How Daniel Lurie threaded a political needle in the mayor’s race
Editor-at-large
The San Francisco Standard
Published Nov. 06, 2024 • 3:24pm
https://sfstandard.com/opinion/2024/11/06/daniel-lurie-mayoral-campaign-keys/
The City Family came out in force Tuesday for a venerable, if cringey, Election Day tradition: free lunch at John’s Grill near Union Square. Former Mayor Willie Brown, still impressively nimble at 90, held court on the sidewalk outside. An ebullient Brooke Jenkins, the soon-to-be-reelected district attorney, promised me we’d have “four more years” to continue an earlier conversation about retail theft. Politicians in and out of office, including Aaron Peskin, Scott Wiener, Jane Kim, Joel Engardio, Catherine Stefani, Mark Leno, and David Chiu, all gripped and grinned their hearts out.
But there was at least one key figure who didn’t make an appearance: Daniel Lurie, who by the end of last night looked to be on a glide path to becoming San Francisco’s next mayor. His absence, of course, was completely by design.
That’s because, for all the talk of nastiness in local politics, the scene at John’s Grill was a vivid reminder that even adversaries inside City Hall are mostly fond of each other (the cup-half-full interpretation). Also, that these insiders are largely in cahoots to maintain their lavish, taxpayer-funded livelihoods (the empty-cup interpretation). Lurie and his minders wanted nothing to do with either of these narratives.
I had gone to John’s to meet two people who, like their boss, didn’t find their way into the gated-off area of the festivities: Tyler Law and Han Zou, the campaign strategist and manager, respectively, of Lurie’s gold-plated bid to become mayor.
“We didn’t even try to make it in,” Law texted me as we failed to locate each other in the scrum. “We’re just chilling on the outside. Like the outsiders we are.”
The duo agreed to publicly discuss for the first time how they ran a campaign that, at minimum, took a little-known candidate who has never held elective office to the precipice of becoming mayor of San Francisco.
Continue here.