San Francisco Voter Guide, Jun 2026

About

For a few years now I’ve been writing an informal voter guide for some friends. It started as a byproduct of my own decision process: I need to figure out how to vote, and I may as well tell you. I’m now publishing it for anyone who finds it helpful.

Before we get started, a bit about me and my political views, to get a sense of whether and where you might agree with me:

• I’m a software engineer who once minored in political science, and have lived in SF for almost 10 years now; see more about me.
• I’m a registered Democrat. In general I consider myself very progressive, but care more than many progressives about good government, realistic economics, and general competence. In practice in SF this puts me somewhere in the middle between the “moderates” and the “progressives”, and I tend to agree with urbanists and YIMBYs on housing and related issues.
• I’m not a fan of the number of propositions we get in California. I sometimes joke about the “anti-proposition voter guide” which is not real but if it were it would oppose everything that could possibly be done legislatively. (Alas, it made no endorsements this cycle.) I don’t always follow that theory, but I tend to hew a bit closer to it than most of the voter guides out there.
• I’m very excited about democracy and about the fact that you and I might not agree on absolutely everything. In this voter guide, I’ll try to tell you what I actually think, whether I’m quite certain or not really sure yet. I don’t do “no endorsement”: I have to decide what to put on my ballot, even if it’s a weak leaning, and so do you. (I basically never leave a line blank.) When it’s a weaker opinion, I’ll also usually try to tell you why you might choose differently.
• For reference, all my voter guides are available here.
• Needless to say, these are my own views and not those of anybody else. (While we’re at it: I used large language models for some research and editing of this guide, but checked their sources for all facts, and all the words were written with my own ten fingers.)

I may still edit this guide up until election day (and will try to leave a changelog if I do). If you think I’ve missed something important in some race, or have any questions, let me know via the links in the header!

Summary

Federal & state candidates:

• Governor: Porter
• Lieutenant Governor: Tubbs
• Secretary of State: Weber
• Controller: Cohen
• Treasurer: Caballero
• Attorney General: Bonta
• Insurance Commissioner: Wolff
• Board of Equalization Member D2: Pimentel
• US House D11: Wiener
• CA Assembly D17: Haney
• Superintendent of Public Instruction: Barrera

SF candidates:

• Board of Education (1 seat): Kim
• Superior Court Judge, Seat 16: Maffei

SF propositions:

• Prop A (earthquake bond): Yes
• Prop B (lifetime term limits): No
• Prop C (business tax tweaks): No
• Prop D (CEO tax increase): No

I’ve also put these in a database along with other endorsements I consulted (inclusion doesn’t imply I agree with the endorser or their endorsement, of course).

Federal & state candidates

• Governor: Porter

There are 62 candidates for governor (and yes, one really is named LivingForGod AndCountry DeMott). Neither Republican, nor the marginal Dem candidates Thurmond and Yee, seemed good enough to consider, so that leaves five: Becerra, Mahan, Porter, Steyer, and Villaraigosa.

I watched the candidates’ answers to Ezra Klein on housing and CalMatters on climate, AI, and affordability. In order from highest to lowest in recent polls:

• Becerra is the most experienced (HHS secretary, California AG) but seems to have more limited policy knowledge (for example in the Ezra Klein forum he seemed to have limited understanding of why it’s expensive to build housing). He recently proposed to freeze home insurance rates, which is about the worst possible policy idea (more on insurance later; he since walked it back). His answer on AI is so generic it could apply to any technology in the last 50 years.
• Steyer seems genuinely progressive-but-reasonable in his thinking. But he’s a billionaire with little political experience. It shows; he seems pretty dialed in on a few specific ideas (modular housing, an AI “token tax”), which may be good but don’t capture the complexity of many of the issues. (And he thinks the cost of local services, rather than NIMBYism, is the main factor causing localities reject housing; the research shows this is one reason among many: aesthetics and economic literacy, for example. It’s a “guy who read one good thinkpiece” kind of a vibe.)
• Porter has had her recent scandals¹, but watching her talk about housing reminded me why she got famous as a House member in the first place: she does really know her stuff! She talked about speed of building as a factor in cost, and about administrative burden in accessing housing services. All of her answers show she has some actual understanding of the issues; for example on AI she talked about how the legislature has already done some regulation on safety but she thinks more is needed on the economic impact.
• Mahan is clearly also knowledgeable on the issues, but I found him a bit fuzzier on the details than Porter. He also didn’t have great answers to why San Jose hasn’t built more housing during his mayoralty, especially since a lot of his policy ideas are about forcing local governments to allow building. He also has some views I don’t like, such as wanting to suspend the gas tax and supporting Prop 36.²
• Villaraigosa had some good answers, and some very weird ones. At times he seemed very strong (and he is also quite experienced, as a prior assembly speaker and mayor of LA), but other times it was like, what the heck did he just say? (His answer on climate had a decent spread of the relevant issues, but then on affordability he talked entirely about gas prices, and rebating some to consumers when gas goes above $5.50, which seems like incredibly bad policy and also small potatoes compared to housing.) He’s also polling pretty low at this point.

