SF Asians Flex Political Muscle
By Romen Basu Borsellino | 26 Sep, 2025

The quick and successful recall of a SF County Supervisor Joel Engardio shows that Asian Americans can bring serious voter clouot to bear when angered.

Any electoral victory for an Asian American candidate in the country is typically accompanied by a generally accurate narrative about the political power that Asians hold.  We’ve seen it following wins by Senator Andy Kim in New Jersey and Grace Meng in Queens.

But last week when Asian Americans successfully flexed their political muscle in the Bay Area it wasn’t in support of an AAPI candidate.  In fact, it wasn’t in support of any candidate. 

The details surrounding the recall vote that ousted San Francisco Supervisor Joel Engardio last week are, frankly, a bit granular. 

Asian Americans vote turnout was, at least theoretically, a matter of public policy rather than identity.  But a deeper look might be able to tell us what was really driving a particularly high AAPI voter turnout.  And what it means for our political power going forward.

Ousted Supervisor Joel Engardio from a campaign video on his Instagram

Proposition K

In 2022 Joel Engardio of District 4 was elected to San Francisco’s 11-member board of supervisors.  The district, more commonly known as Sunset District, is over 50% Asian American, the bulk of whom are Chinese.  Since immigration quotas were lifted in the 1960s, it became a popular spot in the US for Asians to relocate to.  In fact in 1999, approximately 60% of homeowners in the district were Chinese. 

In 2024, the year after being sworn in, Engardio joined four other San Francisco supervisors in publicly announcing his support of Proposition K, a plan that would close 2 miles of West San Francisco’s 3.5 mile Great Highway in order to build a new oceanside park called Sunset Dune. 

Now knowing only the above facts, I’d be lying if I said my own knee-jerk reaction wasn’t in support of the park.  What can I say, Joni Mitchell’s famous chorus of “They paved paradise to put up a parking lot” indoctrinated me from a young age such that I usually side with paradise over the parking lot…or highway.

But members of Engardio's district saw things differently and expressed their opposition to his plan on the grounds that closing a majority of the highway would significantly worsen traffic for them. 

I can now see where they’re coming from.  As someone who spends what feels like the majority of my week stuck in LA traffic, I would probably support paving over the mound at Dodger Stadium itself if it meant shaving even five minutes off of my commute. 

But despite the opposition from members of his district, Engardio held firm.  He moved forward with the plan by putting the matter before all of San Francisco for a public vote. 

It ultimately passed with 55% in favor of Proposition K.  But no thanks to Engardio’s own District, 64% of whom voted against the measure.

West San Francisco's Great Highway

Unsurprisingly, Engargio's constituents felt betrayed, accusing the Supervisor of failing to listen to the very people he was elected to represent.

And so they wasted virtually no time plotting to get him out of office.

While Engardio wasn’t up for re-election until the following year, California’s relatively lax recall laws, which required just 10,000 signatures — 20% of the district’s population — allowed for an earlier opportunity to vote him out.

On Tuesday, September 16, Engardio’s constituents went to the polls to vote on whether or not to recall him from his position. They sent him packing, with roughly 62% voting in favor of the recall, a number similar to the 64% who opposed Proposition K. 

Racial Politics?

To be clear, voters made up all racial demographics.  It was not simply a matter of the Chinese versus Engardio.  But it’s also hard to deny that the AAPI community appeared particularly galvanized. 

In some ways, this ordeal felt personal in a way that goes beyond a debate over infrastructure. 

It’s worth noting the general rarity of high voter turnout in a special election, particularly one with no presidential or or even statewide candidates for office on the ballot. 

Yet 40% of registered Chinese American voters showed up to the polls.  And particularly of note is that foreign born Chinese Americans voted at a higher rate than US-born Chinese Americans. 

Why?

Let’s start by looking at Endargio’s first election in 2022. 

Engardio, a white man, won by ousting incumbent Gordon Mar, a Chinese American. From 2001 until Mar was ousted, every supervisor who held the District 4 seat had been a Chinese American.  Since 2001, every supervisor who held the District 4 seat had been a Chinese American. 

Yet, as the San Francisco Chronicle’s Harry Mok wrote just after the 2022 election, “It could be argued that Engardio’s views are more in line with the Sunset’s Chinese American voters and more “Chinese” than Mar, a progressive who…veered too far to the left for enough of his constituents to lose by about 500 votes.”

For what it’s worth, Engardio is married to Lionel Hsu, a Taiwanese American.

But if Engardio was seen as “the “more Chinese” option in 2022, the recall was a different story. 

One of the loudest voices in favor of ousting Engardio was a group in San Francisco called the Chinese American Democratic Club (CADC), which describes itself as “the premiere Asian American political association in the country.”  They endorsed Engardio in 2022.

In August CADC member Wilson Chu, in support of the recall, wrote that Engardio “embraced our community when it was convenient for him — but turned his back on us the moment he got into office.”

Maybe Proposition K came to symbolize more than just a traffic issue. Maybe District 4’s voters were hit with some degree of buyer’s remorse and would come to feel that even if they agreed with their current supervisor more often than they did with his AAPI predecessor, they felt a greater sense of representation with Mar. 

We will likely get a better sense when voters go to the polls to choose Engardio’s replacement. 

The Future

There’s also the question of what this means for the AAPI community beyond the bounds of District 4.

As Harry Mok pointed out in the wake of the recall vote, “San Francisco’s Chinese American voters have long been described in political circles as a sleeping giant.’”

In other words, the voting bloc could be a force to be reckoned with when properly activated, as appears to have been the case just last week.

Maybe this is the new normal:  The AAPI community now has a blueprint that they can use to recreate this type of engagement in city-wide and state-wide and even nation-wide races going forward.  We’ll see a rise in AAPI elected officials and ballot measures that directly affect the AAPI community.  Asian Americans as a voting bloc will finally be recognized as a force to be reckoned with.

Or maybe this one race was truly just about a highway.