Supervisor Connie Chan and state Sen. Scott Wiener will face off Nov. 3 in the final act of the city’s first open House contest in nearly 40 years, and housing is likely to be a key issue.
Photos by Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle
The race to succeed Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi was a brawl before the June primary. Now, it’s a two-person matchup that is set to become a bitter slugfest between San Francisco political factions.
State Sen. Scott Wiener and Supervisor Connie Chan, both Democrats, will face off Nov. 3 in the final act of the city’s first open House contest in nearly 40 years. Whoever wins will secure a presumably safe blue seat in Congress, with big shoes to fill: Pelosi used the job to ascend twice to the House speakership and become one of the most influential elected leaders in modern American history.
While either Wiener or Chan would be among the more progressive House Democrats, in San Francisco they have historically been on opposite sides of some of the city’s most hard-fought policy debates, especially around housing.
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Interviews in recent days with both candidates and their leading supporters reveal that both sides are eager to seize on housing issues — particularly Wiener’s record in Sacramento, where he has passed numerous bills intended to lower the barriers to homebuilding. Chan and her allies plan to cast Wiener as someone who favors the interests of big businesses and developers over working families. Wiener and his backers, meanwhile, will describe Chan as an obstructionist who has sought to block desperately needed new homes.
Supporters cheer state Sen. Scott Wiener during the primary night party at his campaign headquarters.
Gabrielle Lurie/S.F. Chronicle
Wiener’s most fervent fans include YIMBY groups and some trade unions that favor his expansive approach to development, as well as wealthy donors with ties to the real estate and tech sectors. He is backed by the California Democratic Party and a majority of the city’s Board of Supervisors — the legislative body Chan has served on since 2021.
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Chan is aligned with the left end of San Francisco’s political spectrum, which focuses its housing advocacy more narrowly around low-income residences and protecting tenants from displacement. She is supported by about 40 organized labor groups, including unions representing government employees, as well as a handful of her colleagues on the board’s progressive minority. She also won a coveted endorsement from Pelosi, who has described Chan as someone who “walks in the shoes of all her constituents.”
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Wiener said his record is one of his greatest assets as he makes his case to voters.
“It’s essential that we send someone to Congress who knows how to get things done — who has a track record of getting things done,” Wiener told the Chronicle. “I’m the only candidate in the race with that track record and that ability. Supervisor Chan … is best known not for what she has done, but for what she has opposed.”
Chan said there is “a general notion” in San Francisco that Wiener has repeatedly sided with the needs of the wealthy instead of defending the working class.
“When it comes down to it, he always chooses his billionaire donors over San Franciscans and the best interests of San Franciscans,” Chan told the Chronicle.
Asked to name specific examples, Chan demurred, asserting that she had “said what I have to say.” She added later that she would “be sure that voters know all about it in the coming months, bit by bit.”
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San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan greets voters in Chinatown on primary day as she campaigns for the House.
Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle
Wiener dismissed that line of attack as “trite propaganda” and said he had “gone to war” with big businesses repeatedly during his time in elected office.
As their general election campaigns heat up, Chan and Wiener are likely to spar over a variety of issues: their respective track records in elected office, their plans to make one of the nation’s most famously expensive cities more affordable, and the question of who can best stand up to President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans.
Wiener is the front-runner, having secured about 41% of the vote in the June 2 election — 11 points more than Chan. He and his allies are confident they can prevail in the two-person matchup, pointing to the breadth of his support throughout the city and the long list of legislative accomplishments he can tout to voters. But Chan remains a formidable opponent who can win if she expands her base beyond the neighborhoods where she performed best this month.
A key question in November will be the behavior of voters who backed other candidates in the primary — particularly third-place finisher Saikat Chakrabarti, a deep-pocketed former tech engineer who spent millions of dollars on his own campaign. Chakrabarti, who received about 18% of the vote, courted many of the same progressive voters that Chan is hoping will form her winning coalition.
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It’s not clear how many of them will ultimately rally behind Chan, but Chakrabarti told the San Francisco Standard he will endorse Chan and form a political action committee to support her candidacy. He also said he will set up a 200-person field operation to aid Chan.
David Ho, a consultant who runs a political action committee supporting Chan, said Wiener is “clearly the front-runner” but his team “has to be super anxious” because of how well Chan performed on the west side. Precinct-level results show she bested Wiener in the Outer Sunset and much of the Outer Richmond, which is part of her supervisor district.
Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and Supervisor Connie Chan hug at a rally for Chan’s House campaign in San Francisco last month. Pelosi endorsed Chan for the seat she has held for four decades.
Benjamin Fanjoy/For the S.F. Chronicle
“Let’s just say Connie is able to consolidate progressives and maintain her west-side support — I think the west side, including the Republican and conservative voters, is going to determine who wins,” Ho said. “The fact that she can hold the west side has got to make Team Scott nervous.”