So my view is, Porter is the best, followed by Steyer; I’m conflicted on Mahan and I find Villaraigosa and Becerra pretty weak.

This is almost the opposite order of the polls: Becerra is leading, with Steyer close behind, and Porter and Mahan a good bit lower. Hilton, the leading Republican, is polling high enough that it’s pretty likely only one Dem makes it. So there’s a real question: should I vote for Steyer because he’s better than Becerra and has the best chance of winning?

My view right now is no; I’ll vote for Porter anyway. While Steyer does seem better, he doesn’t seem a ton better, and Becerra doesn’t seem that bad. (He’s already shifted to better positions on some issues under pressure during the campaign.) Also, the momentum has only recently coalesced behind Becerra, and I think it’s still very possible for Porter or even Mahan to pull back in, or even for two Dems to make it to November. So right now I see it as better to just vote for the best candidate. But I expect this answer is unusually likely to change in the next few weeks; I’ll update here if it does.

• Lieutenant Governor: Tubbs

For lieutenant governor, we have a mere 16 candidates, for a job that (we hope) does an even smaller fraction of what governor does. Given the hopefully unlikely possibility they would become governor, I’m only considering Dems. But the job’s ordinary responsibilities are a bit limited (they sit on the boards of the state higher education systems, and some state land management commissions, mainly).

Fiona Ma is the current treasurer and establishment candidate. I’m still not quite sure what to make of the harassment allegations a few years back; the state ultimately settled for $350k and there was little reporting beyond that. Otherwise she seems to have been fine as treasurer, but it’s also unclear what she wants to work on that’s actually related to the lieutenant governor’s job; the top video on her website is about how she will “stand up to Donald Trump”.

Oliver Ma (no relation) and Kellman both seem somewhat serious, but neither has much experience, and both seem to have a campaign platform with little relation to what the lieutenant governor actually does.

This leaves Fryday and Tubbs, who both seem fairly reasonable and know what the job entails. Tubbs was mayor of Stockton and more recently has had some appointed roles; he’s a strong YIMBY, has probably the most interesting platform tied to the actual responsibilities of the office, and has the impressive combination of the YIMBY Action and Working Families Party endorsements. Meanwhile Fryday is in Newsom’s cabinet and has his endorsement, which is maybe more relevant experience; his platform seems good although a bit less tied to the actual role.

In the end, I basically agree with the Chron’s take supporting Tubbs, but I can see a good argument for Fryday as well.

For your amusement, Tim Myers, the original bassist of OneRepublic, is a candidate, but he’s raised only $77k (relative to $2M+ for the others) and doesn’t seem to have much campaign presence beyond some interviews last summer, so I’m not considering him serious.

• Secretary of State: Weber

Weber seems to be great. Secretary of state is the kind of job where mostly you want them to do a good job of the boring logistics of making it easy and secure to vote, rather than going for some flashy changes. California has continued to be one of the best states at that! (Also, this is your periodic reminder that if you’ve never read her bio, it’s kind of incredible.)

The challengers are a Republican who wants to make it harder to vote (and seemingly doesn’t understand the difference between preliminary and certified election results, per his candidate statement); and two Greens excited about doing ranked choice voting and proportional representation (me too, but not actually the Secretary of State’s job).

• Controller: Cohen

Another fairly boring one: Cohen, the incumbent, and only Democrat, is a normal establishment Democrat who has as far as I can tell been fine. (It’s not clear to me that the Controller is supposed to do anything that would be newsworthy unless it goes wrong.) The challengers are a Peace and Freedom party candidate, Adams, who doesn’t seem to know what the Controller is responsible for, and Morgan, a Republican who seems to think that nearly 50% of the state budget is fraud³ and wants to do a California DOGE with Steve Hilton. I see no reason to vote for either.

• Treasurer: Caballero

Three Dems in this race, Caballero, Kounalakis, and Vazquez (none of the others seem worthwhile).

Kounalakis’s website lists no policy platform, only her experience (as lieutenant governor, a job with so few responsibilities that Treasurer would be a step up, and before that ambassador to Hungary). But she would presumably be fine.

Vazquez has some relevant experience but a pretty thin platform.

Caballero clearly has bigger dreams, but somewhat directs them towards what a treasurer can do. She seems the most exciting to me? She does have some weird ideas, like hydrogen power.

Kounalakis is clearly the frontrunner; it seems entirely possible that Caballero could make it to the general as well. In a November campaign I hope we’d hear more from both of them about what they really plan to do, and why. But for now, Caballero seems solid enough for me.

• Attorney General: Bonta

We still like Bonta, who is the teeth behind California housing law, as well as suing Trump (in which he claims to have won 80% of the cases; I guess he should sue even more?). I’m almost surprised he’s not running for Governor, but I’ll take it!

• Insurance Commissioner: Wolff

It’s a bit weird that we elect the insurance commissioner in California, but maybe it’s good actually? It’s probably one of the most powerful state regulators in the country, and the California home insurance market is actually quite a mess with wildfire risk. The insurance commissioner gets to decide when insurers can raise rates; saying no could either keep insurance affordable or cause insurers to exit the state entirely. Good policy can really make a difference here, but an ill-advised step like freezing rates entirely could fully collapse the market.

So, I think it’s pretty important that we elect someone who knows about the industry, and understands the complexity of insurance markets. This isn’t one where we can just stick it to the man; what is already bad could get worse. They should absolutely regulate for consumer protection, but the devil is in the details, not in just “standing up to” the insurance companies.

Luckily, we actually have quite a few candidates, including some good ones.

The best candidates seem to be Allen and Wolff. Allen is a state senator whose district includes the Palisades, so has some experience in the space, as well as in Sacramento. Wolff is a financial analyst with experience in insurance who truly does seem to have gotten into the race because he understands the problem and wants to fix things.

Watching Wolff’s responses in the Commonwealth Club forum, he seems best. Allen is also clearly knowledgeable and experienced, but Wolff got way more into the details: he even got an insurance license before running. He seems both willing to hold insurance companies accountable but also to figure out what it takes to make the market work; and honestly he’s incredibly endearing in his responses. The Chronicle found similarly.

As for the other candidates:

• Bradford is a former state senator. He seems like a good guy, and has a long history of working on insurance policy, but he didn’t seem as up on the details of the issues today.
• Farren, a Republican, actually seems quite reasonable; his idea of a public reinsurance system seems plausible. But I don’t see why he’s better than Wolff or Allen and he has no political experience and less insurance experience than Wolff.
• Jane Kim is a former SF supervisor who’s pretty far left. In a market where you did just need to yell at insurers a bit harder, and stand up for consumers, she might be good; but this is not that market and I don’t think she’s right for the job.

If you really want legislative experience, Allen seems like a good choice, but I’m voting for Wolff. (There’s also an argument for a strategic vote for whichever of the two seems to have the best chance to avoid a general with Jane Kim and a Republican, but I can’t find any polling on the race so it’s hard to know which way that leans; I’ll update this if that changes.)

• Board of Equalization Member D2: Pimentel

Pimentel is open to abolishing the Board of Equalization! The other candidates are seemingly less so. That’s all I need to know. (That link is from 2022. Nothing has changed; a 2023 reform bill failed.)

• US House D11: Wiener

There are 11 candidates in the race to succeed Nancy Pelosi, but basically 3 serious candidates: Scott Wiener, Connie Chan, and Saikat Chakrabarti. (Hurabiell is arguably serious, but basically a Republican, so I’m not considering her.)

