Daniel Lurie’s San Francisco Playbook Could Be What Democrats Need

In the past few months, San Francisco residents have been noticing small changes in their city. They’ve seen more law enforcement patrolling their notoriously troubled neighborhoods, such as the Tenderloin and South of Market. What’s more, police are making arrests for crimes like theft and selling drugs. Some say life feels safer, a sign of change that’s met with cautious optimism. “I am continuously shocked by how much cleaner the city is,” said Sam D’Amico, a tech entrepreneur who has lived there for more than a decade. “Democrats need to look at what is working in San Francisco as the model for the rest of the country.”

In the 2024 election, few cities loomed larger in the Republican imagination than San Francisco. It was cast as a hellscape overrun by crime, fentanyl, and homelessness—a “cesspool,” as David Sacks described it during the Republican National Convention, of “open encampments and open drug use.” Never mind that Kamala Harris’s campaign for presidential office was broadly moderate—her association with the Golden City, where she served as district attorney more than a decade earlier, led Donald Trump to condemn her as a “San Francisco radical.” Following Harris’s defeat, the prerogative for Democrats to reconsider how they were governing at a state and city level was urgent: “The first step for Democrats,” wrote the Washington Post’s editorial board in a November op-ed, is to “fix blue states.”

This is a mandate that San Francisco’s new mayor, Daniel Lurie, who is front and center of many of the new changes within the city, has seemingly taken to heart.

Lurie, 48, is trim and mild-mannered, with a no-nonsense approach to governing that is already shaking up the city’s entrenched bureaucracy. On the campaign trail, the moderate Democrat made bold promises, vowing to build housing, dismantle homeless encampments, revive the city’s downtown, and hold the city’s various government departments and nonprofits accountable. “We have great challenges ahead but also incredible opportunities,” Lurie said shortly after winning the election. “[We] are going to turn around a great American city.”

Lurie, who has just wrapped his first 100 days in office, is still basking in his political honeymoon. But his largely enthusiastic reception in San Francisco shows the first signs of optimism not only for a blue city that may be on track for real changes, but for the beleaguered Democratic Party at large. In Lurie, some Democrats see a model for what the party should prioritize at the national level. “There is a growing school of thought that the best thing for Democrats nationally is to show they can govern and keep people safe—that they are not obsessed with identity politics or canceling someone who disagrees with them,” said Tony Winnicker, a political adviser who, in addition to working with Lurie’s team, has advised former San Francisco mayors Ed Lee and Gavin Newsom. “I don’t think Daniel Lurie is seeking this role, but the pragmatic and heads-down approach he takes to the office could be a good example when it comes to leading Democrats out of the political wilderness.”

Part of Lurie’s appeal is that he is not a creature of government: He has spent the majority of his career working in the private sector, where, for nearly 20 years, he founded and oversaw a philanthropic organization that funds Bay Area nonprofits.

Lurie’s political inexperience is evidenced by one of his most ambitious campaign promises: a vow to dismantle San Francisco’s bloated bureaucracy. For years, the city has been caught in a power struggle emblematic of the Democratic Party’s deeper ideological rift: between progressives determined to dismantle a system they see as rotten to its core and moderates willing to tolerate its flaws for the sake of getting things done. These were tensions that, when compounded by the pandemic, triggered paralysis. “I don’t want to use the term ‘deep state,’ but within the San Francisco bureaucracy, there is definitely an entrenched status quo,” said Winnicker. (Symptomatic of the city’s absurdist policymaking was a 2023 city-appointed reparations committee recommending that San Francisco give Black residents $5 million and homes that cost $1 per family, and a proposal for a 150-square-foot public toilet that would have cost taxpayers $1.7 million and take more than two years to build.)

