Someone who dislikes East/Southeast Asians, or at least is indifferent to the interests of the lower- and middle-class ones in SF.
(SF Chronicle piece from Jan 2022)
On a national scale, San Francisco voters appear almost uniformly liberal, largely voting for candidates and legislation that lean progressive. 85% of San Franciscans voted for President Joe Biden in 2020, the third highest of any county with over 750,000 people. But when it comes to issues on the local level, key ideological differences do emerge along racial and ethnic lines.
The Chronicle collected data on demographics and the political ideology of voters in San Francisco’s electoral precincts — geographic areas used for elections of about 1,000 to 2,000 people — to better understand the city’s divides. To measure political ideology, we used a metric called the Progressive Voter Index (PVI), which was originally created by San Francisco State University professor emeritus Richard DeLeon in 1999, and attempts to measures the ideology of voters in each precinct based on how residents voted on recent ballot measures.
We then identified the precincts where at least 50% of residents identify as one of the four major race and ethnicity groups in the city — Hispanic (16% of the S.F. population), non-Hispanic white (39%), non-Hispanic Asian (34%) and non-Hispanic Black (5%). The demographic data for precincts came from the 2010 Decennial Census, and not the more recent 2020 Census because of incompatibilities between precincts and the latest census-designated geographies.
We found that majority-Asian and majority-Black precincts tend to have lower PVI scores — the medians are 32 and 33, respectively — while majority-Hispanic precincts have much higher scores, with a median of 86. Precincts with majority-white residents have a median PVI of 66, but span a wide range of scores — from a minimum of 11 to the highest possible score of 100.
Many of the majority-Asian precincts in the Sunset, Visitacion Valley, Excelsior and Portola neighborhoods have some of lowest PVI scores. But not all majority-Asian precincts score low on PVI. Some, particularly those in Chinatown, have higher scores, though all are below 70. According to Lee, Asians in Chinatown tend to be lower-income renters, which leads them to vote more progressively, while Asians in other neighborhoods tend to be middle or upper-income families who own homes, making them more likely to be moderate voters.
I'm surprised how overwhelmingly Chinese Asians who live in SF proper are. I knew it was mostly Chinese with some Filipinos and a smattering of other Asian groups, but the ratio of ethnic Chinese to Filipinos is higher than my friends who used to live there led me to believe.
Only seven precincts in the city have a majority of residents who identify as Black. All seven precincts are located in the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood and have relatively low PVI scores, implying less progressive voting behavior. According to University of San Francisco professor James Taylor, Blacks are often seen as moderates in San Francisco politics, where “progressivism” is defined in relation to the viewpoints of the city’s mainly affluent, white progressives.
The city’s majority-white precincts have the largest variation in PVI scores across the four precinct types analyzed. Those in the Forest Hill, St. Francis Wood and Marina neighborhoods tend to have the lowest scores, while those in Haight-Ashbury, the Mission and Bernal Heights have much higher scores.
These high-scoring precincts, though majority white, are located in neighborhoods with sizable non-white populations, particularly Hispanic communities. For instance, in the Mission and Bernal Heights, 35% and 26% of residents identify as Hispanic, respectively — higher than the city’s overall share of 16%. The data suggests that white residents in areas like these are more progressive than those living in neighborhoods with few people of color.
All 17 of the city’s majority-Hispanic precincts analyzed are located in the Mission and have relatively high PVI scores, with scores ranging from 71 to 94. According to Garcia-Castanon, this is in-line with trends in Latino political opinions and behavior: Latinos are generally more environmentally progressive, fiscally progressive, and occasionally, socially progressive.
