In an inexplicable move, San Francisco’s Democratic County Central Committee, which is composed of 32 committee members, did not endorse any of the major and very qualified Asian American candidates for mayor:
[The DCCC] recently endorsed Supervisor John Avalos as its first choice, City Attorney Dennis Herrera as second choice and opted to name nobody as third choice. That meant no love for interim Mayor Ed Lee, state Sen. Leland Yee, Supervisor David Chiu, Public Defender Jeff Adachi or Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting. (Of the 11 serious candidates for mayor, nine are registered Democrats and could score an endorsement. That means more than half who were eligible are Asian.)
I’m kind of shocked that there was no third choice. There must be a lot of political in-fighting going on, with eight of the Asian American DCCC members – including a few candidates like David Chiu and Leland Yee – couldn’t come to any agreement. Given interim Mayor Ed Lee’s current popularity based on polling numbers, I would have thought the DCCC would have endorsed him as at least a third choice candidate.
I’m not saying that the DCCC or San Francisco registered voters should vote for an Asian American candidate just because there is a good number of Asian Americans in San Francisco. I’m just surprised statistically that there were no Asian Americans endorsed given the number of qualified leading candidates.
One interesting fact that I learned was that even though more than a third of San Franciscans are Chinese, but only 18 percent of registered voters are. There has been a drive nationally to get more qualified Asian Americans to register to vote. I’m guessing a lot of those Asian Americans may not even realize that they have to register to vote if they’ve naturalized or may think that automatically gets you on jury duty. As I’ve often said, if you don’t vote, you have no right to complain about your government. In a democracy, you have responsibilities as well as rights.
