San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston on Sunday conceded to challenger Bilal Mahmood in the race to keep his District 5 seat in last week’s election.
According to the latest results released by the San Francisco Department of Elections on Sunday afternoon, Preston won more first choice votes but ended up trailing after the city’s ranked choice voting system eliminated other candidates in the race and left Mahmood with 13,083 ranked choice votes compared to 11,744 for Preston.
Although there are still votes left to count, Preston, who was first elected in 2019 and touted himself as being the first Democratic Socialist elected to the city’s Board of Supervisors in more than 40 years, conceded Sunday evening.
“We received the most first-place votes of any candidate, and I’m proud of my record, especially on tenants rights and affordable housing. I will continue that work to make housing in our city a human right for all,” Preston said in a social media post. “We will continue fighting for every working person, struggling neighbor, and everyone relegated to the sidelines in our city, whether we do that work from inside or outside City Hall.”
Mahmood is a former policy analyst in the Obama Administration who went on to found and work for several nonprofit philanthropic organizations. He was endorsed by Mayor London Breed and state Sen. Scott Wiener, among others.
He pledged to speed up the permitting process for affordable housing by using technology to process permits faster, cut fees and reduce the number of permits needed to build housing, and coordinate city departments to both target fentanyl dealers and create strategies to provide shelter for homeless residents, according to his campaign website.
The political action committee Coalition to Grow San Francisco, known as GrowSF, which opposed multiple incumbents in this election cycle, on Sunday celebrated the effort to “Dump Dean.”
“Regular people just want the basics to work,” said Sachin Agarwal, director and co-founder of GrowSF. “That’s what Dump Dean was all about: kicking out an incumbent who ignored his constituents and made excuses instead of getting the job done, and replacing him with a forward-looking, effective leader like Bilal.”
District 5 includes the Tenderloin, Haight-Ashbury, Western Addition, Fillmore District and Civic Center neighborhoods, among others.
