Lincoln Mitchell

The brief saga of Isabella “Beya” Alcaraz in San Francisco reveals something about the mayoral administration of Daniel Lurie. For those of you who have been paying attention to other things in recent weeks, following the recall of Joel Engardio, the supervisor for District Four, which includes most of the

During the years 2022 through 2024 when San Francisco’s doom loop narrative was at its height, much of the local media as well as conservative groups and observers in San Francisco were committed to the belief that the city was being ravaged by crime with danger lurking on every

In politics, as in so many other parts of life, timing is crucially important. For example, in the recently completed New York City Democratic primary there is little doubt that the salience of the war in Gaza to the left helped catapult Zohran Mamdani, the most outspoken anti-Israel voice in

A charitable way to describe the Democratic Party since Donald Trump’s victory in the November election is that they have struggled to find their sea legs. Many Democratic elected officials have been unable to develop either a message or strategy that inspires or mobilizes voters. A significant exception to

Daniel Lurie has now been Mayor of San Francisco for just over 100 days. While most of the world’s attention has been on the catastrophic, chaotic, cruel and destructive first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second presidency, it is useful to reflect on Lurie’s first 100 days

The release of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book Abundance has set off a policy debate between what is generally called the center and the left, but from an economic perspective is better understood as between the left and the right. Much has been written critiquing the problems

One of the many ways the second Trump administration feels different from the first one is that this time it seems to be hitting San Francisco much more directly. During the first go around, whenever I was in San Francisco the horrors, excesses, cruelty, incompetence and crimes of Trump felt

As recently as a few years ago many would have identified San Francisco as the capital of liberal, or at least Democratic, America. The Vice-President was from the Bay Area and had gotten her start in elected office in San Francisco. One former mayor of San Francisco was the governor

Mayor Daniel Lurie faces a choice. He can continue to embrace the doom loop narrative instrumental to his election victory, or declare victory it and take on the hard work of governance. The doom loop narrative reframed how much of the country and world viewed San Francisco politics, and sought,

The biggest story of the elections in San Francisco was Daniel Lurie winning the race for mayor. Lurie became the first person to defeat a sitting mayor since Willie Brown stymied Frank Jordan’s bid for reelection in 1995. Jordan, in turn, was one of the first high profile politicians

For too long, journalists, and many political insiders, have sought to explain San Francisco politics as an internecine struggle between progressives and moderates all of whom are left of center. This approach is extremely unhelpful. It does not so much shed more heat than light on the issue, as it

It has long been true that San Francisco is an overwhelmingly Democratic city, but it has also long been meaningless to say that. Although it is the truth that you have to be a Democrat to win an election in San Francisco, a very broad range of political views are