While San Francisco voters inched their troubled city in a moderate direction last week, approving ballot measures to empower the police and require drug screenings for welfare recipients, San Francisco Republicans also pulled their party to the political center.

While votes are technically still being counted, candidates from the moderate Briones Society appear to have won a super majority on the left-wing city’s Republican County Central Committee. Seventeen of 19 Briones Society candidates are on pace to win seats on the 25-member central committee, knocking out several current party leaders in the process.

The Briones Society — named after Doña Juana Briones, an early landowner and businesswoman in the Bay Area — seeks to grow San Francisco’s Republican Party and change the city’s progressive direction by reengaging with “the normies,” including disaffected conservatives, independents, and civic-oriented moderates. They’re also open to building coalitions with moderate Democrats who are recoiling from the disfunction in their city.

Jay Donde, a co-founder of the Briones Society, said their takeover is a “validation of our original thesis that there are a lot of dissatisfied Republicans out there who don’t like the current trajectory of the party and the current establishment’s style of unserious politics, and that the path to getting the party back on track is to reengage those disaffected voters.”

National Review first wrote about the Briones Society and the schism in the San Francisco GOP earlier this year. The division between the two sides over what it means to be a conservative, how to grow the Republican Party in and after the Trump era, and, ultimately, how to win elections mirrors similar debates happening on the Right at the state and national levels.

While Briones Society leaders say they want to grow the party by reaching out the center and refocusing on the “unglamorous work of politics,” the party’s current leaders say they’re already successfully growing party registration. They also question the motivations of many of the Briones Society candidates, noting that several are former Democrats.

“These guys have started off by saying, ‘Oh, we’re here for the better administration of the party,’ meanwhile, they started up because they’re Never Trumpers, and that was the motivation,” said John Dennis, the current party chairman who ran on a different slate and who has run several races against Democratic representative Nancy Pelosi over the years.

Donde credits the success of the Briones candidates to “the types of things we’ve been trying to get the Republican Party to do in San Francisco for many years” — fundraising, conducting polls, reviewing data, staying on message, and winning votes in person and over the phone.

“We organized a group of volunteers who were absolutely amazing,” he said.

Dennis is less impressed. “It’s easy to buy a bunch of central committee seats,” he said.

He noted that Martha Conte, a leader of the centrist political group No Labels that is seeking to run a unity ticket for president this year, contributed $40,000 of the Briones Society’s roughly $95,000 political haul during the election cycle. Conte is also one of the Briones Society candidates who appears to have won a seat on the central committee.

Dennis said that under his leadership, they’ve finally stopped the decades-long drop in party registration, increased meeting attendance, and built a successful new precinct operation.

“What [the Briones Society leaders are] saying is that we’ve been ineffective, yet the numbers tell a completely different story,” Dennis said, adding that when “you find a formula for success, you tend to stay with it.”

He contends the Briones Society candidates aren’t representative of the current Republican Party. He said they’re driven by “Trump animus and a sensibility that is more Democrat than Republican.” They will also have a steep learning curve when it comes growing the party.

“You’ve got people who say they can do it, and people who have done it,” Dennis said. “The people who say they can do it just happened to find some money to back them up.”

Donde has been critical of the direction of the San Francisco GOP, accusing the party’s leaders of spending too much time settling personal scores with other Republicans and using their platform to support their own pet causes.

There has been little love lost between the two side in recent years. At one point, the San Francisco GOP voted to censure and disassociate itself from the Briones Society for, among other sins: condemning former president Donald Trump for lying, alleging that Trump instigated an attack on the Capitol, “insulting the demonstrators of January 6, 2021,” urging all San Franciscans to get Covid-19 vaccinations, describing Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene as “toxic,” attempting to move the local party “in a leftward direction,” and referring to the U.S. government as a “constitutional democracy” rather than as a “republic.”

Dennis said his concerns about the Briones Society takeover of the party remain.

“I’m concerned that these guys think that playing nice nice with the Democrats is going to help grow the Republican Party. And I’m sorry, I just don’t think that that works,” he said. “What I think works is identifying who you are, projecting your identity without apology, and being reasonable.”

With the Briones Society’s incoming majority on the committee, Donde said they intend to improve the party’s “anemic voter outreach” efforts, in part through weekly digests, journal articles, and podcasts; and to focus on building up the party’s infrastructure, including by backing new Republican clubs that can identify and bubble up their members’ priorities.

“There is no reason at all that there’s not a chartered Asian-American Republican club in San Francisco,” Donde said. “There’s a lot of untapped energy and enthusiasm, and I think our message is resonating with Asian-American voters in the city.”

Most importantly, Donde said, will be a focus on finding strong candidates who can win elections. While San Francisco may be a long way from electing a Republican mayor, Donde believes it’s possible in the coming years to get civically involved, credible Republicans elected to the school board, to the community-college board, or as sheriff.

“We need to find a really, really good candidate and match them with the necessary support and training and resources, and get them running for the right seat,” he said. “No more of these quixotic campaigns that will generate headlines on Fox News and some donations from around the country. Let’s get someone into a position where they can actually win a seat. Because that’s going to have the biggest impact on the capacity of the local party.”

Donde said he’s also looking to expand the Briones Society model to other Bay Area cities and suburbs, and eventually around California and maybe across the country. Getting principled conservatives reengaged with Republican politics has to happen at the “retail level,” Donde contends, and he believes their model is the best one available at the moment.

“It has to happen through one-on-one local engagements where neighbors and colleagues and co-workers and so forth reintroduce people and get people comfortable again with a Republican politics that is appealing to the vast majority of the electorate,” Donde said.

He also pushed back on the idea that the nation’s political parties are weak and not important.

“The problem is not that they’re weak, it’s that they’ve been co-opted by extremists,” he said. “Telling people that parties are unimportant just validates the decision of a lot of common-sense voters to disengage. And that’s the exact opposite of what we should be doing.”