Her name wasn’t on the ballot, but the 2022 Oakland elections were a disaster for outgoing Mayor Libby Schaaf, the culmination of her eight-year fall from grace.
As she departs because of term limits, Schaaf leaves the mayor’s office and seven of the eight City Council seats in the hands of her political opponents, a hard-left, union-driven coalition that swept the table in last month’s balloting.
Polling showed Schaaf was widely popular in 2015, the year after her first mayoral election. She easily won reelection in a 10-candidate field in 2018. But by the time this year’s election season began, the Libby brand had plummeted so far that her endorsement was considered by some to be a liability.
To be sure, Schaaf shouldered more blame than she deserved for the city’s homelessness, rising gun violence and troubled municipal finances. In Oakland’s weak-mayor governance structure, the mayor can propose a financial and policy agenda, but the ultimate power rests with the eight-member City Council. The mayor has only a seldom-used tie-breaking vote.
So the council, which shifted from roughly evenly split to labor dominance during Schaaf’s tenure, has had the final word on the city’s budget and the votes to stymie the mayor’s police-staffing goals. The mayor, on the other hand, never seemed to find her political message, vacillating between her progressive goals and claims of fiscal responsibility — and unable to articulate a vision that captured both.
Moreover, she never capitalized on her early popularity and the bully pulpit of the mayoral post to build an effective fund-raising and grassroots political operation that could be mobilized in support of political allies. It was her most-consequential failing.
Naïve thinking
Oakland politics do not divide between Democrats and Republicans, or liberals and conservatives. Rather they split between progressives. There are those on the left who also respect the financial realities, such as Schaaf and Loren Taylor, the self-described “pragmatic progressive” councilmember who ran unsuccessfully to succeed her. And there are those on the far-left, such as incoming mayor Sheng Thao, who are politically underwritten by key city labor unions.
In any big city, the key to successful policymaking begins with effective politicking. The mayor cannot press an agenda without the votes on the council. But, as Schaaf stood by passively, Oakland labor leaders over the past eight years built a potent campaign organization that financially and organizationally dominated the 2022 election.
When elected in 2014, Schaaf benefitted from following Jean Quan and Ron Dellums, two largely ineffectual mayors, said veteran political consultant Larry Tramutola. “But she didn’t galvanize that into a political force.”
That wasn’t her goal, Schaaf said. “I hope people appreciated that I was focusing my attention on addressing Oakland’s challenges, not building a political pipeline.” She and her followers are now paying a huge price for that naïve thinking.
Her political allies on the council when she became mayor were all eventually ousted or opted not to seek reelection. And the new candidates Schaaf backed often entered the races late, lacked sufficient funding and were unprepared, inexperienced and/or poorly vetted.
She is right that the contentious environment on the council discouraged prospective candidates. “I was surprised by the lack of willingness or interest to run for office in Oakland,” Schaaf said. But the reticence was reinforced by Schaaf’s lack of a political organization to support campaigns.
Failure to unify
When it came to the mayoral race this year, Schaaf’s popularity was so tarnished that business leaders who shared her concern about a labor takeover of city government failed to unify behind a candidate, and some dismissed Taylor’s candidacy because he was endorsed by Schaaf.
In the business community, “there were a lot of people concerned about Loren initially based upon his support from Libby,” said Greg McConnell, who spearheaded an independent expenditure effort for former Councilmember Ignacio De La Fuente. “Libby had disappointed so many people.”
De La Fuente finished a distant third. His candidacy was always a longshot, especially given his troubled two-decade tenure on the council, but it sucked up more than $500,000 of outside spending that could have helped Taylor counter more than $700,000 of independent expenditures for Thao. “The amount of money that was spent on Ignacio was a waste,” said Tramutola. “I did not feel he had a path to victory, no matter how much money was spent.”
De La Fuente’s entry into the campaign, the division in the business community and the lack of a potent Schaaf-backed political operation cost Taylor the race. When the ranked-choice balloting was completed, he lost to Thao, a union-stalwart, by just 677 votes.
Political vacuum
As Schaaf exits on Jan. 2, she leaves behind a crime-ridden city with inadequate police staffing, unfunded retirement liabilities that have grown from about $2.4 billion a decade ago to $3 billion in 2021, and general fund budget shortfalls projected to reach more than $100 million in each of the next two fiscal years. The state auditor’s financial-risk review of California cities ranked Oakland the 11th-worst for 2020-21.
Despite new property taxes championed by Schaaf and rapidly rising revenues, the city remains plagued with the same key problems present when Schaaf was elected mayor eight years ago. Meanwhile, homelessness is worse. And the pandemic has undercut the growth in business migration to Oakland that was so promising just a few years ago.
Since 2015, the first year of Schaaf’s mayoral tenure, Oakland residents have become increasingly pessimistic about the city. That first year, 24% of likely voters said the city was on the wrong track and 61% said it was headed in the right direction, according to the Chamber of Commerce annual poll. In October of this year, those numbers had flipped to 64% wrong track and 18% right direction.
In 2015, 68% of likely voters had a favorable impression of Schaaf, according to the chamber poll. By October, that had plummeted to 35%. The City Council today is similarly unpopular.
Come January, Thao, as the new mayor, and her labor allies on the council will no longer be able to use Schaaf as their political foil to hide their own failures to address the city’s problems. They will now be fully in charge and accountable.
Meanwhile, with Schaaf gone, more politically moderate residents who once backed her and this year subscribed to Taylor’s pragmatic progressive approach have almost no representation or political organization to fall back on. And the business community must decide whether it wants to unify to be a potent force in the city’s electoral politics or become irrelevant.
Unless the two groups can somehow coalesce, labor leaders will continue to fill the political vacuum.
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