Building Toward November

By Sachin Agarwal

I never expected to get into politics. When I became a dad in 2018, though, I realized that–despite having world-class weather, food, and parks–San Francisco is a really hard place to raise a family.

My parents emigrated from the UK to Southern California in 1983, a time when their salaries as a secretary and restaurant owner enabled them to purchase a modest house and send me to good public schools. But that American Dream is not possible in San Francisco today.

Buying a home is out of reach because the city has made it nearly impossible to build new housing. Permitting bureaucracy makes it extremely difficult to open a small business. Our public schools are nearing insolvency because our school board was engaging in performative politics instead of focusing on student outcomes.

It’s no surprise we have more dogs than children in the city.

My family in the Presidio

Getting Started

I first got involved in politics when I volunteered as a poll worker in November 2019. As I watched voters fill out their multi-page ballots, I wondered how they decided who to vote for in all the Dem vs. Dem races. In that election, former DA Chesa Boudin and Supervisor Dean Preston won by just hundreds of votes, and some of my friends didn’t even realize until results came in that they’d voted against their wishes for the city!

Then it hit me: It wasn’t enough to get angry after the fact. We needed to mobilize before the election to effect real change. I didn’t yet know exactly what that would look like in practice, but during the COVID lockdown, I started having long late-night phone calls about this with Steven Buss Bacio. We realized most existing groups focused only on issue advocacy, even though public comment and online petitions only went so far when city leadership resisted change at every turn.

If the people in City Hall couldn’t get the job done, we concluded, the only path forward was to replace them.

What GrowSF Does

That’s why Steven and I left our jobs in 2020 to found GrowSF, a group that gets high-quality information to voters about how to vote to ensure common-sense reforms like better public safety, clean streets, great schools, and enough housing for everyone who wants to live here.

Polling indicates that most voters want these things, so winning doesn’t require changing public opinion; it just requires helping San Franciscans vote more effectively for what they already want.

We do this by getting good information to voters, creating content that’s easy to understand, and then making sure that information gets to voters via world-class distribution. Our informational voter guide, which we mail to every voter (and the online version of which reached nearly 100,000 people last cycle, equivalent to nearly half the electorate!), includes information on how to vote, summaries of who’s running and what they believe, and quick explainers of ballot initiatives. All of this is delivered in plain English, as well as in Chinese.

In short, we help voters understand how their vote can influence policy. (Or, as one of our opponents put it, we “try to trick people by putting forward non-controversial ideas that everyone can get behind.” The horror!)

We’re focused on electoral outcomes because we believe elections are the only scalable way of delivering change. We can’t move San Francisco forward one public park, bike lane, or permit at a time–we need full-time leaders focused on delivering systemic change that reflects what voters want.

We're Winning

Our approach is working. In the last two years alone, we recalled a dysfunctional school board. We replaced District Attorney Chesa Boudin with results-minded Brooke Jenkins, who has helped cut car break-ins in half since taking over. We elected pro-growth Supervisors Joel Engardio and Matt Dorsey.

And in March, we contributed to the overwhelming election of a common-sense majority to the Democratic County Central Committee, which controls the SF Democratic Party’s endorsements for key city positions.

These election wins are already resulting in actual change. District Attorney Jenkins is prosecuting crime, school board president Lainie Motamedi is focused on student outcomes, Supervisor Joel Engardio is fighting to bring algebra back to eighth grade, and Supervisor Matt Dorsey is working hard to staff our police department.

We still have a long way to go, but things are starting to move in the right direction: Between February and May, the percentage of people who said San Francisco is headed in the right direction improved by seven points.

What's Next

But these wins will mean little if we don’t succeed in November. We’re focused on three areas this fall:

1. Board of Supervisors. The Board has the power to make some of the most consequential decisions facing our city. Right now, four of 11 Supervisors support GrowSF’s common-sense agenda, meaning we just need to win two of the six open seats to gain a majority. If we win, we’ll see major policy shifts in public safety, increased housing development, and more. But if we lose, we’ll undermine the progress we’ve worked so hard to gain.
2. Mayor. We need voters to embrace ranked choice voting among moderate candidates London Breed, Mark Farrell, and Daniel Lurie. Splitting the vote could result in electing Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who would be as disastrous as mayor as he’s been as a supervisor.
3. School Board. SF’s public schools are on a path to run out of cash by 2025. We are focused on electing members of the School Board with experience in managing complex organizations and generating effective educational outcomes to help get the District back on track. San Francisco should have the best public schools, and we’re confident we can get there with good leadership.

To win on these axes, we’re going to continue getting good information to voters when and where they need it. We’ll run our biggest campaign ever across mail, TV, and digital to make sure our endorsements are reaching all voters.

These efforts, of course, take money. The presidential race will suck up lots of oxygen, and November’s ballot might be one of the longest ever. With dozens of candidate races and propositions on the ballot, a well-researched voter guide and robust dissemination strategy will be more critical than ever to make sure voters know about the local races that will affect their daily lives.

GrowSF is extremely capital efficient, using rigorous polling and testing rather than intuition to understand what voters care about and how to reach them. We look at data every day to make sure our campaigns are moving key metrics that indicate we’re moving votes. And we don’t outsource everything to expensive political consultants, so any dollars you donate go toward outcomes, not bloated retainers.

These funds will allow us to reach more voters and elect outcome-driven candidates who are as committed as we are to changing San Francisco for the better, ultimately making the city a place where people are proud to raise their kids–and dogs.

Volunteering as a poll worker, November 2019