Janice Hahn Wins Special Congressional Election in CD 36 (CA)

With most Vote By Mail ballots counted and nearly half the precincts reporting, Democrat Janice Hahn has pulled away from Republican Craig Huey, and will be elected to Congress to fill the term of former Congresswoman Jane Harman.

Here is the latest tally from the LA County Registrar-Recorder, as of 11 p.m. PDT:

   JANICE HAHN  DEM   30,545    56.83
CRAIG HUEY   REP   23,207    43.17
                                                                       
TOTAL PRECINCTS   261   PRECINCTS REPORTING  127    48.66

Even were the precincts reporting overwhelming from Hahn strongholds (we don't know which precincts have or have not reported), barring an extremely unlikely vote distribution in the outstanding precincts, there are not enough outstanding votes for Huey to overcome Hahn's 13.66% lead.

Hahn's campaign, which focused on green job growth and on painting her opponent as a Tea-Party extremist who used his direct-mail marketing business to defraud seniors, and who would vote to dismantle Medicare should he be elected, appears to have been effective in the coastal district (stretching from San Pedro in the south to Venice and Marina del Rey to the north) which is strongly Democratic, but fairly moderate overall.

Huey's campaign, which seemed to focus on painting Hahn, a Los Angeles City Councilwoman (and member of a family which has given Los Angeles several prominent elected officials) as someone who went easy on, or did special favors for, gang members. That line of attack, which may have worked against someone less well known, apparently fell flat for Huey.

UPDATE, 11:45 p.m. PDT:

With 100% of the vote counted, Janice Hahn has been elected to the U.S. Congress, representing the 36th CD (California).

Final, unofficial vote count from the Registrar-Recorder:

   JANICE HAHN   DEM   41,585    54.56
 CRAIG HUEY    REP   34,636    45.44
                                                                         
TOTAL PRECINCTS  261   PRECINCTS REPORTING  261   100.00

Janice Hahn Leads in Early Voting in 36th CD (CA)

With vote totals in for Vote By Mail (VBM) ballots, as well as 7 of 261 precincts, Democrat Janice Hahn has taken an 8.5% lead over her opponent, Republican Craig Huey. Here are the initial numbers, released by the Los Angeles Registrar-Recorder at 8:04 p.m.:

                                                                           
 JANICE HAHN  DEM  21,365    54.24
 CRAIG HUEY   REP  18,025    45.76
                                                                         
TOTAL PRECINCTS 261   PRECINCTS REPORTING 7  2.68 

While these totals don't guarantee a victory for Hahn, they will be helpful against a possible surge by Huey amongst Republican voters in the Torrance / South Bay area, where Huey is expected to run strong.

We'll try to post updates as they become available.

Ted Lieu Elected State Senator (CA28) In Open Primary

With essentially all vote-by-mail ballots counted, together with the ballots from 86 percent of precincts, Ted Lieu holds a 32-percent lead over his closest challenger for election to the California State Senate, 28th District, 57% to 25%.

Based upon the vote count and relatively few precincts left to report, it is clear that former Assemblyman Lieu will be elected State Senator in the 28th Senate District without the need for a runoff election.

Lieu will replace the late Jenny Oropeza in representing the coastal L.A. County district.

Semi-official returns from the Los Angeles County Registrar Recorder, as of 11:30 p.m. on 2/15/11, are as follows:

As of Date: 02/15/2011 Time: 23:30                            Votes  Percent
                                                                         
STATE SENATE 28TH DIST       TERM ENDS 11/30/14                            
                                                                         
 TED W LIEU           DEM  26,021    57.19
 BOB VALENTINE        REP  11,269    24.77
 MARTHA F GIBSON      REP   3,057     6.72
 MARK LIPMAN          NP    1,602     3.52
 KEVIN T MCGURK       DEM   1,192     2.62
 JAMES P THOMPSON     REP   1,066     2.34
 JEFFREY E FORTINI    REP   1,048     2.30
 MICHAEL CHAMNESS     NP      245     0.54
                                                                         
TOTAL PRECINCTS    308  PCTS RPTING 266: 86.36%
REGISTRATION   467,493                                                 

Lieu will be sworn in after the Secretary of State certifies the election results, which may take several weeks.

