UPDATE 5/29/25: The Department of Elections announced Thursday morning that a special recall election of Supervisor Joel Engardio will be held on Sept. 16, 2025. The department verified enough signatures to surpass the required threshold of 9,911.
Selena Chu had the day off from her job, but she was hard at work gathering signatures needed to place a recall of her district’s supervisor, Joel Engardio, on the ballot.
She asked a passing neighbor in Cantonese if they had signed the petition. When the neighbor said yes, she added, “you can also let your relatives know about it when you’re having dim sum this weekend.”
It was not Chu’s first time throwing energy into a local political campaign. But this time felt more draining: The recall effort had raised far less money than the supervisor’s counter-campaign, which had the backing of several wealthy donors. And Chu said she felt abandoned by former political allies.
“We are being used as soldiers who go out and do the footwork, but we are not at the coalition, we aren’t at the table,” Chu said in English.
Chu has done plenty of that footwork. She once campaigned to get Engardio elected. But she broke with the supervisor after he supported Proposition K, which set in motion the closure of a portion of the Great Highway to cars. Other Asian American leaders who share Chu’s views also suspect they are not being taken seriously by the city’s moderate coalition — political groups and influential individuals who, like them, generally support tough-on-crime policies and who backed the recall of three school board members in 2022. These Asian American community leaders feel they cannot expect political or financial backing from local heavyweights on the issues that they care most passionately about. Their constituents’ views and priorities have diverged sharply from other moderates on the Great Highway closure, and this has cost them power.
Asian Americans have been influential in multiple recall campaigns around the Bay Area in recent years, including the ones that ousted three school board members and former District Attorney Chesa Boudin.
“We have led all these campaigns,” said politico Mary Jung, who personally opposes the recall of Engardio but led the campaign against Boudin. “But are people taking us seriously enough?”
On Thursday, the recall team submitted enough signatures for the recall to qualify for the ballot, though the Department of Elections must now verify the signatures, a process expected to take several weeks. The department found the vast majority of a sample of signatures valid last Friday, signaling that the recall is likely to go to voters.
But from the recall campaign’s launch, it was clear wealthy donors who had backed past recalls would not support this one, making it a predictably uphill battle. Community leaders should recognize which causes will win billionaire backing and be more strategic about which issues to pursue, said David Ho, a political consultant who foresaw the campaign’s funding troubles last year.
“The Chinese leadership needs to do a reflection on what happens when they want something that the white billionaire class does not support the cost of,” he said in November, shortly after Proposition K passed.
Josephine Zhao, president of the Chinese American Democratic Club, acknowledged that. But she expressed frustration about which issues are currently winning mainstream support. Zhao said Asian American voters have often been on the front lines, laying the groundwork for major political initiatives like the 2022 recall of three school board members, before large donors stepped in. Now, powerful political groups and wealthy donors are talking about things like redeveloping the beachfront park and approving taller, denser housing on the city’s west side, both of which Zhao’s constituents vehemently oppose.
“They threw us under the bus,” she said.
Zhao, whose political club endorsed Engardio in 2022 but withdrew its approval after Engardio’s continued support of Proposition K, said its endorsement committee would be more cautious in evaluating candidates. The club was also the city’s first political organization to back the recall, followed by the Latinx Democratic Club.
The effort to get an Engardio recall initiative on the ballot was seen by some as a litmus test for the power of local organizing and the strength of political alliances across groups. Even though the recall is likely to qualify, some believe recall advocates and wealthy donors may have split.
Jung noted the Engardio recall campaign’s struggle to raise money, which hampered signature-gathering efforts in their final week.
“The grassroot is being drowned out by money,” Jung said.
But businessman and community leader Louis Lam believes he can still work with both mainstream moderate groups and billionaires in the next election.
If the recall succeeds, the tables will turn Lam said, once Engardio’s wealthy backers realize how his constituents feel. He added that the people pouring money into the campaign to protect Engardio’s position were misled by the supervisor about the value of the Great Highway, and that they don’t really understand what the community wants. After the recall, Lam said he plans to reach out and talk to major moderate political groups as well as big donors to restore the relationship.
Albert Chow, a hardware store owner who is expected to run against Engardio at the next opportunity, said he believed the same. He noted that Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman donated $300,000 and $125,000 to the Proposition K and Stand With Joel campaigns, respectively, which Chow saw as significant enough to influence outcomes. Chow characterized this dynamic as giving undue influence to an outsider.
“They are a younger crowd, transplants to San Francisco,” Chow said, referring to the major donors living outside the district who gave large contributions to the supervisor. “They are long on money and short on history.”
Chow said he sees a difference in the values of affluent young donors, who want more parks and fewer cars in San Francisco, and Asian American families living in multigenerational households in the Sunset, who rely on cars to drop kids at school, take elders to the hospital and commute to work.
Those younger, more affluent donors may be working to reshape the city with philanthropic intention, Chow said, but this generational gap means their vision doesn’t always align with or include the needs of Asian American families who have lived here for generations and witnessed how the neighborhood has evolved into what it is today.
When asked about the large donations he received from wealthy donors, Supervisor Engardio noted that many of his supporters also gave small amounts. He said he recently called all his District 4 donors, some of whom were surprised to hear from him after donating just $10. But when asked whether Jeremy Stoppelman, who lives outside the district and gave $125,000, received the same call, Engardio didn’t answer directly.
“Well, I met him once,” he said.
The disconnect between some local organizers and billionaire backers is even more pronounced among progressive community leaders — those who generally support social services over policing and tend to focus on social and racial equity.
“These billionaires could care less about the Chinese vote, other than to exploit it for their own ends,” said Henry Der, former executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action.
He warned the Chinese and broader Asian community to be cautious when aligning with wealthy donors and to ask whether those donors truly see them as equal partners and have their interests at heart.
Former San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Lillian Sing also expressed distaste for how much influence money can buy non-residents.
“They don’t live in the district where they’re putting their money to influence the lives of the people there,” Sing said.
She and others have characterized the 2022 recall campaign against District Attorney Chesa Boudin as wealthy donors exploiting Asian Americans’ fear of being physically targeted to help rally them behind tough-on-crime policies.
Jung, who led the recall campaign, rejected that accusation, arguing that it received broad grassroots support. She said the effort was driven by two groups with a shared goal of improving public safety: Asian American families who were afraid of being targeted in attacks fueled by racist rhetoric related to COVID-19, and major donors including some from the real estate industry.
Zhao, president of the Chinese American Democratic Club, identifies as a moderate. She said the break from mainstream moderate groups over Proposition K and the Engardio recall did not reflect a broader ideological split. Still, she agreed with Der that such relationships require caution. When her club was weighing whether to endorse the recall, its leadership hesitated at first, knowing their decision could cost them allies. She said her group must take a stand when its interests diverge from what donors will support.
“We’re not going to bend our values to please someone just because they have money,” she said.
Editor’s note 5/31/25: This post was updated to correct the date of the recall election.
