Revenge of the Normies: Effort to Revive San Francisco GOP Leads to Leadership Clash

When Jay Donde looks at San Francisco he sees a one-party town that no longer works for middle-class residents. He sees a city where well-off progressives impose their political will on citizens and then shield themselves and their families from the ugly consequences.

He sees a city where property crime is rampant, where businesses are fleeing, where people struggling with addiction and mental illness waste away in sidewalk camps, and where homes are unaffordable for many. In short, he said, he sees a city that increasingly works for only two kinds of people: those who drive Teslas and those who break into Teslas.

“And that’s not okay,” Donde said. “It shouldn’t be okay with anybody.”

Donde, an attorney who describes himself as a “lifelong conservative,” believes that conservative policies championed by thoughtful Republicans can help revive the far-left city. A few years back he co-founded the Briones Society, a conservative group that also engages with independents and civic-oriented moderates who are open to conservative ideas.

Donde and his Briones Society colleagues believe that if Republicans want to be relevant in San Francisco again, the party can’t just cater to the 7 percent or so of San Francisco voters who are registered Republicans. The Briones Society also aims to “cater to voters who might not be ready to call themselves Republicans yet, but who are conservative-leaning,” Donde said.

But Donde said their efforts to do that within the city’s Republican Party framework have been “vehemently rejected” by the party establishment. So, in response, Donde is leading a group of 20 Briones Society candidates seeking election in March to the San Francisco Republican County Central Committee, an effort to win control of the party’s governing body.

The move has led to a schism among San Francisco Republicans, with some current leaders questioning the motives of the Briones candidates and arguing that there is no need to rebrand or rethink their strategy because the party is already growing and headed in the right direction.

“They want the Democrats to dictate who the Republican Party is,” John Dennis, the party chairman said of Donde and his Briones crew. “I’m not going to let that happen.”

In Dennis’s mind, Donde and Briones Society co-founder Bill Jackson aren’t team players, and instead are “super Never-Trumpers” suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. “When I tell you these guys have TDS, I mean, I’m talking about really acute cases,” he said.

Dennis also pointed to Briones candidates with long histories of donating to Democrats as a reason to be suspicious. “What does that tell you about their intentions?” he asked.

Considering that Republicans are essentially an endangered species in San Francisco, an internecine Republican war in the city may not seem to be horribly important at the end of the day. But the local fight over what it means to be a conservative, how to grow the Republican Party in and after the Trump era, and, ultimately, how to win elections mirrors similar debates happening on the right at the state and national levels.

The San Francisco fight is also notable for conservatives who are struggling to reverse their fortunes in big American cities, where the Republican brand — and Trump in particular — are often toxic. There is only one Republican mayor in the ten most populous cities in the country.

While Donde doesn’t expect San Francisco to turn red anytime soon, he does believe that a significant portion of residents are dissatisfied with the way Democratic leaders are performing. He believes it is possible to build coalitions among Republicans, independents, and even some moderate Democrats to begin changing the city’s direction.

“San Francisco and cities like it are the epicenters of failed Democratic policies on a whole list of things: crime, homelessness, schools, housing, a variety of other issues,” Donde said. “Poll after poll after poll shows that voters are deeply dissatisfied with how this city is administered.”

The ‘Normies’ Strike Back

During much of the first half of the 20th century, business-oriented Republicans were a dominant force in San Francisco, but their power has been diminishing and their ranks have been plummeting since the 1960s.

George Christopher, the last Republican mayor of San Francisco, left office in 1964. There hasn’t been an elected Republican official in the city in a decade. In the late 1960s, about a third of all voters in San Francisco were Republicans, according to the San Francisco Standard. Today, of the 500,000 or so registered voters in the city, only about 36,000 of them, or just over 7 percent, are Republicans, according to voter registration data.

Donde said his involvement in local politics started after he moved back to the city in 2014 and experienced “sticker shock” at the cost of living and housing. He also pointed to the elections of Chesa Boudin, a since-recalled far-left district attorney, and Dean Preston, a Democratic Socialist member of the board of supervisors, as emblematic of the city’s far-left drift.

“The city has been getting increasingly more and more radically left, I think to the dismay of the electorate,” Donde said. “But, also, most of us normies weren’t really paying attention because we were busy with our careers and our families.”

Donde got involved with the local GOP, but he said the experience was disappointing. There was too much settling of personal scores with other Republicans, too many members using the platform to support their own pet causes, he said, and not enough focus on what Donde calls the ”unglamorous work of politics”: recruiting and supporting good candidates, educating voters, establishing Republican clubs, and growing the party.

That’s why, he said, he and Jackson launched the Briones Society, named after Doña Juana Briones, an early landowner and businesswoman in the area. Donde says it’s “a club for conservatives, but also independents who support what we call the politics of opportunity for everyone.”

While Republicans are a tiny slice of the city’s electorate, more than 125,000 of San Francisco’s registered voters, or about 25 percent, aren’t aligned with any party. Looking at polls, Donde believes that at least a third of those voters are conservative-leaning. Engaging with and activating those voters could help to change the direction of the city.

“There’s just an enormous constituency of voters in the city that are like, ‘I’m tired of both parties. The right gives me conspiracy theories and the left gives me identity politics, and no one is actually giving me solutions to the issues that affect me and my family,’” Donde said.

