The week after Manny Yekutiel exited the District 8 supervisor race following two more men coming forward with sexual assault allegations, the biggest unanswered question may be: Why did Mayor Daniel Lurie endorse the cafe owner and would-be politician well after the first accusation was made against Yekutiel in June?
Another, related question: Will the mayor pay any political price for it?
Interviews with politicians, political consultants, political advisors, activists, and academics point to a wide consensus that Lurie’s decision to endorse Yekutiel was, at a minimum, a serious misjudgment. There’s also agreement among many of the city’s political operatives and observers that the mayor is unlikely to lose significant political support for his error.
“There’s been a couple of missteps here, and misjudgments, and they seem to be connected to his trust in himself,” said Jason McDaniel, an associate professor of political science at San Francisco State University. While politicians need to be self-confident, McDaniel said, they also need to be self-reflective. For Lurie, that means, “I’ve got to learn to trust when my personal judgments might be off,” McDaniel said.
That personal judgment, McDaniel added, can be even more clouded when a politician is endorsing a friend. “The mayor needed to be able to say, ‘Look, Manny, I can’t endorse you — this is a potential liability for me.’”
Less than two years into Lurie’s term, political insiders are already discussing his odds of winning reelection. For Lurie, Yekutiel serving as District 8 Supervisor presented the prospect of another ally on the Board of Supervisors who would advance the mayor’s moderate agenda for the remainder of his term. It also offered the opportunity to work with a close friend.
Lurie and Yekutiel’s relationship precedes their co-founding of the non-profit Civic Joy Fund. Both men are Jewish, and both came to politics from outside San Francisco’s political establishment. Lurie reportedly held Yekutiel’s hand and consoled him after Manny’s was vandalized and graffitied with antisemitic slurs in 2025.
Yekutiel and Lurie speak on the phone and see each other frequently, a source close to Yekutiel told me. (The source spoke on condition of anonymity because they were discussing private conversations.) For Yekutiel, who had already collected a number of endorsements, Lurie’s stamp of approval was seen as a counterweight to Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s endorsement of Gary McCoy, one of Yekutiel’s opponents in the race.
“It was a really big deal,” the source close to Yekutiel told me.
According to a source close to the mayor, Lurie considered endorsing Yekutiel before Brad Chapin’s allegations were reported by The San Francisco Standard in June. (The source spoke on condition of anonymity because they’re not authorized to discuss the subject publicly.) After Chapin made his sexual assault allegation, according to the source, Lurie put off the decision to endorse any candidate in the D8 race. Less than three months later, on Sept. 11, after Lurie said he received an assurance from Yekutiel that Chapin’s allegation was false, the mayor endorsed his friend.
For Lurie, endorsing Yekutiel risked repeating the biggest misstep of his first year in office: his appointment of Isabella “Beya” Alcaraz as District 4 Supervisor. Lurie’s selection of Alcaraz exposed a shocking lack of care in his vetting process. Alcaraz was forced to resign from the position following reports of bad business practices and irresponsible bookkeeping. (Alan Wong ultimately got the job.)
“I was surprised the mayor endorsed Manny,” Todd David, a political director for state Sen. Scott Wiener, told me in an email. David also serves as political director for Abundant San Francisco, a YIMBY-aligned nonprofit. Lurie is “notoriously politically cautious,” David said. After the mayor’s misstep appointing Alcaraz, David wrote, he expected Lurie “to proceed more deliberately when considering endorsing Manny.”
“I believe the mayor’s willingness to endorse Manny, and take on the political risk in doing so, speaks to their close, personal relationship,” David said in the email.
The mayor has not publicly admitted that his endorsement of Yekutiel was an error. He has not apologized, nor has he expressed any regret, as he did after his appointment of Alcaraz cratered.
To get Lurie’s explanation of his thinking, and response, I attended a midwifery conference at UC Law at Civic Center on Monday, where the mayor was scheduled to speak. As far as I could tell, I was the only reporter there.
As I greeted the mayor on his way downstairs to the conference room, his spokesperson, Charles Lutvak, told me my only chance of speaking with his boss might be after the mayor spoke.
As the mayor addressed the attendees, I stood shoulder to shoulder with Lutvak, just outside the auditorium doors in the only hallway out as we listened to and watched Lurie speak.
After Lurie finished, he exited the stage, and seemed to sit or stand out of view, as others spoke. Growing impatient, I poked my head in to see the mayor, only to see that he was no longer in the room. I flashed Lutvak a look. Lutvak also looked inside and shrugged, looking as surprised as me that Lurie, with his security detail, apparently left through a backstage exit. There’d be no interview.
Lutvak referred me to Max Szabo, an outside communications expert Lurie pays independently.
I had already contacted Szabo repeatedly in previous days. After the midwifery event, he texted me: “Hey man — as I said we don’t have anything else to share on the record.”
Szabo had previously emailed me an Oct. 1 statement from Lurie in lieu of an interview that read: “Coming forward is hard and these survivors deserve to be heard, and treated with dignity and respect.” The statement noted that Lurie won’t make another District 8 endorsement. “The voters of the Castro, Noe Valley, and Glen Park will decide this race,” the statement read.
McDaniel, the SFSU professor, doesn’t think Lurie’s endorsement and withdrawal of his support for Yekutiel will hurt the mayor’s standing with voters. On the other hand, if there’s a downturn in the city’s economy, for example, the endorsement could factor as an “accrual of issues” that might compound negative feelings about the mayor, he said.
“The Beya Alcaraz thing is in the past, but we’re talking about it now because of this,” McDaniel said.
For David, Wiener’s political advisor, given Lurie’s popularity, voters may move on from the Yekutiel and Alcaraz messes, though not entirely without a change of sentiment about Lurie. “We may look back on this, and say it was the moment that the honeymoon was over,” he said.
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to clarify the timeline of Daniel Lurie’s endorsement of Manny Yekutiel.
