Mayor London Breed and the Limits of Governing while Black and Female in San Francisco (with Chelsea Jones and Lorrie Frasure)

In 2018, London Breed became the first Black female mayor of San Francisco, CA. Given the city’s majority white and Asian populations, sparse Black population of about 5 percent, and storied history of LGBTQ activism, Breed’s victory over an Asian woman and an openly gay white male, creates a lens through which to examine the role that descriptive representation, symbolic empowerment, and deracialization play in determining this candidate’s self-presentation strategy. Using news reports, campaign materials, speeches, and social media posts, as well as some descriptive statistics from a local opinion poll, the authors examine Breed’s ground game.