CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story had an incorrect total for David Chiu’s vote.
By Tim Redmond
NOVEMBER 6, 2014 — Not good news for David Campos this afternoon.
The first 7,300 Election Day absentees were just released, and they aren’t following the pattern of Election Day votes. In fact, David Chiu added another 700 votes to his lead.
Chiu is now at 51,878 and Campos at 48,107. Chiu won 55 percent of the votes counted today.
Not clear yet which precincts these are from, but it would take a pretty overwhelming shift in vote patterns to move Campos into the win column.
On Election Day, the Campos GOTV effort was clearly superior to the Chiu effort, by a long shot, and a lot of us suspected that the Election Day absentees would be included in that. I’m not sure why Chiu was so dominant in those votes; we’ll have to look at precinct data and try to figure that out.
Meanwhile, it appears there will be three new faces on the Community College Board — Thea Selby and Brigitte Davila will both be winners, the trends show, and John Rizzo will retain his seat. Amy Bacharach will join them for the next two years in the seat vacate mid-term by Chris Jackson.
Once again, Rodrigo Santos, despite outspending everyone, finished way out of the money.
It also appears that two incumbents, Emily Murase and Hydra Mendoza, will keep their School Board seats, joined by Shamann Walton. Nothing’s going to change there, either.
I just talked to Tom Ammiano, the outgoing Assembly member, and he said the closeness of the race was important. “David Campos will have a great future, and we are a forced to be reckoned with,” he told me.