In fact, neither of the coalitions that powered Wiener and Chan’s top-two finishes were straightforwardly “progressive” or “moderate.” Based on a past Chronicle analysis of voting behavior, it was in fact Wiener who did slightly better in precincts with a more “progressive” voting history (although the correlation was clearer still for Chakrabarti). On the other hand, Chan could reasonably claim to have done better with “working class” voters — the parts of the city where fewer voters have college degrees.
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But Chan-friendly working-class areas were also more likely to have supported Trump in the 2024 election — a clear reminder that in San Francisco, as in the rest of the state and nation, what the working class wants is not necessarily the same as what progressives do.
Wiener’s campaign released a memo Monday that tried to debunk some of the narratives buoying Chan and her biggest boosters after the primary. The memo said that while Chan performed well in parts of the west side such as the Sunset, she also underperformed in her own supervisor district, which Wiener led by a narrow margin. The memo noted that Wiener racked up large margins in “numerous eastern and central San Francisco neighborhoods that contain substantial numbers of votes” and asserted that the electoral map “leans heavily in Senator Wiener’s favor” going into November.
San Francisco Democratic Party Chair Nancy Tung, who supports Wiener, said he can lean on his record to build the coalition needed to prevail in the general election.
“His path to victory is really continuing to talk to voters about his really substantive legislative wins (and) his position on housing,” Tung said. “He has a good chance of picking up Chakrabarti supporters who are typically younger, affordability-minded and housing-minded people … because I think that’s where our local progressives and national progressives diverge: on this issue of housing.”
In the nearly 10 years he has served in the state Legislature, Wiener has been at the forefront of the YIMBY movement, which seeks to lower barriers to building new homes throughout the state. Among his legislative wins is Senate Bill 35, a 2017 bill that requires jurisdictions behind on their housing construction goals to follow a sped-up approval process. He was also the architect of SB79, a controversial 2025 bill that allows denser homes near transit stops.
His fellow YIMBY adherents will undoubtedly highlight those and other legislative achievements as they promote Wiener as a housing hero — and Chan as a housing villain. To justify that characterization, they may point to Chan’s December vote against Mayor Daniel Lurie’s “Family Zoning” plan to allow taller and denser housing on the west and north sides of San Francisco.
“Scott’s got a long record of doing everything he can to support housing at all income levels, and Supervisor Chan’s record says the opposite,” said Corey Smith, executive director of the Housing Action Coalition, who favors Wiener. “One thinks building housing is a good idea. The other thinks it’s a bad idea.”
Yet Chan also has plenty of allies who will make the opposite case about her record on housing. When she voted against the Family Zoning plan last year, she said she did so largely because she wanted more protections against the demolition of rent-controlled housing — a stance shared by some of the labor leaders now backing her congressional campaign.
Supporters greet state Sen. Scott Wiener at his primary night party at his campaign headquarters in his quest for a House seat.
Gabrielle Lurie/S.F. Chronicle
“Connie has been trying to remind everybody that … the problem with housing in San Francisco is not only that there’s not enough of it — it’s exacerbated by the fact that there’s not enough for working families and middle-class families who otherwise have to drive an hour and a half each way to come to work in this city,” said Mike Casey, president of the San Francisco Labor Council, who supports Chan.
Casey called Chan “a real champion for working families in this city” and said Wiener was “probably the single most divisive elected official I have ever known.” Casey explained that description of Wiener by pointing to Wiener’s primary selling point — his housing record, which Casey said had favored the real-estate industry and “driven wedges” between unions.
That critique didn’t go over well with Wiener, who told the Chronicle he had been fighting against “NIMBYs who don’t want to see more housing built.”
“Is that divisive? I don’t think that’s divisive,” Wiener said. “People can’t afford to live here. The middle class is being pushed out. … We’re trying to build new homes, and no one has done more than I have to build support for building new homes.”
He said he has a “forward-looking vision for San Francisco and for the country.” In contrast, Chan is “firmly living in the past” by “fighting to preserve San Francisco’s broken approach to housing,” Wiener said.
Chan pushed back in her interview with the Chronicle, saying she has consistently advocated for the best interests of the people she represents.
“I understand my job is to listen to our constituents and to find solutions that actually work, instead of calling them names like NIMBYs, and just turning his back away from constituents,” Chan said. “That is not how you represent people.”
Even though Wiener held a commanding lead in the primary, Chan noted that about 60% of voters picked another candidate, which she said “gives us a wide opening … that we are going to cultivate.”
The election will make history no matter the outcome. Wiener would be the first openly gay person to represent San Francisco in the House; Chan would be the first Asian American to do so.
For whoever comes up short, the election will mark another first. Both Wiener and Chan have won elected office every time they’ve sought it. That will change for one of them in five months.
Deputy data editor Aseem Shukla contributed to this report.