Two of the city’s biggest political advocacy groups took a $10 million swing ahead of the November election, hoping to woo voters and transform SF by culling progressive influence and reshaping how City Hall operates. It didn’t work — and now the fallout begins.
On Friday, Neighbors for a Better SF and TogetherSF announced that they are merging into one group under the “Neighbors” moniker. The operation will continue under the helm of Neighbors Executive Director Jay Cheng. It’s not clear what role, if any, his wife, current CEO of Together SF Kanishka Cheng, will take in the newly combined organization.
The two groups have much in common: They both spent big on campaigns to elect former Supervisor Mark Farrell as mayor, oust left-leaning politicians on the Board of Supervisors, and reform city committees. They were both backed by some of the wealthiest moderate and conservative funders on the West Coast, including billionaire tech venture capitalist Michael Moritz and Republican megadonor William Oberndorf.
Ultimately, though, all the angst and dollars didn’t gain much at the polls. Farrell lost his mayoral bid, garnering fewer votes than either Mayor London Breed or outgoing Supervisor Aaron Peskin. Only two of Neighbors’ and TogetherSF’s six endorsements for the Board of Supervisors won. Their push for charter reform (via Prop. D) fell flat, too.
The merger may mark the end of an oft-toxic chapter in recent SF electoral history, marked by intense partisanship, a sea of attack ads, and a number of corruption scandals.
Naturally, the Chengs have tried to spin the merger as a kind of victory lap.
“With a new mayor and Board of Supervisors aligned with our shared priorities, this merger marks a pivotal moment in advancing our vision for San Francisco’s future and builds upon the success we’ve had so far,” Kanishka Cheng wrote on Friday in an emailed announcement to supporters.
But the political landscape has shifted since the groups were founded in 2020, and ideological alliances are now harder to define.
They rose to power at a time when the pandemic, and the backlash against perceived progressive missteps in the city, drove a swath of SF liberals to embrace the reactionary sentiment pushed by Neighbors and their ilk, according to Jason McDaniel, a professor and expert on urban politics at San Francisco State University.
But the recent election “showed the limited impact of these campaigns. There’s a lot of political science around how hard it is to get people to change their votes by spending money on it,” McDaniel told me. “They saw where public opinion was going, and put themselves in the lead of the proverbial parade. Schools, public safety, and homelessness — that was their opening, but they didn’t change opinion much.”
Meanwhile, the varied community leaders I spoke with on inauguration day seemed to share a sense of optimism for the new mayor, with one observer lauding Lurie’s seeming “level head” and curiosity.
Of course, whether or not the rhetoric of change translates into policy remains to be seen. Lurie might bring some new tools to the job, but his strategies for tackling drug crime, addiction, and homelessness are well within the norms of recent administrations. (He even kept the police chief.) For all intents and purposes, Breed’s agenda lives on in City Hall, like a specter who whispers “crisis mayor” to passersby.
As for schools, the immediate problem with the San Francisco Unified School District isn’t that it’s too woke or hates algebra, as the right has claimed. The problem is the district’s looming budget deficit due to financial mismanagement and shrinking enrollment, which threatens to land SF schools under state control. The district has now wasted more than a year on a plan to close schools, one that collapsed under mass revolt from parents. The district, instead, will focus on widespread layoffs to bring its finances under control.
Maybe these problems will lead to opportunities for Neighbors for a Better SF to lobby for specific recalls, firings, or policies — but it will be tougher without a clear villain or an avenue for partisan outrage. And it will be even harder now that their leader has lost much of his political juice.
Cheng is a longtime state political operative and protégé of Democrat strategist Mary Jung, who led the recall against former progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin. But the SF Standard recently reported that Lurie won’t have anything to do with Cheng, or with any of his affiliated groups.
Cheng has pissed off a lot of people over the years. He has been linked to scandalous decisions made by the Farrell mayoral campaign, which led to the campaign being charged the largest fine in city Ethics Commission History. That wasn’t Cheng’s only run-in with the Ethics Commission, which slapped Neighbors SF with a $53,000 fine in 2024 for failing to report payments to a PR company during the Boudin recall. He has also been accused of sexual assault — an incident for which he was arrested, but never charged.
Cracks are emerging elsewhere in the city’s ecosystem of megadonors who push for political changes. Crypto king Chris Larsen, who has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Neighbors, recently bemoaned how the business community “screwed up” its priorities and tactics in the last election.
Elsewhere, Y Combinator head Garry Tan, one of the city’s fiercest reactionary voices, is bowing out of the board of GrowSF, another political org that spent millions in the November race. (Tan has big plans to cozy up with President Donald Trump on behalf of Silicon Valley, instead.)
“They need to reorganize and change strategically toward an area where they’ve had success and there’s still energy in the electorate,” McDaniel told me. “The question is, where is the parade going now?”
The Chengs’ desire to “grow and sustain a movement of community dissatisfaction” is at a crucial fork in the road — but regardless of the next move, it might matter less than they hope.