San Francisco is, at least for the foreseeable future, an incredibly safe House seat, which means it’s quite possible that, like Pelosi, the winner this year could end up as our representative for decades, and perhaps in the Dem leadership eventually.⁴ Obviously all the candidates will be a solid vote to, for example, abolish ICE and support universal healthcare; but we should aim higher, for a candidate who can be an effective legislator over what will no doubt be a range of political climates in the coming decades.

Wiener is our state senator from the “moderate”⁵ faction in city politics, known for his prolific legislating for YIMBY causes and much more. Chan is supervisor representing the Richmond in the SF “progressive” faction. Chakrabarti is an early Stripe employee who then got into politics in the Bernie Sanders universe, ran AOC’s first House campaign, and was her chief of staff for the first 7 months of her term.

All three candidates are well to the left of even the median Democrat in the House. So it seems less important to me to try to parse the small differences in their opinions on national issues. On their opinions alone, Chakrabarti is perhaps the most exciting, although he seems a bit weaker on housing.⁶ But the real question will be which of those opinions they can get enacted.

To that point, let’s talk about how Wiener has been an incredibly effective legislator. His YIMBY policies were not popular at first! But he found and built the coalition, and adjusted the bills as he learned about what could get support. More recently the same happened with AI regulation: Wiener’s original stronger bill was vetoed by Newsom but he came back with a narrower attempt, and got it passed. (Chakrabarti has decided this means Wiener is being “bankrolled” by the “AI lobby” because he “worked with them to water down AI regulations”; in fact most of the labs opposed the final bill; only Anthropic supported it.)

And that’s what I think is most important by far: Wiener has learned what it actually means to legislate: you can yell as hard as you want that someone else is soft on some issue, but what actually matters is finding the votes to take action, even if that action is not really enough. (Then you try again for more, and again, and again.) Nancy Pelosi knew how to count the votes, and got us among other things the Affordable Care Act. None of the candidates will be Nancy Pelosi, but Scott Wiener seems best to take up her mantle.

• CA Assembly D17: Haney

Haney is the only candidate, and has done a good job, except for the whole campaign finance mess. Get ready: if Wiener wins the House race, we’ll have a special election for his seat, in which Haney is expected to run; if he wins we get another special.

• Superintendent of Public Instruction: Barrera

This race is a bit tricky to parse; it’s nonpartisan, with a fairly wide spread of endorsements.

After watching the responses from all the candidates who participated in EdSource’s forum, and reading some other endorsements, Barrera and Newman stand out as the best. Barrera has the most relevant experience (both state and local administration), and San Diego, where he has been school board president for a while, has seemingly done quite well in the last 10 years. Newman has more legislative experience, and very good answers on specific policy questions, like evidence-based reading education, and how to support districts in navigating the use and misuse of AI.

I could go either way on this one, but it’s hard to argue with Barrera’s experience in San Diego, and he’s got more education-relevant endorsements as well, so I lean towards him.

SF candidates

• Board of Education (1 seat): Kim

This is to fill a vacancy from 2024, until the end of the term in January. (We’ll elect this seat as well as two others again in November.) Kim is the current appointee to the seat, and since 2025 also board president.

I’m most excited about Kim, who seems pretty serious about the mechanical details; his answers to Mission Local and Young Dems questionnaires seem the richest. He also has experience both as an educator and in administration in SFUSD. The school board needs that right now; the problems in the school district (funding and budgeting, the mechanics of school assignment, and simply paying teachers on time) aren’t easy and take more than a desire to solve them.

With that said, Cheung also seems fine; she seems plenty sensible, just not quite as up on the details. She’s a bit more to the left (and got the UESF endorsement, while Kim got the more moderate groups, as well as the Young Dems and the Chronicle).

For completeness: Marckmann seems to be a single-issue candidate opposed to closing any schools. It’s a tricky issue, and one where the district has clearly made a number of mistakes, but it’s hard to believe that the best policy on when to close a school in a district with declining enrollment is “never”. She has historically opposed eighth grade algebra, whereas I strongly support it, although she has perhaps now backtracked. I don’t see any reason to vote for her.

• Superior Court Judge, Seat 16: Maffei

Judge elections are always tricky. Luckily it seems like both candidates are fine. Maffei is a prosecutor, while Pray is a public defender; to some extent both have the bent (and endorsements) you would expect but both seem to also have a balanced view and experience.

