Boudin had plenty of donors from around the country (including from billionaires) and was getting free puff pieces placed about him in The New Yorker about his Los Angeles fundraisers. Money flows in all directions.

Certainly, but not equally.

> By June, the groups seeking to recall Boudin together raised $7.2 million to oust him, while the district attorney’s backers gathered about $3.3 million.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/election/article/Chesa-Boudin-ou...

Yes because by that point Boudin had lost his electoral credibility. It's instructive to see who funded his original run for DA.

The narrative was against Boudin by the time of the recall, but that campaign was nevertheless still funded by big money, which has a tendency to amplify narratives, and this entire discussion was focused on the recall anyway.

The entire discussion has no focus and starts with a false claim about violent crime being down between 2020 and 2022. In any case, claims that money influenced outcomes are ill-substantiated since many San Francisco election results go against the best-funded outcomes.

Though apparently, neither in the case of the election of Boudin, nor in his recall!

https://ballotpedia.org/District_Attorney_election_in_San_Fr...

https://ballotpedia.org/Chesa_Boudin_recall,_San_Francisco,_...

Yes, even in that case. In a ranked choice election, you cannot simply look at the numbers in isolation. The opponents to Boudin ran something of a slate where they cross-promoted each other. So in a real sense, Boudin won despite being outspent in 2020. (Though there is a compelling case to make that Boudin's victory was mostly a fluke due to Nancy Tung's Cantonese language voters being misled by local Chinese-only newspapers about policy positions.)

It is not a false claim. Violent crime is more than homicides. Violent crime was down according to SF city police department: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/7kTBb/1/ You can see more statistics in the discussion here: https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Chesa-Boudin-San-Fra... Homicides were not outside of historical trends during Boudin's tenure. A few homicides difference across years has nothing to do with the DA.

Police department crime statistics in San Francisco are so unreliable that a single store electing to report all shoplifting incidents tripled the citywide rate: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/shoplifting-data-Targ.... Many policy changes are being enacted throughout the city such as teachers who were beaten deaf by their students not being allowed to file a police report: https://missionlocal.org/2022/04/total-meltdown-at-everett-m....

Homicides give a useful corrective since they’re harder to under report.

Given this fact and the various confounders (e.g. how do you rob or assault someone during a time of complete shutdown, how does nilling out the substantial daytime population increase do to per capita rates, is an overdose death really not worth reporting in crime statistics), at best we don’t know what actually happened to violent crime rates in the last three years.