SAN FRANCISCO — Daniel Lurie is rich. Really rich. But you wouldn’t know that from looking at him.
At a recent Halloween block party in the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco, the billionaire heir to the Levi Strauss fortune and Democratic mayoral candidate showed up in a wrinkled, white button-down shirt, some dark blue slacks, and well-worn shoes. It was his eighth stop of the day. If he was exhausted, he didn’t show it.
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The day before, Lurie, 47, went to 12 events across the city, and the day before that, he hit all 11 supervisory districts.
“I’ve been doing this for 13 months, and I’m getting stronger every day,” he told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview. “I’m honestly energized by it and by seeing the people all over the city.”
Lurie made his way through the eclectic crowd gathered at the Castro Merchants party on the corner of 16th and Noe Street. It was largely made up of members from the LGBT community. There were also children from the neighborhood and a beefy bulldog dressed up as a taco that wobbled away with a win in the costume contest.
Lurie shook hands, posed for pictures, and made his pitch to voters.
Some were skeptical of the newcomer, but others, such as Rodrigo Latoya, were more optimistic.
“At least he’s here,” Latoya, a 6-foot-3-inch man dressed as Dolly Parton, told the Washington Examiner. “That’s more than I can say about most of those other f***ers in the race.”
Lurie has a slight edge in the crowded 13-person race that includes incumbent Mayor London Breed, scandal-plagued former Mayor Mark Farrell, Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, and Supervisor Ahsha Safai.
Though San Francisco holds nonpartisan elections, all five of the leading candidates, Lurie, Breed, Farrell, Peskin, and Safai, are Democrats. All say Breed, who has pivoted in recent months from touting progressive policies to conservative ones, is not up for the challenge of leading California’s fourth-largest city.
The candidates have presented very different visions for the future of a city that is elbow-deep in a homelessness crisis, hasn’t fully bounced back from the pandemic, and has a public safety problem that has shaken residents, business owners, and tourists to their core.
Breed has struggled to find footing with voters who blame her for creating chaotic conditions that have led to a mass exodus of stores from the downtown area, as well as mismanagement in the office that borders on gross negligence.
She has criticized Lurie, founder of the anti-poverty nonprofit Tipping Point, for being a political newbie who lacks the experience to lead San Francisco. Instead of taking her comments as a negative, Lurie has turned it into a positive and is banking voters do, too.
“The city hall insiders I am running against have all been in office for a decade or more and have failed to deliver,” he said. “They built up this system. They are all responsible for it, and then they exploit it, and now they’re trying to say to everybody, ‘No, wait, wait, we’ll fix it!’”
“They all underestimated not only us, but they underestimated the people of San Francisco and their desire for change and accountability. They are not getting it from anyone I am running against, but they know they’ll get it from me,” he said.
Lurie decided to get into the mayoral race following a harrowing incident while walking his children, a 9-year-old son and a 12-year-old daughter, to school in June 2023. They saw a man who was naked, screaming, and “clearly in distress.”
Nobody did anything about it because residents had become numb to such spectacles. So had the police.
It was then, Lurie said, that he realized he had “more work to do” and threw his name into the race. In the months since, he hasn’t been shy about blasting elected leaders such as Breed, Farrell, and Peskin.
“If you want more of the same, you’ve got plenty of choices,” he said. “I have worked with every mayor since [now-Gov.] Gavin Newsom through this current administration. I know how to get things done. I know how to work with people. I am just not a product of the broken, corrupt system.”
Lurie added that he knows he hit a nerve with the other candidates in the race and that they are “aiming their fire at me right now.”
“It’s OK because we are speaking for the people,” he said. “They are desperate for change.”
If elected, Lurie said his No. 1 priority will be keeping the city safe.
“Public safety is paramount,” he said. “We have to make sure we protect our taxpayers and our residents and not just when APEC is here or the JP Morgan healthcare conference is in town. We have been able to do it for those events, so why not for everybody? We are going to be able to do it 365 days a year for our taxpayers and our residents.”
To do that, Lurie said he would first make sure San Francisco has a “fully staffed police department, sheriff’s department, and 911 dispatch office.”
“The city hall insiders have failed to deliver for the people of San Francisco, and we are going to deliver on that promise of true public service, not for personal profit but to serve the people again,” he said.
“We are going to get our behavioral health crisis on our streets under control. We are going to get people off the streets and into help. More mental health, drug treatment beds. We are sending a message to the country: You do not come to San Francisco to deal drugs, to do drugs, or to sleep on our streets. And then, I am going to win business back, to win conventions back. We have three global sporting events coming over the next 20 months. That’s $1.4 billion of economic revenue.”
To his opponents, Lurie’s laundry list of lofty goals, coupled with his inexperience in politics, sets him and the city up for a high-stakes failure.
They have also accused him of trying to buy the race.
In addition to the $8 million Lurie has contributed to his own campaign, his mother, Mimi Haas, has supported his candidacy through a $1 million independent committee contribution. His brother, Ari Lurie, gave $150,000 to the same committee. Lurie’s rich tech friends also opened their wallets for him and forked over hundreds of thousands of dollars.
On a per-capita basis, he has only been outspent by two candidates in modern mayoral history: Rick Caruso, who unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Los Angeles, and Michael Bloomberg, who served three terms as mayor of New York City. Both are self-made billionaires who pitched voters on their business chops and ability to run the massive organizations they built.
Lurie’s only significant work experience is in philanthropy.
He knows he is asking voters to put a lot of trust in him — trust he hasn’t necessarily earned. In fact, he is asking voters to do what they haven’t done in more than a century: elect a mayor who has never served in government before and then give him the keys to the city and hope he makes good on his campaign promises.
If he wins, Lurie would be the first person since 1911 to be elected mayor of the city without prior government credentials.
He has touted his time leading Tipping Point, which he founded nearly two decades ago, and insists San Francisco doesn’t need a career politician at the helm who has been given opportunity after opportunity to fix the city’s problems but failed.
But not everyone is buying Lurie’s upbeat attitude and promises of change.
Several people the Washington Examiner spoke to in disenfranchised pockets across the city said they feel like Lurie won’t represent them because he has never lived a day in their shoes and could not possibly understand their hardships.
“How can he be a trust fund baby and win?” Shirley Moore, who moved to San Francisco from Tennessee in 1967, told the Washington Examiner. “He has never lived a day in my shoes, nor has he struggled for any basic needs. So, how would he fix my problems?”
“He spent millions on his own campaign. How would someone like him understand a day in the life of my problems? How does he understand that? He doesn’t have to worry about how he’s going to have to pay his house note. He doesn’t have to worry about how he’s going to have to keep his car running. He doesn’t have to worry about insurance. He doesn’t have to worry about sending his children to school and making sure his children have security and education. He doesn’t have to worry about any of that, so how would he understand me? Living in the Bay View and being devoid of service. … He doesn’t have any idea how we live. The city ignores us completely. That has never happened to him.”
Moore, a 76-year-old retiree who now sells jams, also had some choice words for the other candidates running in the race.
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“Everybody in this race … they are deceptive,” she said. “They run deceptive politics. There’s nothing that they are going to do to solve San Francisco’s problems. All they are going to do is pay back their loyal contributors and do favors for them, but the problems in this city that we are about … they aren’t going to do anything about them.”
If Moore had to choose a candidate more aligned with what she wants, it would be Breed, but she said she isn’t 100% sold on her, either.
