San Francisco Mayor Breed gets a major challenger. Inside Daniel Lurie’s plan to beat her.

SAN FRANCISCO — Daniel Lurie, a longtime nonprofit executive and an heir to the Levi Strauss & Co. fortune, formally announced his challenge to Mayor London Breed on Tuesday, pledging to dramatically bolster police presence in a city roiled by homeless encampments, drug overdoses and a downtown hollowed out by the pandemic-induced tech exodus.

“We are in a crisis, and we are hurting right now,” Lurie, a Democrat, said in an interview ahead of his announcement Tuesday. “We need people to work together, and the only way you can take on an entrenched system with a leader that has allowed these problems to fester is with new leadership. It's got to be leadership from the outside.”

With that cannon blast at San Francisco’s clubby Democratic establishment, Lurie becomes the latest fed-up centrist to challenge the prevailing progressive politics in one of America’s most important cities. Candidates campaigning against crime and quality-of-life complaints have rattled Democratic politics in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and other cities, though with decidedly mixed results at the ballot box.

Lurie’s candidacy is a daring wager that San Francisco voters — motivated by frustration with the slow pace of progress and eager for a new direction — will reverse a tradition of elevating City Hall operators to the mayorship. His distinctive profile is that of a city government outsider with an insider’s pedigree and connections.

He joins a growing field in the 2024 mayoral race that’s targeting the incumbent Breed, a Democrat who took office late in 2017 after spending four years on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, including two years as its president. The city’s ranked-choice voting system is notoriously hard to game out, and more candidates are likely to enter a contest that already includes Supervisor Ahsha Safaí. But Lurie’s campaign is banking on the idea that while Breed maintains a base of loyalists, few voters who want a clean break from the status quo will select the mayor as their second or third choice in the election.

Given the overwhelmingly liberal San Francisco voter base, the ultimate winner of the race will almost certainly be a Democrat — though debates within the party are often about shades of deep blue and focus on “moderates” versus progressives. Both Breed and Lurie fit more neatly in the moderate camp, making questions of experience and their records potentially larger focal points than pure ideology.

Under the Breed administration, the city has struggled with the proliferation of homelessness, rising drug deaths, smash-and-grab car break-ins and a commercial retail slump that has decimated business downtown. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta, at Breed’s behest, have for months sent additional state law enforcement and prosecutors to the Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods to contain the damage.

Breed in recent weeks has been fighting back. She blasted a judge’s injunction barring the city from sweeping homeless encampments. Breed also has squared off with the city’s homeless coalition and accused its members of holding the city “hostage for decades.” Thousands of people live on San Francisco’s streets, a problem that goes back decades but has become more visible and visceral with the rise of deadly fentanyl use, a global pandemic that’s closed office space especially in the tech sector, rising housing costs, and a shortage of shelter beds.

Lurie said his campaign would focus on a fresh face and accountability. He held up public safety as his top priority. He promised to hire more police officers and pledged to create enough shelter beds to allow city officials to clear the streets of encampments. He called for a change in how the city investigates drug dealing so that judges are able to hold offenders in custody rather than letting them out to immediately reoffend.

Asked whether he supported so-called safe-injection sites — a controversial policy that has divided progressives and which Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed at the state level last year, Lurie said the city must first deal with shutting down open-air drug markets before having that debate.

Lurie, the founder of Tipping Point Community, said his organization provided more than 6,000 people with services that helped them transition out of homelessness or prevented them from losing housing. Ticking through the group’s accomplishments, Lurie dropped a long list of bold-faced names — from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to venture capitalist Ron Conway — with whom he worked on North Bay fire recovery. Lurie also enjoys relationships with Jason Elliott, a top adviser to the governor, and Sean Elsbernd, a former supervisor and Breed’s chief of staff, with whom he’s worked closely in their city roles.

“We have a demonstrated track record of results on issues where City Hall is falling down,” Lurie said. “I have the skills and experience bringing people together in a way that I've demonstrated across many different projects and organizations.”

He wants to change the culture from the inside, he said, creating more accountability in city government and fostering coordination between departments that at times aren’t even talking to each other. In perhaps his most pointed critique of Breed, Lurie said he wants to end the finger pointing and backstabbing in a city famous for internecine warfare and eating its own.

He contended there’s been a lack of progress from the mayor since the court’s initial ruling nine months ago preventing the homeless encampment sweeps. While he called the injunction “ridiculous” and agreed with Breed that it should be overturned, Lurie added “we’ve had nine months of blaming someone else instead of standing up enough shelter beds.”

Maggie Muir, a top strategist to Breed, defended Breed's record as mayor and tried to turn the tables on Lurie, dismissing him as “a beginner.”

“Mayor Breed is working every day to make San Francisco safer and cleaner,” she said. “She’s fought through two of the greatest public health threats of our lifetime — the Covid pandemic and the fentanyl crisis — and she’s working tirelessly to get cops on our streets and drug dealers, tents and garbage off of them.”

Muir posed a series of questions to Lurie, including some he answered in POLITICO’s interview.

“The question really is, does Daniel Lurie agree with the mayor on these things or not? Where does he stand on arresting drug abusers who refuse treatment? Where does he stand on removing tents? Where has he been on hiring more police officers? Where was he during the Covid state of emergency?”

“If he does agree with her on these policies, where has he been? And why should we trust a beginner to accomplish these things faster? If he doesn't agree, why would San Franciscans want him in charge?”

Lurie’s campaign pointed to what they view as the mayor’s unparalleled control over city operations — having appointed two supervisors, three Board of Education members, the district attorney and numerous department heads and commissioners. Yet he faulted Breed for not being able to corral support for her side or reach consensus.

“At every turn, it’s been ‘I can't get stuff done because of the Board of Supervisors.’ We've been promised more police officers, but we have 300 less than when she took office,” Lurie said, adding, “We have a person in charge that has been entrenched in this system, and part of City Hall for more than a decade now. And what we hear is it's always someone else's fault. There's a lot of finger-pointing.”

While Breed appears vulnerable, Lurie is far from a sure thing. San Francisco has long favored leaders who come from inside the system, including Willie Brown, the former Assembly speaker, and Newsom, whom Brown appointed to his first commission job.

Several other city mayors rose to power following tragedies, from Joe Alioto after his boss on the campaign, Gene McAteer, died, to Dianne Feinstein after the assassination of George Moscone. Breed herself took over as acting mayor in 2017 following the death of her predecessor, Ed Lee. She ultimately won a special election after another supervisor, Mark Farrell, was a temporary caretaker for the mayor’s office.

The city’s big races also have pivoted off of familiar themes: moderates versus progressives and residential neighborhoods versus downtown. Lurie’s team believes next year will be different: Voters are motivated by wanting to feel safe, they argue, and many also have lost faith in the current crop of leaders and desire a new direction to restore the city’s lost luster.

Lurie’s team is run by a who’s who of national and state operatives: with general consulting and media headed up by Tyler Law and Larry Grisolano, the famed admaker, and polling by David Binder, the state’s top pollster. Lurie’s run is being managed by Trishala Vinnakota, and Max Szabo is communications director.

Lurie, who has two young children and is married to Newsom’s director of protocol Becca Prowda, told POLITICO he would start fundraising Tuesday and estimated he would bring in enough to not only be competitive, but win. Asked if he planned to tap his wealth to donate to his own campaign, Lurie and aides said he doesn’t have to make any decisions around issues like public financing until next year.

“I know that imposing accountability, challenging bureaucracy and shaking up politics as usual is a tall order,” he said. “But this is where I believe that you have to have some courage and you have to be willing to take on those entrenched interests to turn our city around. The opponents that I will face in this field have tried and they have failed.”