Damn, Daniel: Lurie is getting the hang of being mayor, one sly move at a time

For an inexperienced politician, the mayor has shown a surprising skill for consolidating power and winning over adversaries.

By Adam Lashinsky

Editor-at-large

Published Feb. 21, 2025 • 6:00am

The San Francisco Standard

It is still early days, but the themes of Daniel Lurie’s mayoralty are beginning to come into focus — in a wholly encouraging way.

The conventional wisdom throughout his campaign was that Lurie, who had never held elective office, was untested, inexperienced, and more or less unprepared. The San Francisco chatterati viewed Lurie as particularly vulnerable in the rough-and-tumble world of local politics, what he himself described as a “knife fight in a phone booth” that is highly entertaining but deeply damaging.

And yet, in office a mere six weeks, Lurie has shown himself adept at two critical skills: earnestly cultivating relationships with politicians who might otherwise have been adversaries, and shrewdly consolidating power in a mayor’s office that many chin-strokers have felt for decades was too weak.

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