A ‘Moderate Coup’

But the Briones Society strategy of bringing in independents and political moderates has proved a hard sell to the current Republican central committee leaders.

Dennis, who has been part of the central committee since 2008 and who has run several races against Nancy Pelosi, said he’s all for growing the party in San Francisco, but he has concerns about the Briones Society methods.

“I always told them I was a little skeptical of the thesis, because what they were suggesting was they were going to get fence-sitters to make a big, bold move to become a registered Republican in San Francisco,” he said. “Not in Idaho, not in Utah, but in San Francisco.”

And Dennis contends that under his leadership, the party is finally growing. Between 2022 and 2023, Republican registration increased over 7 percent in San Francisco County, the highest of any county in California, according to state data Dennis provided.

“It’s a low base, but we’re turning around and moving in the right direction,” Dennis said.

Dennis contends that Donde and other Briones leaders haven’t been loyal team players on the central committee. Donde, he said, “hasn’t been to a meeting in six months.” (Donde said he’s no longer on the committee and has no duty to attend their meetings.)

At one point, the San Francisco GOP voted to censure and disassociate itself from the Briones Society for, among other sins, condemning Trump for lying and alleging that he had instigated an attack on the Capitol, for “insulting the demonstrators of January 6, 2021,” for urging all San Franciscans to get Covid-19 vaccinations, for describing Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene as “toxic,” for attempting to move the local party “in a leftward direction,” and for referring to the U.S. government as a “constitutional democracy” rather than as a “republic.”

“I’ve defended them from some of the more conservative elements on our committee,” Dennis said of the Briones Society members. “In return for that, they formed this other slate to remove all those people who have done all the good work that have helped to grow the party.”

He has accused the Briones Society of trying to pull a “moderate coup.”

“I’m not sure how getting elected in a free and fair election constitutes a coup,” Donde said.

Dennis is part of a competing slate of central committee candidates that he calls “cross-ideological” leaders in the party — social conservatives, moderates, and libertarians. “It’s about competence and effectiveness,” he said. “We’re the people who got the work done.”

Democrats in Disguise?

Dennis also questions the motives of the Briones Society leaders and candidates, noting that a few of them seem to have donated almost exclusively to Democrats, and one, Martha Conte, is a leader in the centrist political group No Labels, which is working to get ballot access in dozens of states for a moderate “unity ticket” for president.

Dennis specifically noted the donations of Briones Society candidate Jennie Feldman. According to Open Secrets records, the San Francisco–born attorney has donated to a who’s who of Democrats over the last 15 years or so: Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Raphael Warnock, and Beto O’Rourke, among others.

“Why would you recruit someone like that to run for the central committee, the Republican Party Central Committee in San Francisco?” Dennis said.

But Donde said that Feldman — a lifelong Democrat who has become a Republican — is a perfect example of a “success story of our approach to politics.”

Feldman told National Review that she was a “proud Democrat” her entire life, mostly because that’s what she assumed a “good,” “thoughtful” and “compassionate” person should be. But her politics have evolved over the last few years, she said.

“What changed for me, and it’s been a process, has been life in San Francisco,” she said, noting daily vehicle break-ins in her neighborhood, the city’s homeless crisis, and an inadequate response from the police and from city leaders.

Feldman said she started reading conservative writers and exposing herself to conservative ideas, which she’d never really engaged with before. At one point last year, she appeared on Fox News to discuss the shuttering of San Francisco’s Nordstrom stores, she said.

“I think the Briones Society was kind of a hand out for someone like me who was questioning,” she said. “Marjorie Taylor Greene is not going to be the person who convinces me that maybe I’m a Republican. But Jay Donde is.”

The Briones Society is “speaking a language I can understand,” she added.

Feldman denied that she is some Democratic plant trying to infiltrate the local GOP.

“What has changed is, I have opened myself up to the idea that the current policies aren’t working, so we need to look at different policies,” she said. “And the current policies need to be challenged, and the current policies need to be challenged by people who are thoughtful and effective and not name callers and bomb throwers.”

Bigger Ambitions

Dennis said he doesn’t believe the Briones Society candidates will prevail in the March 5 election. People who win committee elections tend to be past winners and people with name recognition. But he acknowledged the Briones Society’s challenge is unusual.

“Why would we go back to square one with people who can’t show up to meetings and donate to Democrats, who’ve never run an event, who have never recruited candidates?” he asked.

Donde believes his slate can win, pointing to a growing list of endorsements from the San Francisco Police Officers Association and several local civic leaders.

He acknowledges that San Francisco is a long way away from electing another Republican mayor, but because of the dissatisfaction with the way the city has handled public safety and education, he believes it’s possible in the coming years to get civically involved, credible Republicans elected to the school board, to the community college board, or as sheriff.

“I think that’s certainly possible in the medium term,” Donde said. “In the long term, honestly, this is really a pilot program. We want to demonstrate success with the San Francisco Briones Society, and then be able to take that to Sacramento, and have a Briones Society there, and after that to Reno, and after that to Chicago, and so on.”

Donde acknowledges that trying to win converts in a big, liberal city like San Francisco can be hard, but he knows through experience that it’s possible.

“There is this initial, ‘Ugh, Republicans, I’m not sure I could sign up for this,’” Donde said. “But once you start talking to people about conservative principles and policies you support, there’s a lot more openness to that. Once you get a critical mass of folks together who, to be frank, are just fun to hang out with and normal, the path becomes a lot easier.”