Supervisor Stephen Sherrill won the race Tuesday to represent District 2 in San Francisco. He had 71% of the vote in early results, with ballots left to be counted in ranked-choice voting.
Sherrill, a moderate ally of Mayor Daniel Lurie, was appointed to represent District 2 at the end of 2024 by former Mayor London Breed after Catherine Stefani was elected to the State Assembly. Challenging Sherrill for the seat was Lori Brooke, a neighborhood activist and organizer with deep ties to the district, which includes affluent neighborhoods such as the Marina, Cow Hollow and Pacific Heights.
Brooke and her supporters criticized Sherrill for his vote in favor of Lurie’s “Family Zoning” plan, which allowed denser and taller residential buildings in some areas of the city, including in District 2. Brooke, the long-time president of the Cow Hollow Association, organized a coalition of neighborhood groups, called Neighbors United, to lobby against the plan.
Her campaign has also sought to leverage local dismay over a proposed 20-story residential tower on the site of a Safeway store in the Marina, suggesting that Sherrill had done too little to oppose the project. Sherrill has been opposed to the design from the outset and told the Chronicle that he met with state housing officials in May to try to find ways to slow the project’s progress.
Lurie offered Sherrill an early endorsement in the race, his first since becoming mayor at the beginning of last year. Outside political groups aligned with the mayor have also lined up behind Sherrill, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads boosting him and attacking Brooke.
The race was complicated in its final weeks by accusations by two former advisers and confidants to Breed that she had chosen Sherrill for the job to secure future employment opportunities from billionaire Democratic donor and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, for whom Sherrill had worked for several years. Before his appointment, Sherrill led the Mayor’s Office of Innovation, a City Hall department that is partially funded by Bloomberg.
Both Breed and Sherrill have denied the allegations. Brooke leaned into them in the last stretch of the campaign, suggesting in ads that Sherrill had benefited from “corruption” in Breed’s administration.
Sherrill hold the seat until the end of Stefani’s term at the end of the year. Voters will pick a candidate to represent the district for the four-year stint in November.