We are now ten days since the local election and we now have some preliminary updated vote counts. It appears that there were about 6200 new votes in the Measure G election. The yes percentage ticked up to 65.69—still a full point shy of the two-thirds mark it needs to pass.
The two most interesting races at this point are the Fourth and Fifth Supervisorial elections—the new results show bad news for the incumbents, albeit in different ways.
It seems much more likely that the 4th Supervisorial race is going to a November runoff. Jim Provenza is now at 49.3 percent. The clear trend since the returns came in on Election Day has been pushing him below the 50 percent mark he would need to win it outright.
Linda Deos’ showing now has her at 37.7 percent—stronger than a lot of people would have predicted.
If this result does hold, it becomes interesting to see where David Abramson’s solid 13 percent of the vote will go. One might guess that some of that will go to the challenger, but that remains to be seen. Another dynamic is that we would expect—if things have returned to a sense of normalcy by November—a higher turnout in the fall.
Perhaps the most surprising result is long-time Supervisor Duane Chamberlain, who led by a mere 90 votes after Election Day, now trails by 164 votes against former Woodland Mayor Angel Barajas. It was eight years ago that another Latino former mayor of Woodland challenged Duane Chamberlain, but Chamberlain←mainly on the strength of his rural vote—was able to defeat Art Pimentel by over 7 percentage points or about 450 votes.
Once again it is a heavy rural-urban split, where Angel Barajas is winning in the Woodland and Knights Landing areas and one precinct right around Yolo County Airport, but Duane Chamberlain is carrying most of the rural votes including communities like Esparto, Madison, Dunnigan, and Zamora.
Duane Chamberlain was first elected in 2004 and has served four full terms.
While Measure G has inched up to 65.69 percent yes, we believe this measure will fail. In fact, our analysis from Election Day has largely held. The measure had 63.9 percent in the initial returns from the pre-Election Day vote-by-mail ballots. It received about 66.9 percent of the vote in the ballots cast at the polls on Election Day.
The new batch has 4200 yes votes to 2071 no votes. That breaks down to 66.975 percent of the vote.
That is very slightly better than it received on Election Day, but not nearly enough. We had projected that it would need 68.8 percent of the remaining ballots to win. It has fallen well short of that.
There are probably another 6000 to 6500 out there, but barring some unforeseen surge in those remaining ballots, we believe that Measure G will finish with just under 66 percent of the vote, perhaps 100 votes shy of winning.
One thing that is clear is the early voters did Measure G in—it would be helpful perhaps to understand why that is the case.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
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