2019 San Francisco District Attorney election
The 2019 San Francisco District Attorney election was held on November 5, 2019, to elect the next District Attorney of San Francisco. The election, which was held alongside the 2019 mayoral election in which incumbent mayor London Breed won her first full term, was won by public defender Chesa Boudin.
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First choice results by supervisorial district Boudin: 20–30% 30–40% 40–50% 50–60% Loftus: 30–40% 40–50% Tung: 30–40% | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The incumbent district attorney, George Gascón, announced in October 2018 that he would not seek a third term. Gascón then abruptly resigned in October 2019, and Breed appointed Suzy Loftus to replace him on an interim basis.
Four candidates, Chesa Boudin, Suzy Loftus, Nancy Tung, and Leif Dautch, ran in the nonpartisan election, with Boudin and Loftus seen as the front-runners. San Francisco elections are conducted using ranked-choice voting: voters are permitted to rank the candidates in order of preference, and should no candidate garner a majority of first-choice votes, the support of the candidates with the fewest votes are successively re-allocated until one candidate attains a majority.
The winner of the election was unclear for several days; Loftus conceded the race to Boudin on November 9. The final results showed Boudin defeating Loftus by 4.6 percentage points in first-choice votes, and by 1.7 percentage points in the final round.