Ms. Oloumi said she believed Mr. Boudin never fully embraced the role of a prosecutor.
“He seems to value the perpetrators more than the victims,” she said.
David Lee, a political science lecturer at San Francisco State University, said the two recall elections in San Francisco — the Board of Education members in February and Mr. Boudin on Tuesday — were a clarion call by an surly electorate.
“There is anger at the failure of government, the failure of city hall, to address pressing problems,” Mr. Lee said. On the precipice of a generational changing of the guard in San Francisco — two iconic San Franciscans, Nancy Pelosi, the house speaker, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, are in the twilight of their careers — voters are sending a message of frustration and hankering for change, Mr. Lee said. This was especially true of Asian American voters, he believes.
“In San Francisco, a third of the population is Asian and they don’t feel like anyone is listening to them — City Hall or the Democratic establishment,” he said.
At the same time, many political analysts cautioned not to read too much into the result because it reflected the dynamics of a recall election: When Mr. Boudin was elected in 2019 he received only 36 percent of the vote in the first round of voting. In the third round, under the city’s ranked choice system, he ultimately inched ahead of his main rival for the job, Suzy Loftus, by a few thousand votes.
“In a recall election, you are running against yourself,” said Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco. Mr. Brown said he voted to keep Mr. Boudin in office as a protest against the recall process. But he was also critical of Mr. Boudin, whom he described as “a warrior for the downtrodden.”
“That’s what he is,” Mr. Brown said. “He’s certainly not a prosecutor.”
Holly Secon contributed reporting.
