wrong policies, and the wrong ideology, is something I'm okay with doing — in a sea where everyone disagrees with me.”
SF’s tiny but growing Republican base
The SFGOP is synonymous with the Republican County Central Committee, or RCCC, the party’s local governing body.
As of today, it represents 38,048 Republicans, or 7.5 percent, of 504,171 registered voters in the city and county of San Francisco, according to city data. That compares with 321,927, or 64 percent, of registered Democrats.
Dennis tracks those numbers in granular detail. Republican registration in San Francisco had been drifting downwards for 60 years, he said — until he was elected SFGOP chairman in 2019. That year, the number of registered Republicans started inching upwards after hitting a modern low of 6.4 percent, he said.
He points to more than 6,000 newly registered Republicans since 2019, a number corroborated by election data. More importantly, Dennis said, the Republican party is gaining ground on Democrats. In 2022, he said, there was one Republican registered in the city for every 9.4 Democrats; today it's one Republican for every 8.46 Democrats. Those figures are harder to verify but his obsession speaks for itself.
“In the last two years, I mean in relative terms — relative terms, right — they have exploded,” Dennis said, referring to the proliferation of Republicans. “We’ve grown the party — in San Francisco.”
The SFGOP produces voter guides, fundraises, and hosts speakers and events. Its most important work is recruiting and endorsing candidates. For its monthly meetings, Dennis’s work as chairman is performed outside the spotlight, less than a mile but a world away from the Olympic Club, in an auditorium with stained seats at a state government building in the Tenderloin.
On stage, he presided over 25 delegates, a few of them wearing red MAGA caps, and a handful of ex-officio members. Seven people sat in the audience including Ellen Lee Zhou, a candidate for Mayor (also wearing a red MAGA cap).
As the May meeting got underway, Dennis and SFGOP treasurer Bob Rintel patiently parried one delegate’s concerns about seemingly negligible discrepancies in the group’s financial records. The most overtly interesting agenda item was a vote between two candidates vying to replace a delegate who recently stepped down.
The race featured Troy Minor, a member of the San Francisco Young Republicans, against Daniel Goodwyn (another MAGA cap wearer), who stormed the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021 in an insurrection to overturn the presidential election results, and was subsequently arrested.
On video taken inside the Capitol, a fellow protester identified Goodwyn as “sfthoughtcriminal,” according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court in Washington. Goodwyn called the U.S. Capitol police officer escorting him out of the building an “oathbreaker,” urging others to get his badge number, the filing said “It should also be noted that Goodwyn is a self-proclaimed member of the Proud Boys,” according to the complaint.
At the meeting, a delegate speaking in support of Goodwyn’s candidacy said he stepped into the Capitol for less than one minute. “He didn’t take, break, or hurt anything,” she said. “When he was asked to leave, he left.”
In his plea agreement, Goodwyn was charged with entering a restricted building and said he would cooperate with an investigation of the riot. He ended up being sentenced to 60 days in jail. The delegate claimed that he spent three weeks in solitary confinement, which could not be verified.
Goodwyn has concluded that his time in prison for being at the “election integrity protest” has “radicalized and solidified” his Christian faith — and pushed him closer to the Constitution, she told the group. Minor, the younger candidate, beat Goodwyn by one vote. Dennis noted aloud that the result spared him of having to cast the deciding ballot.
On almost every political and social issue, Dennis stands by Trump. He supports the former president’s position on abortion, believes the U.S. shouldn’t support Ukraine, and that all four criminal cases against him amount to “third world lawfare.” Jan. 6 is the single subject on which he allows a hint of a difference. When the attack started to unfold, Dennis, as he often does, jumped on Twitter.
“As soon as I saw that happening, I was like, in bold: get out!” Dennis said. “This is a nightmare. This is a disaster. Don't do this. This is horrible,” he added. “So I'm not, you know, I’m not supportive. I think it was in the best case scenario a PR nightmare.”
Trump, he added, “should’ve cut his losses, and said this is not worth pursuing because the system is screwed up – just let it go and come back in 2024.”
