This is an excerpt from Make It Make Sense, LAist’s post-election results newsletter. If you want updates on the outcomes for the March 5 election and what they mean for your life in L.A., sign up here.
It’s the end of Election Week, and we still don’t have definitive calls on many races. That was expected — we knew from the beginning it could take days or weeks to get a clear picture of the results. But four days after Election Day, some of these counts are getting interesting.
In three L.A. City Council races, each new ballot count shows races tightening or shifting in a way that defies expectations from the initial results released Tuesday night.
This race, led by Adrin Nazarian with 38% of the vote, is definitely going to a runoff, but the race for second place remains interesting. Jillian Burgos came from behind to overtake Sam Kbushyan. On Thursday she was ahead by just one vote, but Friday's tally put her 422 votes ahead, with 19% of the vote.
With Nazarian so far ahead, it might seem like it doesn’t matter who comes in second. But there are instances where the runner-up in a primary has gone on to win the general.
A lot of that comes down to how different the candidates in the runoff are from each other. If they’re very similar, it’s more likely the frontrunner just becomes more of a frontrunner.
But if the top two candidates are very different and the second-place candidate has a lot in common with the other candidates who came in behind them in the primary, they could pick up a big chunk of the votes in the runoff.
Will incumbent Nithya Raman make it to 50%? That’s been the overarching question for the District 4 race from the beginning, and she's been getting steadily closer. If she gets more than 50% of the vote, she’ll win the race outright and avoid a November runoff.
After the first returns on March 5, a runoff between Raman and deputy city attorney Ethan Weaver looked pretty likely. But with Raman creeping toward the 50%+1 threshold, now things aren’t so clear.
Raman had 21,274 votes as of the latest count. Weaver had 18,337, and a third candidate, Lev Baronian, had 5,120. The outcome of this race would be clearer if we knew how many outstanding ballots there were to count in District 4 specifically — but unfortunately, we don’t.
Like L.A. City Council District 2, the District 14 race has a clear leader who is definitely headed to the runoff. But who will finish in second place and face de León in the runoff remains very unclear. Only 21 votes separated Ysabel Jurado and Miguel Santiago after Friday's vote tally.
But the dynamics are different. Incumbent Kevin de León’s lead is fewer than 1,000 votes — much smaller than in District 2. He also has a lot of baggage – he’s faced calls to resign over his role in the City Hall leaked tape scandal.
And the second-place contenders are pretty different from each other.
Santiago, a former Assemblymember, has raised the most money out of all the District 14 candidates and has support from several county and state elected officials. He was ahead of Jurado in the first returns on Tuesday night and remained in second place until today's vote count, when Jurado passed him.
Jurado, a tenant rights attorney, has backing from progressive officials, such as District 1 Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, and organizations including Ground Game L.A. and the Democratic Socialists of America.
We asked our civics and democracy correspondent, Frank Stoltze, what he’s paying attention to since he’s been watching this race more closely than anyone else in our newsroom. Here’s what we had to say:
“I think what's really interesting about this race is how well tenant rights attorney Ysabel Jurado is doing. Assemblymember Miguel Santiago spent about twice as much money as her — $615,000 — and had the benefit of another nearly $700,000 in outside spending on his behalf. It speaks to the strength of Jurado's door-to-door ground campaign. In any case, it's likely whoever comes in second will have a good chance against the embattled incumbent Kevin de León.”
Meanwhile, there’s another race in wider L.A. County that hasn’t been showing the same kind of dramatic arc:
Incumbent Supervisor Janice Hahn has been flagged as likely to win outright and avoid a runoff since the first returns on Tuesday night. As you can see, her lead has stayed strong throughout the week, and second-place candidate Alex Villanueva isn’t gaining vote share.
But reminder: A race is only called when all the ballots are counted, the Associated Press calls it because the lead is larger than the number of uncounted ballots remaining, or the other candidate(s) concede. Last night Alex Villanueva went on Instagram Live and insisted he would not concede.
“If she’s [Hahn] expecting some kind of concession or a phone call, she’s never going to get it,” Villanueva said. “We’ll take it day by day.”
Sounds like we might be waiting for a call in this race until the last vote is counted.
