Scott Wiener being challenged from left, as Jackie Fielder tries to unseat him in SF

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Scott-Wiener-being-challenged-from-left-as-15475439.php

John Wildermuth Aug. 11, 2020 Updated: Aug. 11, 2020 5:18 p.m.

San Francisco state Sen. Scott Wiener stands with supporters of a housing bill he introduced in the Legislature, during a rally outside Oakland City Hall on Jan. 7, 2020.

Jackie Fielder, a 25-year-old activist and college lecturer, is mounting a surprisingly strong challenge to state Sen. Scott Wiener in an only-in-San Francisco contest that features a progressive incumbent and an even more progressive opponent.

Fielder, a democratic socialist who describes herself as a “Native American … Mexicana, and queer educator and organizer,” is making her first run for office against Wiener, a 50-year-old gay attorney who was elected to the state Senate in 2016 after serving two terms on the Board of Supervisors.

Fielder collected a third of the vote in the March primary to set up the all-Democratic general election in the 11th State Senate District. The Mission District resident is attacking Wiener from the left, arguing that he has not been progressive enough to properly represent the district, which includes all of San Francisco along with Daly City, Broadmoor, Colma and part of South San Francisco.

“We need someone in Sacramento we can count on 100% of the time, not 50%,” Fielder said in an interview. “Now is the time for bolder changes.”

Wiener, a Castro district resident, points to the 36 bills he’s written that have become law as evidence of the impact he’s had in Sacramento. They include measures eliminating some prison sentence enhancements, providing net neutrality protections, protecting LGBT seniors and a wide range of efforts to make housing more affordable.

“I’m anything but timid when it comes to legislating,” he said in an interview. “I’m one of the most progressive members of the Legislature.”

But being the most progressive Democrat in Sacramento isn’t the same as being the progressive leader in San Francisco, as even Wiener acknowledges.

“Someone’s always going to say I’m not progressive enough,” he said. “It wouldn’t be a San Francisco election if someone wasn’t saying a candidate wasn’t left enough.”

There’s a huge political gap between San Francisco and most of California. With Republicans making up fewer than 7% of the registered voters in the city and the Senate district, the political battles are typically intramural affairs featuring progressive Democrats and left-leaning independent voters.

“Narrow issues divide candidates in San Francisco, and that’s not always true in Sacramento,” said Corey Cook, vice provost at St. Mary’s College and a former political science professor at the University of San Francisco. “In San Francisco the argument is about how strong tenant protections should be, while in Sacramento the question is whether there should be any protections at all.”

Issues that are settled questions in San Francisco — LGBT rights, sanctuary city rules, rent control and others — are battlegrounds in the Legislature.

“Someone like Scott Wiener can be a leader in the progressive cause in Sacramento, but seen as not doing enough” by San Francisco standards, Cook said.

Fielder has slammed Wiener for defending police officers accused of misconduct when he worked in San Francisco’s City Attorney’s Office, for supporting increases in the size of the police force as a supervisor, and for “trying to balance the budget on the backs of students, teachers and public employees” by supporting coronavirus-based cuts in the current state budget.

She also argued that Wiener’s housing efforts have been aimed more at helping campaign donors in the real estate industry than the people who need housing, focusing on market-based solutions “that benefit developers and speculators” and don’t close the housing gap.

Fielder wants to see a $100 billion California Housing Emergency Fund, raised by tax increases on the state’s wealthiest taxpayers and corporations. The money would be used to buy at least 200,000 existing units and to build 100,000 new homes, owned either publicly or by nonprofit groups.

Fielder, a lecturer in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University, would also “incentivize or require” the state’s wealthiest neighborhoods to create more housing at all levels of affordability.

“The (state) budget needs to be bigger” to deal with the state’s problems, Fielder said, including financing single-payer health care, free child care, free public education from preschool through college, free public transportation and a $20-an-hour minimum wage.

This can be done, Fielder said, by building alliances that Wiener hasn’t been able to create.

“The majority of Californians support fundamental change in the state’s economy,” she said. “I’ve been able to build coalitions,” working on projects as varied as the Native American fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline and the successful opposition campaign against a 2018 San Francisco ballot measure that would have given police more latitude in using Taser stun guns.

Wiener argues that it’s much easier to talk about fundamental change than it is to make those changes happen.

“If you never compromise, it feels good and makes a good sound bite on Twitter, but you won’t accomplish anything,” he said. “I’m not someone who goes to Sacramento to yell and tweet. I’ve turned these concerns into laws.”

A legislator needs to work with a variety of groups and people to get bills passed, Wiener added, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t disputes.

While he has worked with developers and land owners, he said, “I’ve stood up to the real estate industry when I disagreed with them.”

Wiener recently lost a major endorsement because of a dispute with a labor group. The California Labor Federation backed him in the primary but declined to renew that endorsement for November, citing a dispute over what it argued were inadequate protections for unions in his SB899, which would have allowed church groups to build affordable housing on their land.

The measure, which the state Senate passed unanimously in June, stalled in the Assembly after building trade groups raised concerns that the bill would not require union labor. While the state labor group did not endorse Fielder, local unions can now support her campaign.

Wiener, who noted that he has a 100% voting record during his time in Sacramento with the California Labor Federation, said labor groups originally signed off on the bill and then changed their position.

The action “is disappointing and shortsighted,” he said.

That kind of back-and-forth dispute with major players in California politics is something Fielder, who filed to run for state Senate about 18 months after moving to San Francisco, doesn’t have the experience to deal with, Wiener said.

“There’s no way you can know a community as complex and diverse as San Francisco in only 18 months,” he said. “She doesn’t know the community, she only knows a small subset of it, the democratic socialists.”

Wiener, who has lived in San Francisco for 23 years, argued that his years of working with all kinds of groups in and around San Francisco make a difference.

“We need leadership who understands the community, who has worked for the community,” he said. “I fight for our progressive values, not only fight, but I know how to deliver.”

Fielder who grew up in Southern California and moved to the Bay Area to attend Stanford University, says San Francisco is the only city she has called home since school and that the 200 or more campaign telephone calls she makes each day have shown her a different San Francisco from the one Wiener represents.

“I’m talking to people who have never been contacted by a campaign,” she said. “I’m reaching people who have been left behind in the district.”

It’s the fundamental job of a political system to be responsible for those people, Fielder added.

She said she’s running “because the Democratic supermajority (in the Legislature) can’t find the backbone to take on the wealthiest taxpayers and corporations.”

State Senate endorsements

Jackie Fielder:

Supporters include progressive groups like Our Revolution, the California Progressive Alliance and the Democratic Socialists of America. She also has the backing of the California Teachers Association, United Educators of San Francisco, the San Francisco Tenants Union, San Francisco supervisors Gordon Mar, Dean Preston, Hillary Ronen and Matt Haney, along with Mark Sanchez, president of the San Francisco Board of Education, and former Assemblyman Tom Ammiano.

Scott Wiener:

Wiener’s backers include most mainstream Democratic leaders, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and Rep. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo. He has been endorsed by San Francisco Assemblymen David Chiu and Phil Ting, along with San Francisco Mayor London Breed, San Francisco Supervisors Norman Yee, Rafael Mandelman, Ahsha Safai, Catherine Stefani and Shamann Walton. Other endorsements include all five San Mateo County supervisors, the California Democratic Party, the California League of Conservation Voters, Equality California and a number of labor unions.

John Wildermuth is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jwildermuth@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jfwildermuth