Matt Haney and David Campos Face Off Today in Special Election for California Assembly Seat

Residents of some of San Francisco’s most popular and troubled neighborhoods are electing a new state Assembly member in a special runoff race Tuesday between two Democrats.

The runoff is being held because neither Matt Haney nor David Campos received more than 50% of the vote in February’s special election. Haney, a current San Francisco supervisor, beat Campos, a former supervisor, by less than a percentage point.

Assembly District 17 covers the eastern half of San Francisco and includes tourist-heavy neighborhoods such as Chinatown, Haight-Ashbury, downtown and the Mission. It also includes the Tenderloin, which in recent months has been the focus of a city-sanctioned effort to reduce homelessness, drug dealing, open-air drug use and fentanyl overdoses.

Both candidates are on the progressive end of the Democratic Party.

Since February, Haney has received the endorsement of third-place candidate Bilal Mahmood, and Campos has received the backing of fourth-place candidate Thea Selby. The mayor has endorsed Haney and, if Haney wins, would pick his replacement on the Board of Supervisors.

Tuesday’s winner will have to run again in the statewide June primary and November general elections to keep the seat for another two-year term, meaning residents of the district could vote on the race up to four separate times this year.

The seat became vacant last year after David Chiu resigned to become San Francisco’s city attorney, a job that became available when Mayor London Breed appointed then-City Attorney Dennis Herrera to head the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission after Harlan Kelly resigned in 2020.

Kelly left after federal prosecutors charged him with fraud for allegedly accepting bribes from a permit expediter in exchange for insider information. Kelly is fighting the charge and is just one of several San Francisco city officials and contractors ensnared in a public corruption scandal involving former Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru.