By Edward-Isaac Dovere, CNN
San Francisco (CNN) — The last time this city’s voters had someone other than Nancy Pelosi representing them in Congress, there were no self-driving taxis on the streets, no AI ads competing for space around the tie-dye shop in Haight-Ashbury. The youngest San Franciscans who could have voted then are nearing retirement age now.
“I’m not sure what came first, Pelosi or San Francisco,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a close Pelosi ally and a former mayor of the city, told CNN recently.
Now with just weeks to go in the first round of the race to replace Pelosi, an iconic center of liberalism — one that sits almost fully within one congressional district — is trying to figure out what comes next.
As the Democratic Party churns over what makes a progressive and what kind of fighters its base wants, how to tackle affordability, or even whether to use the word “genocide” about Gaza, those fights are coming to a head in the city Pelosi has represented in the US House since 1987.
Candidates and their advisers admit that though they’ve been preparing for this moment for years, they’re still struggling to figure it out.
They’re building outreach programs, explaining to voters that Pelosi isn’t running in the June 2 nonpartisan primary, finding the right balance between attacking President Donald Trump and digging in on parochial issues like the enduring controversy over the Great Highway running along the Pacific Coast, a stretch of which has been closed to cars.
Pelosi had long been quiet about the race but has become more explicit about her potential preference with time running out before June 2. Pelosi has appeared at events for Connie Chan, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and speaking positively about what Chan could do in Congress.
Still, a spokesperson for the former speaker points back to a November statement after she announced her retirement that she did not plan to endorse.
“For her seat to be open is wild for the city,” Mayor Dan Lurie told CNN, sitting in the office in City Hall he won by ousting a fellow Democrat in a 2024 race that became its own referendum on whether traditional Democratic governance had failed the city. “I don’t think we even know quite what to make of it.”
A candidate’s long ambitions
Scott Wiener has been preparing to make something of it for years. Raised in New Jersey, Wiener has lived for nearly 30 years in the Castro, one of the nation’s most prominent gay neighborhoods. He started as a lawyer and then made his way from LGBTQ political activist to the Board of Supervisors (San Francisco’s equivalent of a city council) to representing a state Senate district that overlaps almost entirely with Pelosi’s House district.
Wiener’s years of preparations to follow Pelosi were about as subtle as Chonkers, the oversize sea lion that’s been showing up at Fisherman’s Wharf. That came to annoy Pelosi. Weiner acknowledged that a relationship that started out strong has become “a little bit strained” as he made it clear that he was going to run for her seat this year before her announced retirement, and that he wouldn’t step aside for her daughter Christine, now running for Wiener’s state Senate seat.
“That is what it is,” he said.
Wiener is the kind of local politician constantly popping up at events back and forth between his district and Sacramento. Newsom, who is staying neutral, calls him “a bit of a legend up here in terms of his ability to carry bills.” Onetime rival and now endorser Rafael Mandelman called him a “transit su