纽约时报中文网 - 英文原版-英In the Race for San Francisco Mayor Chinese Voters Take Center Stage

The contenders for San Francisco mayor are perfecting the pronunciation of their names in Cantonese. They are scrambling to recruit the best Chinese-speaking volunteers, in what one campaign manager described as a bona fide “arms race.”

And they are grabbing any opportunity to meet with Chinese American voters in the city. Ding Lee, a former president of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, said that in the past, mayoral candidates would pop by the association’s historic building in Chinatown for a photo-op and leave after 10 or 15 minutes.

“Now they almost never turn down an invitation to come, and they stay for the whole event,” Mr. Lee said with a chuckle. “They know that the Chinese vote is quite powerful now.”

Nationally, Asian American voters often have to fight for attention because their numbers are still considered too few in most states for campaigns to invest heavily in outreach. But in San Francisco, where people of Chinese descent comprise more than one-fifth of the population, mayoral candidates believe that Chinese voters could decide the outcome in November.

The community has become more politically energized than it has been in years, helping to drive what many say has been a moderate backswing in the famously liberal city. Chinese Americans were seen as a driver of two recall elections that shook the city in 2022, to replace progressive school board members and a liberal district attorney.

Chinese voters are also considered to be up for grabs this year. There are no leading Chinese contenders in the race, and frustration over school governance and crime in the city remains high among Asian American voters in particular. San Francisco has struggled to recover from the pandemic and continues to face issues with open-air drug dealing and property crime.

Those challenging Mayor London Breed have sensed an opening. They are reaching voters on WeChat, a popular Chinese social messaging platform. Some have recruited Chinese leaders who were instrumental in the recall elections to serve in key campaign roles this year. And they are grasping for anything that might give them an edge, even tussling over how their names appear in Chinese on the ballot and campaign signs.

Political influence in the community was once centralized in the hands of progressive organizations in Chinatown and power brokers like Rose Pak, who played a pivotal role in numerous elections, including the successful 2011 campaign of Ed Lee, the first Asian American to be elected mayor of San Francisco. Willie Brown, a political legend in California for his longtime rule over the State Assembly before he became San Francisco mayor, once said that Ms. Pak could deliver votes from 20 to 30 percent of the electorate.

But Ms. Pak passed away in 2016. And over the years, the Chinese community, the oldest in the nation, has grown more diverse and dispersed. As a result, candidates must work even harder to court leaders and voters in various neighborhoods.

“It’s like a 50-state strategy,” said Aaron Peskin, president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, who announced his candidacy for mayor in April. “You’ve got to do everything.”

Ms. Breed, Mr. Peskin and Ahsha Safaí, another leading mayoral contender who also serves on the board of supervisors, the city’s governing body, have longstanding ties within the Chinese community. Asian American voters, including Chinese Americans, were a key part of the coalition that elected Ms. Breed in 2018. And both Mr. Peskin and Mr. Safaí represent districts with large Chinese populations.

Chinese voters are not as familiar with Mark Farrell, a venture capitalist and former city supervisor who briefly served as interim mayor after Mr. Lee died in office, and Daniel Lurie, the founder of an anti-poverty nonprofit and an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. Both candidates, moderates who have focused on reducing crime and drug use in the city, have turned to a newly energized crop of Chinese American activists for help.

In an unmarked office space in the Mission District one recent morning, one of those activists, Kit Lam, 48, watched as an intern, hunched over a laptop, worked to update a script for campaign volunteers to use when talking to Chinese voters.

The night before, a Chinese voter told Mr. Lam that she had never heard of Mr. Lurie. But the voter mentioned that she had heard that an heir to the Levi’s fortune was running for mayor.

“It made me think that we need to mention the Levi’s thing earlier when we talk to Chinese voters,” Mr. Lam said.

In 2021, during the pandemic, Mr. Lam was one of the leaders in the campaign to recall several members of the board of education for the San Francisco Unified School District. Parents were frustrated that board members seemed to be focused on renaming 44 schools — a decision that was later overturned — while the district was among the last in the nation to fully reopen campuses.

Chinese American parents were also upset that the board had ended merit-based admissions at Lowell High School, a high-achieving campus that has long been a feeder to top universities. That decision was also later reversed.

Mr. Lam, who had two children in the school system, set up a table at farmers’ markets for months, collecting more than 12,000 signatures toward qualifying a school board recall election. In 2022, voters recalled three board members, and Chinese American voters played a significant role. Turnout was 37 percent among the 30,000 voters who requested Chinese-language ballots, significantly higher than the overall turnout of 26 percent.

Mr. Farrell, the venture capitalist, has turned to Jade Tu, a 28-year-old community organizer who was instrumental in the 2022 recall of Chesa Boudin, the progressive district attorney.

Ms. Tu, like many new Chinese American activists in the city, said she entered the cutthroat world of San Francisco politics after a spate of anti-Asian attacks during the pandemic. She is now Mr. Farrell’s campaign manager.

Mr. Farrell has vowed to be tougher on crime, the fentanyl epidemic and homelessness in San Francisco. He is considered the most right-leaning of the leading mayoral contenders.

“I will make sure that we have a Police Department that is fully funded in City Hall. and that we have enough police officers to keep us safe in our neighborhoods every single day,” he said recently at a dim sum restaurant, receiving a smattering of applause from a mostly older, Cantonese-speaking crowd.

Mr. Farrell stood in front of one of his campaign posters that featured a slogan in Chinese: “Live in Peace and Work Happily — Public Safety Number One!”

Ms. Breed has made her own hard push this summer to win votes from Chinese residents. She recently visited China, where she urged leaders to restore many of the direct flights to San Francisco International Airport that were canceled during the pandemic. She also lobbied to bring giant pandas to the San Francisco Zoo..

She has also pointed to recent declines in crime across all categories, including anti-Asian attacks. Ms. Breed has attributed that drop to her tough-on-crime agenda, and has touted it in her biweekly column in Sing Tao Daily, the city’s largest Chinese-language newspaper. And she has taken an aggressive new tack toward removing homeless encampments in the city, including offering bus tickets out of town before giving people the option of shelter.

“The message around what we’ve done to help deal with the issues around crime is just not getting out as effectively as we need it to,” Ms. Breed said in an interview at a restaurant in Chinatown.

But many Chinese voters, in recent interviews, said that bigger changes were needed.

Jennifer Lu, the owner of a print shop in Chinatown, said that she still closed up early most days out of concern for safety. Business was down anyway, she said, a decline that she blamed partly on decreased foot traffic in the neighborhood and a rise in homelessness.

While she had not yet decided on a mayoral candidate, she said she felt strongly that city leaders needed to do more.

“Just this morning, there was a homeless guy sleeping in front and another one across the street,” said Ms. Lu, standing at the entrance of the shop that her family has owned for nearly 35 years. “We call the police but the problem never gets resolved.”

With three months to go before the election, it remains to be seen how Chinese voters will respond to the increased outreach. Already, the intense focus on the community in San Francisco has been an anomaly compared with most other parts of the country, where Asian American voters are rarely prioritized by campaigns.

“Chinese voters are going to get so many mailers,” said Han Zou, Mr. Lurie’s campaign manager, “that they could build a house from them by the end of this.”