Generally that would lead me to lean towards Pray, but the Chronicle reports she “wouldn’t want a criminal assignment”, which seems a bit weird to me. Maffei’s experience seems broad enough to not be a concern, so I lean towards her.

SF propositions

• Prop A (earthquake bond): Yes

In general I love me an emergency preparedness bond. This one is a bit complicated in that it supports seismic upgrades to police and fire stations (great), a new backup water system (I dunno man, but the Fire Chief says it’s good), and the Potrero Muni Yard (what a mess of an underwhelming project, but surely still better than not funding it). But as usual, voting against it wouldn’t get us a better one; everybody endorses it⁷ and it seems fine.

• Prop B (lifetime term limits): No

Wouldn’t it be nice if Scott Wiener could continue being our state senator? Turns out he’s really good at the job, but now he has to go off to Washington and work on things less relevant to his interests and learn a whole new world of politics. This is a great example of why term limits are a bad idea. (Note the city and state systems differ in various details.)

Political science research agrees: legislative term limits weaken the legislature relative to the executive and to special interests. Now, there are costs and benefits: incumbency advantage is real, and there are advantages to periodically interrupting it. But in that sense, the ideal is the system we have in SF: supervisors can serve at most two consecutive terms, but then can return if they, and their constituents, so desire.

Prop B would change it so that the limit is lifetime. Aaron Peskin is of course opposed (he’s already served four terms total), but a broken clock is right twice a day: while I wouldn’t vote for him, if his constituents want to bring him back in 2029, so be it.

• Prop C (business tax tweaks): No
• Prop D (CEO tax increase): No

Two conflicting props; at most one can pass.

Let’s talk about Prop D first. In 2020, we passed a tax on companies with highly paid CEOs. In 2024, we cut it by 80% and exempted businesses under some thresholds, as a part of the business tax reform. Prop D would increase the tax by about 9× starting in 2027, and compute it based on the median of all employees, rather than just SF employees, making more employers subject and at higher rates.

I voted for the CEO tax in 2020 (“I don’t know that this is great tax policy, but on the other hand I don’t really mind”) but after another few rounds of adjusting business taxes, I’m more annoyed about bad tax policy and less annoyed about overpaid CEOs.

And I do think it’s very bad tax policy! The whole gross receipts tax structure makes the city reliant on a few companies, which makes the city’s revenue very uneven, and may incentivize those few companies to leave the city. (Not to mention that gross receipts get messy for different types of businesses with differing profit margins.) This is even worse for the CEO tax: the top 10 companies paid 61% of the CEO tax in 2024. Per the controller it would raise $250–300M based on past years, although with “significant annual fluctuations”.

The other problem is, which companies does it affect? One might assume tech companies, but grocery stores would seemingly be equally taxed.⁸ Unlike the gross receipts tax, the CEO tax doesn’t appear to make adjustment for type of industry, so it would affect lower-margin industries more; the top bracket for the regular gross receipts tax is almost 4× higher for “Information” than for “Retail Trade”. (Incidentally, the top rates of around 1% are substantial; the regular gross receipts top brackets range from 0.224% to 1.008%.)

Now on to Prop C. It seems to be on the ballot mainly to be a duelling prop with D, and would make two gross receipts tax changes:

• The exemption for small businesses would increase from $5M to $7.5M.
• The (small) CEO tax increase scheduled for 2028 would take effect in 2027. These net to a small tax cut of $30–40M (with the same caveats on the CEO tax). (Presumably the former is included because it’s good politics, and the latter to cause the collision.) No argument seems to be offered for why either of these tweaks are useful except as a directional “support small business” thing.

Yes on D and No on C are sponsored mainly by local labor unions, and endorsed by progressive orgs. No on D and Yes on C are sponsored by some tech people and the Chamber of Commerce, and endorsed by GrowSF and friends. SPUR and the SF Dems endorsed no on both.

Where does that leave us? I don’t know. I think the CEO tax is a bad idea. I don’t really like that it was quietly decreased in 2024, but I don’t really think two wrongs make a right for Prop D, and I certainly don’t think three wrongs make a right for Prop C. Given the importance of downtown business recovery, I think we should just leave this one alone for a cycle. At this rate, we’ll surely be back for another swing in 2028, so we can fix it then.