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   From: noreply@pugleaf.net.invalid   
      
   SAN FRANCISCO — If Zohran Mamdani represents the rise of progressive   
   politics in America, San Francisco is fast becoming the deflating counterpoint   
   for the left.   
      
   It isn’t just that liberal lion Nancy Pelosi is on her way out or that   
   moderate Democrats, backed by wealthy tech investors, have trounced the left   
   in election after election over the last five years. It’s that San Francisco   
   progressives who have    
   been lost in a fog here — paying the price for voters’ frustrations over   
   street conditions, homelessness and a drug addiction epidemic — have seen   
   liberals in another big city suddenly supplant them.   
      
   At a series of meetings organized by socialists and other progressive groups   
   here in recent months, the contrast with New York hung over the gatherings,   
   stirring a sense of envy and anger. Many in San Francisco said it feels as if   
   their city now belongs    
   to the billionaire class.   
      
   “The takeover is classic: San Francisco is the jewel in the crown of the   
   crypto and tech industries,” vented Aaron Peskin, a progressive former   
   president of the Board of Supervisors who lost last year’s mayoral election.   
   “They want this to be the    
   symbolic elite tech capital of the world.”   
      
   It’s a bicoastal split screen that speaks to a realignment of America’s   
   progressive power base. In New York, Mamdani, a democratic socialist who took   
   office on Thursday, was swept into power on promises of free buses, childcare   
   and widespread rent    
   freezes. In San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie, an heir to the billion-dollar   
   Levi Strauss fortune, has focused on austerity measures, beefing up policing,   
   reviving a hollowed-out downtown core and supporting the booming   
   artificial-intelligence industry.   
      
   San Francisco, once an incubator to a host of modern progressive ideas from   
   the LGBTQ+-rights movement to ethnic studies in classrooms and protections for   
   undocumented immigrants, has changed. Even progressives acknowledge it isn’t   
   the liberal    
   trendsetter of yesteryear.   
      
   That shift has already upended the national political narrative around the   
   city. For decades a lefty caricature and punching bag for conservatives,   
   pundits and politicians on the right are now racing to make Mamdani the face   
   of the Democratic Party in    
   the midterms. Meanwhile, moderates in San Francisco, while celebrating their   
   victories, hold their city up as a warning sign for what they cast as the   
   excesses of the left.   
      
   “The message is you can take things too far,” said Nancy Tung, chair of   
   the San Francisco Democratic Party and a moderate who’s helped lead the   
   city’s centrist shift. She added, “Don’t expect that voters won’t   
   notice forever.”   
      
   https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/02/as-mamdani-rises-in-new   
   york-san-francisco-turns-away-from-the-left-00701711   
      
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