Three weeks before the April 15 special election for Oakland mayor, supporters of both Barbara Lee and Loren Taylor are searching for the winning move that pushes their respective candidate to the top.
At times, their backers have appeared more concerned with escaping the shadow of Sheng Thao than taking on the opposing campaign.
Thao, who was recalled by 61% of voters in November and more recently indicted on felony charges of bribery and conspiracy, looms over the shortened election cycle — her political orbit seemingly toxic to even her most ardent past allies.
“Don’t Elect City Hall Insider Loren Taylor,” reads a new campaign flyer mailed this week to voters’ homes, with a photo of Taylor and Thao sitting next to each other, smiling, when they were both City Council members. “He Got Us Into This Mess in the First Place.”
The political committee that paid for the flyer is led in part by SEIU 1021 and IFPTE Local 21, the two largest public-employee labor unions in Oakland. The mailer was funded independently, meaning Lee’s campaign isn’t allowed to have taken part.
Outside spending often far outpaces cash held by candidates’ actual campaigns in the weeks before an election — especially in Oakland, historically a union town where labor groups spent over $700,000 to get Thao elected in 2022 and a few tens of thousands last year to oppose her recall.
The irony of those groups now weaponizing Thao as political poison is not lost on Taylor, a longtime foe of Thao. “They must have gone through a lot of video from council meetings to find that image,” he said in an interview about the photo of him and Thao together.
Lee, who opposed Thao’s recall on principle — she said she dislikes recalls as an electoral strategy — has sharply criticized the ex-mayor for both the alleged “pay-to-play” scheme identified by federal prosecutors.
She has also taken aim at Thao’s own decisions in office, including her attempt to balance the budget with revenues from the city’s still-pending Coliseum sale.
“Every elected official has to have the trust of the voters they’re accountable for,” Lee said in an interview.
Taylor’s own campaign released an ad last month that focused heavily on Thao, to whom he lost by 677 ranked-choice votes in the 2022 election.
“I voted for the recall of Sheng Thao,” an unnamed woman identified as an Oakland “grandma” says in the ad’s voiceover, “because of the incompetence and corruption in Oakland City Hall.
“And you know who supported Sheng?” the voiceover continues. “Barbara Lee. She’s now running for the same job — and I’m not sure what she’s done for Oakland.”
In interviews, Taylor is more respectful of Lee, the noted congresswoman whose 26 years representing the East Bay in Washington, D.C., earned widespread positive reviews from her constituents for the reams of federal dollars she secured for Oakland.
“I do not believe Barbara Lee is corrupt,” Taylor said. “I do not question her integrity. The real issue is this is not the role for her. The role of mayor is not the same as what you do when you’re a legislator on Capitol Hill.”
Thao, who has pleaded not guilty to federal charges, did not respond to an interview request.
Lee has resisted going on the offensive against Taylor, reminding interviewers that her interest is in “talking about Barbara Lee” than attacking anyone else.
The strategy is part of her campaign’s larger pitch to voters — that she can heal a kind of hostility between political camps that seemed to emerge during Thao’s administration, while Taylor would only deepen the city’s divides.
The former congresswoman noted, in an interview, that she had been endorsed by seven of the eight sitting council members, with the lone exception, Noel Gallo, choosing to remain neutral.
“We need an elder in the room to get everyone to sit down and shut up sometimes,” Councilmember Janani Ramachandran, who openly clashed with Thao, said in an interview.
“Loren’s a very nice guy and I hope there’s a role for him in shaping Oakland’s future. … For mayor, I think Barbara Lee’s leadership is going to be stronger in this moment,” she added.
Taylor said he’s willing to work with other elected leaders who disagree with him, noting a recent lunch with Councilmember Zac Unger, the labor-backed former head of Oakland’s firefighters union.
There are few meaningful policy differences between the candidates besides how they promise to handle the city’s budget — with Taylor hinting consistently at “being able to make hard choices” and Lee explicitly avoiding worker layoffs as anything but a last resort.
But whoever is elected April 15 could end up choosing to take a back seat on a two-year budget that city leaders are expected to finalize before July. Oakland projects a $140 million shortfall that Interim Mayor Kevin Jenkins said the city’s current leadership is solely tasked with trying to close.
“I’m doing the job fully,” Jenkins said in an interview, “not with the anticipation of anyone else coming.”
Lee and Taylor’s own promises to voters about budgeting seem to align with this timeline.
Lee has pushed for a full “forensic audit” of the city’s finances and Taylor is clamoring for a “zero-based budgeting” approach in which each city department would need to justify all its expenses instead of carrying them forward between years.
Such processes would take months to complete, so it’s likelier that the two candidates would not settle into the driver’s seat on the budget until next spring.
The mayor’s office itself would be back up for grabs a few months later, in November 2026 — what would have been, in another world, the end of Thao’s first term in office.
Shomik Mukherjee is a reporter covering Oakland. Call or text him at 510-905-5495 or email him at shomik@bayareanewsgroup.com.