Peskin — the termed-out former Board President who spent years as San Francisco's most polarizing progressive power broker — has apparently become the boogeyman of choice in the D2 race. Candidates and their allied PACs are invoking his name not because he's on the ballot, but because associating your opponent with Peskin-style politics is apparently the most efficient shorthand for "this person will tax you into oblivion and make it harder to build anything."

And honestly? It's kind of genius.

District 2 is one of the more fiscally moderate corners of the city. Voters there tend to care about public safety, clean streets, and not watching their property taxes fund yet another study about a study. Tying a rival to Peskin's legacy of bureaucratic expansion and anti-development obstruction is basically political poison in that zip code.

But let's step back and ask the obvious question: why does San Francisco politics still revolve around a handful of personalities rather than actual policy platforms? The fact that "Peskin" functions as an epithet in campaign literature tells you everything about how shallow our local political discourse has become. Voters deserve more than guilt-by-association mailers. They deserve candidates who can articulate their own vision for the district — what they'd cut, what they'd fund, and how they'd hold City Hall accountable.

Meanwhile, the District 4 race is heating up too, with the latest campaign finance filings revealing a competitive fundraising battle that suggests the Sunset is no longer the sleepy political afterthought it used to be.

The broader takeaway? San Francisco's political realignment is real. When even attack ads have shifted from "my opponent isn't progressive enough" to "my opponent is too progressive," the ground has moved. Whether the candidates running on that shift actually deliver fiscal sanity once in office — well, that's a different story entirely.

We'll be watching.