Whether or not Lurie can unwind the city’s sclerotic tendencies for good remains unclear. During his campaign, he repeatedly pledged to build 1,500 new beds for the homeless within his first six months in office—a goal that, while relatively straightforward, revealed his political naivete: “To make that campaign promise in the first place shows that Lurie genuinely did not understand the machine he was getting into and the weaponized incompetence he would be up against,” a San Francisco writer who covers city policy told me. “There is a sense that Daniel Lurie has no idea what’s going on and does not know how the levers of power within the city work.” (Lurie has since expanded his timeline for delivering the beds, and his campaign has broadened its definition of what constitutes a bed.) In response to this, Lurie’s press secretary pointed me to a line from Lurie’s 100-day address in which he said that building the 1,500 beds was still a goal that was within his “line of sight. It won’t be easy, but I’m never going to apologize for setting ambitious goals…We may not always hit them, but we will never stop trying.”

Still, Lurie’s greenness could serve as a strategic asset. “Lurie was not a known quantity,” said Steven Bacio, who cofounded the organization GrowSF, an advocacy group that produces deeply researched voter guides. “He has been absolutely blessed,” he adds. Lurie has been blessed, too, by organizations like Bacio’s, which supports public safety and additional housing, and which paved the way for more moderate leadership by helping flip the board of supervisors to a moderate majority in 2024.

Yet another advantage for Lurie is the political upheaval of 2022, in which San Francisco ejected some of its most left-leaning candidates. “The city had a reckoning over which direction it wanted to go in, and it voted to have a new district attorney,” said Brooke Jenkins, who was reelected as the district attorney in November. Jenkins is referring to her predecessor, Chesa Boudin, who, in the two-and-a-half short years he served as district attorney, came to personify the sort of whimsical progressivism that the city appears now to be rejecting wholesale. (Many city agencies—especially the police—felt that Boudin’s push to divert offenders into rehab and mental health programs clashed with his duty as the city’s top prosecutor.)

To Jenkins, San Francisco has long been governed on the “staunch belief that ideology was more important than results. That’s where the party has gone wrong. You can take an ideological position, but if you can’t govern within the basic functions of that ideological framework, people will not be pleased.”

On the surface, many of Lurie’s policies aren’t all that dissimilar from those of his predecessor, London Breed, a fellow moderate, who, in her final days, laid much of the institutional scaffolding upon which Lurie is now capitalizing. (When I suggested to Charles Lutvak, Lurie’s press secretary, that many people had told me that Lurie and Breed had similar policies, he scoffed: “I don’t think anyone is seriously saying that to you.”)

But there are key differences. For one, Lurie has a more congenial relationship with his board of supervisors. And he is affable: “If you didn’t endorse Mayor Breed, she wouldn’t talk to you,” said Jim Araby, a veteran labor organizer in San Francisco. In contrast, when Araby told Lurie that his labor union would not endorse him, Lurie was unfazed. “He said, ‘That’s okay. After I win, we’ll work together.’ And that’s literally what happened,” said Araby, who joined Lurie’s administration as a senior adviser on labor relations in November.

Oh, and another thing: Lurie is rich. As an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, the jeans company born in San Francisco, he may be the richest person to ever run for city mayor, which, as more than one person pointed out to me, makes him “so rich that you can’t buy him.” Lurie’s mayoral bid—the most expensive in recent city history—was largely self-financed, giving him a rare degree of political independence: “He can afford to piss people off,” said Winnicker.

Perhaps Lurie’s greatest advantage, though, is that he has friends in high places—especially within the tech industry. As part of his plan to revitalize the city, Lurie has assembled many of the industry’s most influential power players in a committee that includes DoorDash cofounder Tony Xu, Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. “Daniel Lurie is encouraging tech companies to stay in San Francisco,” said Ryan Petersen, the CEO of the supply chain management company Flexport, which has offices along San Francisco’s troubled downtown Market Street. “Lurie has called me. He texted me. He shows up when companies sign a new lease. He puts in the effort.”

Petersen said he was attacked twice on Market Street outside his company’s offices, which led him to stop hiring employees in San Francisco. While he is still considering leaving the city for good, he is optimistic that the new mayor will curb street violence and revitalize the city’s downtown. While the mayor has made it clear that he has no intentions to run for higher office, some, like Petersen, are hopeful. “Whoever cleans up San Francisco becomes the front-runner to be the governor of California, and whoever becomes governor of California goes on to be the front-runner to be the president of the United States,” said Petersen. “So it’s an incredible opportunity for somebody to become a national figure. I don’t know if Daniel Lurie is the guy, but I hope so.”