Harris' Lead Up To 53,500 Votes

Kamala Harris has once again expanded her lead in the race for California Attorney General, based upon returns filed with the Secretary of State on Monday, November 23. Harris now leads L.A. D.A. Steve Cooley by 53,581 votes. The S.O.S. reports just under 400,000 ballots left to be processed by counties statewide, though an L.A. Times analysis puts that number at under 300,000.

(The S.O.S. reports of ballots remaining to be processed has seemed to lag data from the count of ballots throughout this process. It would be helpful if that office could coordinate that report with the county-by-county reports, or set out a clear statement of what that count truly represents.)

The counties reporting on Monday, according to the S.O.S., included pro-Cooley counties Butte, Orange (which had earlier reported that they had completed their vote count), Riverside (where Harris actually picked up 279 votes over Cooley for the day), San Diego and Ventura. Pro-Harris counties reporting were Imperial, Los Angeles (where Harris' margin was 8,922 votes), Marin, Monterey, Napa and Santa Clara. Sacramento County, which favored Cooley in initial tallies, but whose later tallies favored Harris, also reported.

While there may be some bumps along the road based upon which counties are reporting, we expect Harris to hold at least a 40,000 vote lead from here on out, with a likely final margin of at least 50,000, and likely in excess of 60,000 votes.

(Photo courtesy KamalaHarris.org)

Field Clears for Ted Lieu in 28th Senate District (CA)

The field has largely cleared for California State Assemblyman Ted Lieu (D-53rd AD) in the soon-to-be-announced special election to fill the 28th Senate District seat of the late Jenny Oropeza, who passed away this October 20 at 53 years of age, of complications from an abdominal blood clot. Oropeza was re-elected posthumously on November 2, beating her Republican opponent by a 22 percent margin.

Initial indications were that numerous local past and present office-holders were considering entering the special election race, likely to be held in March or April, 2011. Among the names mentioned, in addition to Lieu, who failed in his bid to be the Democratic nominee for State Attorney General and is being termed out of his Assembly seat, were Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn (who had run for the Democratic nomination for Lt. Governor this past June), Assemblyman Warren Furutani (whose seat overlaps much of the southern portion of the 28th S.D.), and former Assemblyman George Nakano, who lost the Democratic primary for the 28th S.D. to Oropeza in 2006.

Hahn and Furutani have now announced that they will not be running Jenny Oropeza's seat, and each has endorsed Ted Lieu for the seat. There has been no recent word on Nakano's intentions.

John Stammreich, the Republican candidate in the November election, has stated that he will not run for the seat at this time, but has left open the possibility of running in 2012, after the Redistricting Commission has redrawn district lines.

Kamla Harris Will Be The Next Attorney General of California

Based upon ballot tabulation updates from the last two days, and particularly upon today's update incorporating approximately 50,000 votes from Los Angeles County and additional votes from Monterey County, it now appears that Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley has no feasible path to victory in the California A.G.'s race, and that San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, will be the next Attorney General of California.

As of 4:14 p.m. today, Harris held a lead of 4,291,854 votes to Cooley's 4,248,804, a margin of 43,050 votes, or .5%. This constitutes Harris' largest lead since results were first announced on election night.

Harris, who had a 30,730 vote lead as of the 17th, saw that margin shrink slightly on the 18th, as many counties in which Cooley had run well reported additional results. Cooley apparently picked up an advantage of over 10,000 votes in Placer County, offset somewhat by additional ballots from San Francisco and Sacramento, where Harris' provisional ballot votes substantially outperformed her overall percentages, as expected. Despite this slight Cooley pick-up on the 18th, Harris held a lead of 29,399 votes before gaining an additional advantage of nearly 14,000 votes today.

According to a source in a high position within the Cooley campaign, Steve Cooley will be meeting with his staff over this weekend to determine his next steps. While that source advised us that a recount or legal action would likely result should the margin between the candidates end up below the 10,000 vote range, we were also advised that Cooley would not drag the matter on should Harris be ahead by a range of about 20 to 30,000 votes or more after all ballots had been tabulated.

As the Cooley campaign pours over the numbers tonight and this weekend, we expect them to conclude that Kamala Harris will emerge the winner by such a margin so as to make the cost, effort and inconvenience of any challenge to the result counterproductive. (California law does not provide for any sort of automatic recount.) While they may wish to wait for another round of updates, including the next L.A. County update next Tuesday, we expect Steve Cooley to concede the race sometime next week, returning his full focus to running the largest local prosecutors office in the nation.

