Daniel Lurie, a philanthropist from a prominent Jewish family and an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, was leading the mayor’s race in San Francisco by 12 points on Wednesday morning.
Lurie led incumbent Mayor London Breed, 56% to 44%, after 14 rounds of ranked-choice voting, according to the S.F. Department of Elections. All other candidates were eliminated after 13 rounds, including Aaron Peskin, who is also Jewish and serves as president of the S.F. Board of Supervisors.
Although more than 150,000 ballots must still be counted, Lurie’s campaign saw itself in a strong position and released a statement, thanking supporters and looking ahead to a new administration.
“You poured your whole selves into this campaign. Now, I am asking you to pour that same passion and energy into turning our city around,” Lurie said in the statement.
Breed has not conceded, though. “I want to be very clear: This is not over until the last vote is counted,” she told supporters late Tuesday, according to Mission Local.
Lurie came into the race with no political experience, knowing that most of the city’s mayors — including Breed, Ed Lee, Gavin Newsom, Willie Brown and Dianne Feinstein — have come in with prior election wins.
He is founder of an anti-poverty nonprofit Tipping Point Community, where he served as CEO for 14 years. He also has longstanding ties to the Bay Area Jewish community and prominent family members. His parents, who divorced when Daniel was a child, are Rabbi Brian Lurie and Miriam “Mimi” Lurie Haas.
Lurie’s mother subsequently married Peter Haas, a great-grandnephew of Levi Strauss. Mimi Haas, a billionaire and one of the largest shareholders of Levi Strauss & Co., donated generously to her son’s campaign — to the tune of $1 million, according to the SF Standard.
The Haas family has donated massive sums to institutions across the Bay Area over decades. Mimi Haas is also president of the Mimi and Peter Haas Fund, a grant-making organization focused on early childhood education.
Rabbi Brian Lurie was named assistant rabbi at Congregation Emanu-El, San Francisco’s largest synagogue, in 1969. After then working for the United Jewish Appeal in New York, he returned to San Francisco and worked as executive director of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation from 1974 to 1991. He also served as president of the New Israel Fund, a progressive organization that advocates for democracy and civil rights in Israel, including Palestinian rights.
As election results began to solidify on Wednesday morning, Brian Lurie told J. that his son “has a very good chance” of becoming the next mayor.
“If so, he will do a first-rate job, and I am very proud of him for running a hard and challenging campaign,” Lurie said.
He added that many people had called to say that his son’s results are a “silver lining” in otherwise dismaying election news nationally.
“I smile and nod my head,” Brian Lurie said, “but I cannot find the joy in the national election process I was hoping for.”
Daniel Lurie has a master’s degree in public policy from UC Berkeley. Tipping Point Community, the organization he founded in 2005, has doled out more than $440 million since its launch, according to the organization’s website.
In the fiscal year 2023, it gave more than $24 million to nonprofits supporting housing, employment and early childhood education, according to publicly available tax documents.
Lurie filed paperwork to run for mayor in fall 2023. He challenged Breed on issues such as homelessness, the drug crisis and a local economy that has struggled since the pandemic. He ran on a platform of improving public safety and revitalizing the city’s sluggishly recovering downtown. His campaign got a boost via an endorsement from the San Francisco Chronicle.
In his statement to supporters, Lurie thanked his wife, Becca, and their two children.
“The campaign is over, but the work continues,” he said.