The Election Night results are no surprise.
I was pretty convinced that David Campos and Sup. Matt Haney would finish as the top two, with Bilal Mahmood getting maybe 20 percent of the vote and Thea Selby getting maybe 5 percent.
About half the total votes have been counted, the vast majority of them vote by mail. And for all practical purposes, Haney and Campos are in a dead heat.
As of 9:15 tonight, Haney was 2.06 percentage points ahead of Campos, 37.5 to 35.44. That will change a little as the ballots dropped off on Election Day are counted. Those typically run more progressive than the earlier ballots, and we won’t know for several days the final numbers. It’s like the margin will close, and in effect the race will be a statistical dead heat.
Mahmood has 21 percent. Selby has about 6 percent.
And Campos and Haney will face off again in two months. It will be a wild sprint to a runoff that will have nothing else on the ballot.
The Chronicle headline is embarrassingly inaccurate: “Haney will head to Assembly runoff, likely facing Campos.”
The article also has this:
As the first results came in, Campos said he was “cautiously optimistic.” As about 30 people gathered at the Eagle Bar in SoMa, the candidate said he was proud of the strong field campaign, that was free of “corporate money.”
Why is “corporate money” in quotes? It’s pretty clear what that means. Seriously.
The School Board members were all recalled by overwhelming margins. Again, that was no surprise: Huge amounts of money went into the recall, and there was very little in the way of an anti-recall campaign.
This has national implications, but for now, it means that the mayor will get to appoint three new members of the board.
There are a lot of interesting questions and unknown factors about the April runoff.
Where did Mahmood’s vote come from, and where will it go? What impact did the massive conservative School Board recall vote have on the race?
And will the big-money independent-expenditure committees supporting Haney launch a massive barrage of hit pieces on Campos?
Mahmood ran almost entirely on social media, with huge ad buys that went to younger voters. Will those voters show up in April? Who will Mahmood endorse?
Most of the recall voters probably went with Haney or Mahmood. Do they care enough to show up for an April vote that has nothing to do with the schools?
Turnout tonight was 25 percent. The recall was citywide, and the district covers only half the city, but it’s worth noting that twice as many people voted in the recall as voted in the Assembly race.
We don’t have detailed precinct results yet, so there’s a lot we don’t know. Except that the new two months are going to be crazy.
