OAKLAND — The chips were down for Mayor Sheng Thao once before, when the upstart progressive was in a tight battle with a fellow first-term City Council member to become Oakland’s next mayor.
With crime still not leveling off after a grueling pandemic, the more politically moderate candidate, Loren Taylor, had been embraced by Oakland’s older Black community and earned the endorsement of incumbent Mayor Libby Schaaf.
But Thao had something far more powerful: the backing of labor unions to the tune of $700,000 in outside spending — some of which paid for late-game flyers mailed to voters’ homes that proclaimed Thao as the candidate who represented “less talk and more action.”
Just two years later, Thao needs another boost ahead of a tricky election, only this time she is running against herself — or at least the public perception of her failings.
Voters will decide Nov. 5 if Thao deserves to complete the second half of her term, with Taylor looming in the wings as a possible replacement if the mayor is indeed removed from office.
There’s another clear difference this go-around: The unions are not offering Thao anywhere near the same amount of support.
SEIU 1021, which represents over 2,000 workers in Oakland, this week gave $50,000 to an outside committee built to fend off the recall, while the city firefighters’ union offered $2,500 and local health care workers threw in $1,000.
That’s a small fraction of what likely helped Thao eke out a victory in 2022. And it leaves the mayor with few resources to rival an independent pro-recall committee that received $480,000 from Piedmont hedge-fund executive Philip Dreyfuss.
The politics around the recall are proving so toxic that several labor leaders and political candidates in Oakland declined interviews by this news organization, with a couple admitting they feared blowback from Thao’s enemies if they openly supported her.
Political observers speculate the lack of outside spending may be due to poll results published in August in which 69% of likely Oakland voters described Thao as unfavorable, compared to 17% who had a favorable view of her.
The poll, conducted by David Binder Research, which works closely with Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, has a +/-4.9% margin of error.
“The mayor is clearly still getting strong support from unions — it’s irrefutable,” William Fitzgerald, the mayor’s anti-recall campaign spokesperson, said in an interview.
Thao’s time in office has been fraught with both unforeseen challenges and perhaps avoidable struggles: her firing of Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong, a feud with the NAACP, the shuttering of local businesses attributed to crime, the A’s departure, a historic budget deficit, a still-unexplained FBI raid on her home and a messy sale of the city’s Coliseum share.
The last of those, the Coliseum sale, is still in flux. The mayor intends to use revenue from the $125 million deal to help keep city employees paid and avoid cuts to the city’s police and fire departments. Thao has been roundly criticized by financial experts for using the sale of a long-term asset to cover short-term expenses.
The bulk of that revenue, $110 million, may not begin arriving until next May, likely forcing the city to plow through reserve funds. Oakland’s leaders, whoever is in charge, will attempt to close a structural deficit that still needs to be addressed by next summer.
“Given this economic situation, any (candidate) who wants to replace the mayor may have questionable judgment,” said Dan Lindheim, a former city administrator who now teaches public policy at UC Berkeley, alluding to the difficult financial decisions that lie ahead.
The unions stand to suffer from the city’s ongoing financial turmoil, especially under new leadership. When Oakland burned through its reserve funds during the Great Recession, Lindheim approached the labor unions to reopen their contracts and agree to more favorable terms for the city.
Some of Thao’s critics suggest the mayor should do the same — especially as reducing fire stations appears to be back on the table as a means of resolving the ongoing deficit, according to a person with direct knowledge of the city’s finances who declined to be named out of fear for job security.
Until now, though, Thao has avoided talk of renegotiating a cost-of-living adjustment that the City Council approved at the height of pandemic-related inflation, when Thao was a member.
It is the kind of loyalty that made her a close ally of labor in the 2022 mayoral race.
Rank-and-file union members campaigned for her aggressively, “starting early and until the last minute,” Zac Unger, who heads the firefighters’ union, said in an interview after this news organization became the first to declare Thao the election’s winner.
Unger, now a City Council candidate, declined to be interviewed this week about Thao’s current labor backing, saying, “We’re not going to be out in front on this story.”
Days earlier, Piedmont landlord Chris Moore had formed an outside political committee specifically to oppose Unger and boost both his primary District 1 opponent, Len Raphael, as well as a candidate in the District 7 race, Ken Houston.
The recall movement against Thao has a lot of internal overlap. Until recently, Raphael served as treasurer of the outside committee that raised $480,000 from Dreyfuss to oppose the mayor, and separately he claimed the recall campaign’s former head, Brenda Harbin-Forte, was his boss.
Harbin-Forte stepped down to run for city attorney and insists in interviews that her old role as a political activist won’t bias her against the mayor. The city’s Public Ethics Commission dropped a lawsuit in the summer that would’ve forced the recall campaign to turn over its fundraising records.
Seneca Scott, a particularly hostile enemy of Thao’s who ran against her in the last election and now works with the recall campaign, said the group won’t send out opposition mailers before the recall election — as the unions did two years ago to support her.
“There’s no need,” he boasted in an interview. “She’s done.”
Shomik Mukherjee is a reporter covering Oakland. Call or text him at 510-905-5495 or email him at shomik@bayareanewsgroup.com.
