The wild card in S.F.'s mayoral race? A huge increase in voter turnout

San Francisco has never chosen a mayor with an electorate as large as the one expected to cast ballots by Tuesday.

Whether Mayor London Breed is re-elected could be decided by an additional 200,000 people compared to the city’s last closely contested mayor’s race in 2018. That’s because this is the first mayoral election since voters moved such contests from odd-numbered years to even-numbered presidential election years......

Mitchell, who is vice president of an analytics firm called Political Data, said he projects about 200,000 San Francisco voters will cast a ballot this year who have not voted in a mayoral election before.

The difference between presidential and mayoral election turnout in recent years has been stark.

About 450,000 people voted in San Francisco in the 2020 presidential election when Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump at the height of the pandemic. In 2016, about 415,000 people voted in the city when Trump beat Hillary Clinton.




https://www.sfchronicle.com/election/article/sf-mayor-voter-turnout-19861691.php