Originally posted on the San Francisco Examiner.
On a recent Saturday morning, Min Chang planted herself on a plot of sidewalk along the Embarcadero not far from the Ferry Building, and — campaign sign in hand — began flagging down passersby.
“Hi, are you voting in November?” she said. “I’m running for the school board.”
Few zipping about under a dreary sky even gave a hint they noticed Chang, a longtime executive in the private and nonprofit sectors. But those who did stop to chat seemed to immediately connect with her central campaign pitch, focused on fiscal prudence and good governance, nodding approvingly as she laid out her plan to leverage her decades of business acumen to help stabilize the troubled finances of the San Francisco Unified School District.
“I know how to fix it,” she said.
What goes unmentioned in these interactions is that Chang is running with the backing of the local Republican Party and serves on its governing board.
Her party affiliation means that Chang’s campaign is paddling very much against the political current in San Francisco, a famously liberal city that hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since the 1960s. In the decades since, GOP registration has fallen so low that The City’s registered Democrats now outnumber Republicans more than eight to one.
Min Chang, candidate for San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education on Thursday, Aug. 1, 2024.
Craig Lee/The Examiner
This November, Chang is among an unusually large contingent of Republican candidates also running for public office in San Francisco.
The group includes Yvette Corkrean, a registered nurse whose anger over the pandemic lockdowns has propelled her to become a first-time candidate running to unseat Scott Wiener from the California State Senate; Bruce Lou, a long-time campaigner against hate crimes targeting Asian Americans now making a run for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s seat in Congress; U.S. Army Veteran Jeremiah Boehner, who is running for District 1 supervisor on a platform that — like other local Republican candidates — emphasizes support for law enforcement, pro-business policies and clearing the streets of the unhoused and drug users; and several others.
While local Republicans acknowledge that their odds of victory in those races remain long, they’ve expressed confidence the party’s conservative message is one that San Francisco voters are eager to hear this election cycle. Meanwhile, they say, they’re hopeful that Chang and the rest of those running will succeed in spreading that message more widely.
Amid simmering voter frustration over crime, street conditions and other quality-of-life issues, GOP leaders say they see signs that many voters are shifting right and growing more open to conservative ideas.
Bloc by Bloc: Where political power stands in San Francisco
After struggling for decades to hold on to electoral relevance in San Francisco, the party hopes to seize — in a moment of political flux — an opportunity to build common cause with The City’s like-minded independents and moderate Democrats, and maybe, just maybe, regain a seat at the table of mainstream city politics.
But political watchers agree — in deep blue San Francisco, the challenges will be steep, to say the least.
Expanding the conversation
For her part, Chang — who describes herself as a fiscal conservative — says many voters are welcoming her platform, which emphasizes the need for “hard decisions” in the school district in order to bring costs under control.
Asked if Chang’s partisan status would affect her vote, one woman out on the Embarcadero who had just wrapped up a friendly chat with the candidate said, “Oh, she is a Republican?”
“We have to fix our schools, so I guess I’d be open to what ideas are being proposed,” said the woman, who declined to give her name but described herself as a lifelong Democrat.
These days, such interparty meetings of the mind are growing more common in San Francisco politics as conservative priorities gain traction, local GOP leaders say.
As one measure, they have tracked modest but consistent gains in Republican voter registration over the past few years. The growing Republican support is a sign, in their view, that more voters are losing confidence in the ability of Democratic leaders to address The City’s many crises.
At the same time, some of those same Democratic leaders are now embracing more right-leaning policies themselves, like the recent ballot measure that imposed drug-screening requirements on welfare recipients and another that curtailed police oversight.
John Dennis, Chairman of the San Francisco Republican Party, Yvette Corkrean, candidate for State Senate District 7, Bruce Lou, candidate for Congressional District 11 and Stephen Martin-Pinto, candidate for Supervisor District 7, pictured on Friday, Aug. 2, 2024.
Craig Lee/The Examiner
“We’ve been saying what needs to be said and what the right path forward is for a long time,” said San Francisco Republican Party Chairman John Dennis. “But the Democrats had to go through this progressive era, which has destroyed The City.”
Afraid to speak out
As former President Donald Trump accepted the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in Milwaukee days after surviving an assassination attempt last month, about 40 party faithful squeezed inside the cramped quarters of a Marina bar for an evening watch party.
The crowd cheered as Trump called on the Democratic party to stop “weaponizing the justice system.” They booed when he dropped a reference to “crazy Nancy Pelosi.”
And attendees were just as fired up about local political grievances, complaining bitterly during the event that “one-party rule” and the leadership of Mayor London Breed have failed The City.
“What has she done?” said one independent voter who declined to give her name. “Nothing”
What The City needs now most of all, many agreed, is a conservative counterbalance for San Francisco’s progressive excesses.
“I don’t think the Democratic Party would have had its progressive era here had there been a bigger, stronger Republican Party, because we would have kept them in check,” said Dennis, who served as a delegate in Milwaukee.
Outside the confines of a conservative gathering such as this one, though, many local Republicans say they have been afraid to share their views publicly. Most attendees The Examiner interviewed declined to provide their names, saying they feared blowback from friends or coworkers.
“We are at the point where, if you are Republican in San Francisco, you’re not exactly taking your life into your own hands,” Jacob Spangler said, “But you’re certainly taking your career into your own hands.”
The 23-year-old conservative, who serves as president of the College Republicans at San Francisco State University, claimed his Republican affiliation has gotten him kicked out of house parties and rejected from a fraternity’s pledge process.
Even an ex-girlfriend, he said, decided that she did not want to make their relationship publicly known.
“She said her friends and family would disown her,” he said.
Can the party rebrand?
Hoping to untangle the local Republican Party from a thicket of toxic associations — which members contend have been applied unfairly — one local conservative group is trying to reshape its image.
Briones Society co-founder and president Jay Donde said his group wants to steer the party away from a brand of politics that “embraces conspiracy-mongering and reactionism” as well as “post-liberalism,” and instead focus on core conservative values such as small government, public safety and free markets.
The effort to shift the party has opened up an ideological rift among local Republicans that has at times grown bitter. Over the past few years, the Briones Society has found itself frequently at odds with many in local Republican leadership.
In one contentious episode two years ago, The San Francisco Republican Party passed a resolution censuring the Briones Society for denouncing Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot, as well as the group’s pronouncement that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe to use.