Last week, two prominent female Democrats from San Francisco were defeated, but one of those stories was lost in the maelstrom following Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris. On the same day the city’s former district attorney became the first Democratic presidential candidate in 20 years to lose the popular vote, the city’s mayor, London Breed, was turned out of office as well. She was the first San Francisco mayor in nearly three decades to fail to win a second term; her replacement will be political outsider Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune.

There are surface-level comparisons to draw between Harris and Breed. They are both Black women who lost to wealthy white men. They both tacked to the political center to try to survive. They both were undone, in part, by forces beyond their control.

Breed’s defeat, though, offers discomforting lessons for big city Democrats across America, especially as it becomes clear that Trump made tremendous gains in the working class, nonwhite neighborhoods that the Democratic establishment has long taken for granted. Breed’s undoing does not bode well for Eric Adams, who seems destined to be a one term mayor after his federal indictment in September. Adams, of late, has tugged closer to Trump, but even with the sudden reddening of New York City, that is unlikely to save him in a metropolis that has grown weary of his incompetence.

What Adams and Breed share, beyond identity, is a past commitment to fear-mongering and an inability to rectify what ails their cities most. Thanks, in part, to Breed’s own declarations, enough San Franciscans bought into a frothing media narrative that crime there was out of control. (Retail thefts and carjackings were a challenge, but not of the sort that ever made San........

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