***

Update: November 20, 2010, 12:25 p.m.:

The L.A. Times has again provided a county-by-county analysis of the statewide vote count as it applies to the Harris-Cooley race. That count has found that there are 305,004 ballots remaining to be counted statewide, with 185,937 (60.9%) in counties Democrat Harris won on November 2, and only 119,067 (39.1%) in counties in which Republican Cooley lead.

56,000 of the remaining uncounted ballots, the Times reports, are in L.A. County. While Harris leads Cooley in L.A. County overall by about 14%, she has been leading Cooley by about 22% among the later mix of ballots, which contain larger percentages of provisional ballots cast on election day.

The above figures cannot be the basis of simple calculations to determine the final tally. Each candidates percentage of advantage varies from county to county; for example, while Harris leads Cooley in L.A. County by 14% overall, Cooley trounced Harris in Orange County by 29%. (However, Orange County has now completed its vote count, and Cooley's advantage there will be of no further benefit to him as the last 300,000 ballots are tabulated. San Diego County, in which Cooley leads Harris by about 13%, has only 12,000 ballots left to count.)

Further, a higher percentage of the provisional ballots remaining throughout the state, and certainly in L.A. County, will be found to be "no count" ballots --those which are found to have been cast by voters who were not eligible to cast a vote. (The invalidity will likely be due to the voter having cast a vote out of their registered county, or having been validly registered to vote in the county in which the vote was provisionally cast.) Those "no count" ballots, which are generally screened multiple times before a final determination of invalidity is made (thus accounting for their appearance later in the tabulation process), now make up a greater percentage of the uncounted ballots than they have up until now. We expect that fewer than 50,000 of the remaining 56,000 L.A. County will actually make it into the final vote total. (The same situation should apply to counties statewide.)

Based upon the above figures and reasonable extrapolations therefrom, we now expect Kamala Harris to defeat Steve Cooley by more than 50,000 votes statewide.

Kamala Harris Solidifies Lead in State A.G. Race - Cooley Attacks L.A. Registrar

Kamala Harris has solidified her lead in the California State Attorney General's race, and appears to have a fairly direct path to victory.

The current tally from the Secretary of State's office shows Harris with a 30,904 vote (.4%) lead over Republican Steve Cooley. This lead appears to be fairly solid based upon several facts:

Orange County, which went 2 to 1 for Cooley, has counted and reported all but 1,598 ballots. San Diego County, which favored Cooley by about 13.5%, is down to 35,000 ballots left to process. Other pro-Cooley counties appear to be more than offset by untallied votes from counties which favored Harris on election day.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles County still has approximately 100,000 ballots remaining to process and report. In the last two ballot reports from L.A. (incorporating a greater percentage of provisional ballots, which, as we've discussed in prior posts, tend to favor Harris to a greater extent than the overall vote count), Harris has held at least a 22% advantage over Cooley, collecting over 61% of the vote, compared to Cooley's under 39%.

The Cooley camp has responded to the unfavorable vote totals in L.A. County by sending a swarm of workers, reportedly including retired law enforcement officers, to the County Registrar's office in Norwalk, where, according to the Harris campaign, they are acting aggressively and are crowding county workers who are attempting to validate (or invalidate) provisional ballots based upon a review of the provisional ballot envelopes containing the provisional ballots. (Workers cannot determine how the voter cast his or her vote when reviewing the ballot envelope to make a determination of validity; the ballot is sealed within the provisional envelope.) Harris volunteers, reportedly including members of the SEIU and the West LA Democratic Club, are keeping an eye on the provisional ballot processing, proceeding at approximately 90 stations in a secured room on the 4th floor. Workers from both campaigns are also keeping an eye on each other during this process.

The Cooley campaign also appears to be putting together a PR campaign to discredit the Los Angeles Registrar, and to question the validity of the Los Angeles vote count. Much like the argument of Joe Miller in Alaska, where the tea-party-supported candidate is attempting to beat write-in candidate Lisa Murkowski, Cooley seems to be arguing that voter intent should be ignored, unless that voter has complied with all technical rules in casting his or her ballot. Meanwhile, tension is increasing as Steve Cooley sees his victory, which he appeared to have once taken for granted, now appears to be slipping away.