[amitkgupta84]

I was thinking of 2018, but I don't remember Ellen Lee Zhou being Republican, only Richie Greenberg. Four unaffiliated-but-Democratic candidates ranked higher, Ellen and Richie were next both with less than 5% of the vote. Mark Leno and Jane Kim were the two I recall banding together; they were #2 and #3 respectively after London.

> But San Francisco has 316k registered Democrats, 137K registered with no party preference, 33K registered Republicans, and 15K registered with other parties. Expecting symmetry between the nationally major parties in San Francisco is silly.

SF is extremely unbalanced. See: https://www.bestplaces.net/voting/city/california/san_franci.... Why is it silly to expect it to be less extreme?

[dragonwriter]

> Why is it silly to expect it to be less extreme?

It's silly to expect that national distribution of political thought to be approximated in every geographic subdivision. It has never been even approximately, the case. Structurally, the US electoral system encourages coalition building and dividing so that factions that nationally are roughly balanced form the major national parties, but there is no reason that that's even a privileged frame to decide what is “balanced”.

[amitkgupta84]

No one is saying every geographical subdivision needs to reflect exactly the aggregate distribution at the national level. I expect the split in individual cities to deviate from the national mean split. Based on my subjective experience living in SF, and based on the data, SF’s deviation is too extreme.

Sure, we can regress to a form of solipsism and just say there’s no possible discussion to be had about whether SF is too extreme. Yes, God has not written down a cosmological constant of what threshold determines too extreme vs not too extreme. I think it’s pointless for us to gaslight ourselves into this belief. If we can’t say SF is too extreme, how can we say crime is too high, or persecution of LGBTQ is too high, or anything else?

In the link I shared above, SF deviates as far left as the scale can go. If you think it is possible to have an inter-subjective conversation about whether SF is too extreme, but think SF isn’t, what would need to be true for you to declare SF past the threshold?

[sagarm]

It's up to Republicans to find a way to appeal to San Franciscans.

The bottom line is that they're deeply out of step with the city on culture war issues they themselves whipped up. Forcing women to give birth to corpses, legalizing discrimination based on sexual orientation, opposing all pandemic mitigations, etc. Even if an individual politician doesn't support these positions,they define the brand.

[amitkgupta84]

I think the problem is San Franciscans are out of touch with reality. The root problem is not the GOP brand; despite the flaws in the GOP brand that is not the bottom line.