Sunni Khalid: “What about this marriage of convenience being Ahsha Safa and Mark Farrell?
Joe Eskenazi: “Alliances like this make sense in a rank choice race and you will see it on the district supervisor level as well where alliances form and you want to get people's number two votes and you're incentivized not to be, you know, a petulant jerk because then people won't put you as a number two vote and this alters how people behave.I would certainly see the benefit for Mark Farrell. He would like to get Ahsha Safai number twos, which many of them you would think ideologically would instead go to someone like Aaron Peskin. And in fact, because of this allegiance, some unions have rescinded their endorsement of Ahsha Safai because they would rather, you know, it'd be Ahsha, who is a labor stalwart, or Aaron Peskin, who's also a long history of cooperation with labor. I am less certain what Ahsha Safai gets out of this deal. I don't know what's going to happen. If the polls are accurate, he's not going to get anybody's number two votes, because he will be out of the race before that becomes a factor. So, unless he truly believes that Mark Farrell would make a better mayor than either Aaron Peskin, or London Breed or Daniel Lurie, then it doesn't make sense to me.”
Sunni Khalid: “Do you think that it moves the needle much at all?
Joe Eskenazi: “I mean, as far as polling is concerned, we only have less than three weeks before the election. I don't know that it moves it much, but I don't know that this is a play designed to do much. This is designed to pick up, you know, a small number of votes could make the difference in a close race. The margins could be very small so every step could be pivotal or not, again, you know, if Mark Farrell is there in the top two, and it's a close race, then you could look back on this and say that mattered. But, if he's not, then it didn't, the way that ranked choice voting works is that it gets to the top two. You aren't the beneficiary of all of these games if you're not in the top two, because you have to finish in the top two to get everyone else's votes. And then you have what's known as an instant runoff, right? This is a synonym for ranked choice voting is instant runoff voting. All of the gamesmanship doesn't matter if you don't finish high enough to benefit from it. Let's put it that way. And Ahsha, it would be a tremendous surprise and point to fundamental errors in the polling systems of everybody's polling system. If he was in the top two, Mark Farrell could very conceivably be in the top two. So, all of the various stratagems to try and get votes from other candidates that fall by the wayside could factor into that.”
