Let Everyone Else Have Miami: Garry Tan Will Take San Francisco

It’s often said that politics in San Francisco is like a knife fight in a phone booth: up close, slashing and surprisingly vicious. But there’s a reason for the hand-to-hand combat. The small city—with a mere 875,000 residents, fewer than in Columbus, Ohio—is massively important to Democrats nationally, having produced the current vice president of the U.S., the speaker of the House, the party’s second most senior Senator, and the governor of California.

But recently, that phone booth metaphor has pointed to another reality: While the political knife fight has raged on, the phone service in San Francisco has stopped working. You can’t get a dial tone. The switchboard operators are out to lunch. And the phone booth smells like pee.

Venture capitalist Garry Tan says he’s here to make the system work again. And if he has to knife a few opponents in the process—like District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who faces San Francisco voters in a recall election on June 7—that’s the price he is willing to pay. Right now, he has a lot of allies and a lot of momentum. In total, the campaign to oust Boudin has raised at least $6 million, a twofold advantage over the anti-recall effort.