Westneat: Cities ‘move to the right’

What prompted the introspection down south was an election in March in which San Francisco voters backed slates of moderate candidates as well as some right-leaning, tech money-backed measures that, as The New York Times put it, “probably wouldn’t have seen the light of day a few years ago.”

One measure gave more power to the police, including to do car pursuits. Another sought to override the school district’s equity-in-math policy that restricted middle school algebra. The last, sounding like it was hatched in a red state laboratory, requires welfare recipients with drug addictions to be screened, and to enter treatment in order to continue getting benefits.

All three passed handily. Now, in the city’s mayoral race, candidates appear to be leapfrogging one another to the conservative side, proposing such previously unheard-of plans as bringing in National Guard troops to quell drug markets.

“San Francisco Democrats are locked in a race to the right,” Politico reported.

What’s happening there is, I suspect, also what’s happening here — which is not really a “race to the right.” At least not in the sense that voters in either San Francisco or Seattle are flirting with full-on Republicanism.

That said, there are shifts among left-leaning voters.

“The pandemic brought our dysfunctional public safety and education systems to the forefront,” was how Armand Domalewski, a San Francisco progressive Democrat, put it in an online essay. “Taken together, (the votes) reflect an electorate deeply frustrated with grand ideological visions, and hungry for better nuts-and-bolts of governance.”

This rings true. Ideological experimentation was for pre-pandemic. But during the pandemic, city life kind of went to hell. So now people just want stuff that works.

Domalewski noted that chief among these constituencies are Asian Americans, who make up more than one-third of San Francisco (and about one-sixth of Seattle).

I noted a few weeks back that our own Chinatown International District went for Donald Trump in the presidential primary. Why nearly 30 percent of voters there backed Trump is unknown; there’s no sure way to find out beyond polling or canvassing the entire neighborhood.

This past week, Seattle’s Northwest Asian Weekly, in the heart of Chinatown, speculated about it.

“There is some distrust of President Joe Biden’s border policies because they appear to be equivalent to Seattle’s progressive politics of apparently ‘favoring’ those experiencing homelessness and substance abuse disorders over working-class or low-income people who live in the community,” the paper wrote.

Is this entirely fair? Maybe not. But politics ain’t beanbag, as the old saying goes. If I were in government in Seattle, I would pay close heed to what the Northwest Asian Weekly is saying here. Especially the part about working-class resentment.

People want rules back. Even liberal people in godless left coast cities. This includes people who may simultaneously be worried about how those rules might get enforced — they want them back anyway.

Said one moderate candidate from the group that swamped the lefty slate: “San Franciscans want to make sure our streets are safe. They want better public education. They want a government that works. When did those stop being Democratic values?”

It’s a pointed and good question, one we’ve been wrestling with in Seattle as well. Prediction: The move “to the right” — which really means back toward center — hasn’t yet run its course in either city.