Also tucked into the meeting agenda was an obscure item that Dennis dispatched within less than a minute: The chairman announced that lawyer Harmeet Dhillon agreed “to effectively represent us” if the SFGOP gets sued by the San Francisco Briones Society.
‘Hostile takeover’
The Briones Society is named after Doña Juana Briones de Miranda who was a 19th century Mexican-American pioneer, businesswoman, healer, and landowner in what would become San Francisco. The Society pitches what it says is a fresh brand of San Francisco conservatism, in the GOP molds of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan.
In a March election, the Briones Society consummated what Dennis describes as a “hostile takeover” of the SFGOP. The group outspent the SFGOP’s slate of candidates by seven to one, Dennis said, resulting in 17 out of 19 Briones candidates winning spots on the committee. Once the winners are seated, just eight members, including Dennis, will remain who don’t belong to the Briones faction.
Adding insult to injury, 13 Briones members signed a letter to Dennis last month arguing that the SFGOP was attempting to stall their takeover. Their term was supposed to start in April, but two weeks after the March election, the SFGOP changed its bylaws to delay their start dates until January, 2025, according to the letter.
The move allows current SFGOP members to “enjoy an extraordinary lame duck period of nine months before voters’ voices, concerns, and preferences are heeded,” the letter reads. “This is entirely improper.”
Nicholas Berg, one of the 17 Briones members who won in the March election, and one of the 13 Society members who signed the letter, said the signatories are considering two options. The first is an appeal to the state Republican Party on grounds that the victorious Briones members should serve on the SFGOP immediately. The alternative, he said, is for the Briones candidates to sue the SFGOP to force an immediate transition.
Which is why Dennis lawyered up with Dhillon. A San Francisco-based attorney with expertise in election law, she is a board member of the California Republican Party, and a frequent speaker at the Federalist Society. Similar to other lawyers including Rudy Giuliani, Dhillon has hitched her career to Trump, fighting to overturn the 2020 election results and challenging voting rights in contested states. She also traffics in conspiracy theories, including doubting the veracity of the attack on Paul Pelosi, a theory amplified by Tucker Carlson.
The Briones Society winners “freaked out” about the bylaw changes delaying their start until 2025, Dennis said. The date was changed to align the SFGOP with California party rules, he said. Without the move, San Francisco Republicans risked losing the right to send delegates to state party conventions, he added.
Objectors from the Briones Group “think everything’s directed at them, and it’s just really not the case,” Dennis said. “They’re going to be colleagues of mine next year, so, you know, there's no conspiracy against them.”
According to Berg, marginal increases in the number of Republicans registered in San Francisco are beside the point. The overall number “shows that the SFGOP under Dennis isn’t on track to make the party competitive in the city anytime soon,” Berg said.
The March election “wasn’t a hostile takeover,” Berg added. “It was a free and fair election,” he said, suggesting that Dennis’s group of candidates raised less money and received fewer votes “because San Francisco Republicans are dissatisfied with Chairman Dennis’ leadership and his style of unserious politics.”
However the conflict over the Briones delegates’ start date gets resolved, Berg said, Dennis’s days as the SFGOP chairman are numbered. Once the Society members get their seats on the committee, “I don't expect that John Dennis will be reelected to be chairman,” he said. “I think it will probably be somebody from the Briones supermajority.”
Dennis declined to respond to Berg’s prediction.
He remains puzzled by why the Briones Society spent so much money to take over the San Francisco Republican Party, given its small size and influence. He estimates that as many as 90 percent of current SFGOP delegates support Trump, while the Briones Society founders suffer from “real serious Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
A more plausible motive for the takeover might be that Briones Society members are chasing the “tons of media attention” the SFGOP chairman gets, he said. “I think that’s maybe what’s coveted here.”
Dennis said he doesn’t aim to join the Trump administration should the former president return to the White House. The SFGOP has endorsed a new candidate, Bruce Lou, to run against Pelosi in November. For the time being, he plans on serving his full SFGOP term after winning reelection.
“I have no long term aspirations, beyond helping the country, growing the Republican Party, and defending liberty,” he said.
