Picking Over the Carcass of Election 2014, Part 2: Supervisor, City Council, and Local Executive Races

Now in our new Orange flavor!

This post will follow OJB’s Guide to Your Whole Freakin’ Ballot, starting down with “County Executive” races.  (Just search on the word “Parrish,” it will put you in the right spot.)  Our Guide (in its October and November forms) received a combined over 4000 page views, which is pretty good for us.

By the time you’re done with some of the entries here, you may want to know more about provisional voting procedures; you’ll find the info you want at that link.  If you’ve moved within the city, your City Council votes will count.  Here’s the rule you’ll most need to know:

Voters who are not on the polling place roster for an unknown reason. Should this occur, the elections official will check the county’s official registration records after Election Day. If the voter was properly registered to vote in the county and in the precinct in which they voted, their provisional ballot will be counted. If the voter was registered to vote at another address in the county, their votes will be counted in the races they voted on as if they were voting in their home precinct (i.e., their votes for U.S. President, statewide, and countywide measures will be counted, but their votes in a city council race may not be counted if the precinct they’re registered in is in a different city council district than the one in which they cast a ballot). If the voter is not registered to vote or is registered to vote in another county or state, their ballot will not be counted in part or in whole. (Elections Code section 14310(c)(3).

Now, we’re off to the races!

County and Judicial

Assessor: After a narrow loss in 2010, Claude Parrish finally defeats Webster Guillory, who tried to run for reelection at least one time too many, with 53.2% of the vote.  (By the way, after the election OC Political identified Guillory as a Democrat.  He isn’t; check your own list of elected officials, guys.  He’s NPP.)  Parrish had the Republican endorsement, but even with Guillory’s recent troubles that would not have been enough.  He got three huge assists from Jorge Lopez: (1) there would have been no runoff without Lopez in the race; (2) Lopez filed the complaint against Guillory’s perjury in his ballot signatures; and (3) Lopez endorsed him, bringing with him enough Democratic votes to put Parrish over the top.  Happily for Parrish, whose experience on the Board of Equalization was quite different from what he’ll face as Assessor, Lopez also knows the ins and outs of how to run the office (as does his Republican business partner), and there’s real hope for reform here in an office that really needs it.

2nd District Supervisor: Michelle Steel gets 62.6% against Allan Mansoor.  There are two lessons here: (1) Orange County really does not care much about carpetbagging; (2) Republicans in particular should not say racist stuff when they are in local government because it can come back and bite them.  Lots of people wouldn’t vote for Mansoor, the better candidate in this race, because of things that he said from when he was in Costa Mesa politics when pandering to nativist voters.  It’s a top 2 world now, folks; you never know when you’re going to need some Democratic votes.  Comport yourselves accordingly.

5th District Supervisor:  How did Lisa Bartlett get 54.3% of the vote against Robert Ming?  I really want to know.  Ming had all sorts of top-flight endorsements from the local Republican establishment; Bartlett had very little, but she still trounced him.  As I wrote back before the primary, I think that she got a rotten deal from the GOP establishment regarding her practices on the Transportation Corridor Authority, which is why OJB endorsed her.  If this makes her a more honest and independent Supervisor, that’s great.  (But how did she do it?)  I note that she was left out of the “Asian Republican Women” photo that has been making the rounds: that’s classy, ladies — or whoever is posing you.

Judicial Seat 14:  Kevin Haskins got 58.4% against KC Jones.  I really liked Jones’s presentations and I hope that he runs again — but apparently that Republican Party endorsement means a lot in this sort of race.

City Executive and Legislative

Aliso Viejo

For two seats: David Harrington got 30.7% of the vote; incumbent Phil Tsunoda got 25.3%; incumbent Carmen Cave got 17.4% and the others trailed.

Anaheim

For Mayor, Tom Tait absolutely crushed the competition, getting 54.3% of the vote.  Lucille Kring got 19.6% and Lorri Galloway 19.0%; Denis Fitzgerald trained with 7.0%.  Tait had faced a lot of attack ads, including a reputation-wounding ad from Tony Rackauckas and others from the police — and yet behold.  Kring did a lot of campaigning ; Galloway, according to her supporters, walked a lot of precincts and gave them her views on issues individually without broadcasting them publicly.  That’s what her supporters said she did — which is bizarre, as it invites the criticism that she was tailoring her message to each household and hoping that people didn’t compare notes.  I prefer to think that she just, for whatever reason, didn’t campaign.  Fitzgerald was a big winner in other races, having a stake in the Assessor’s race, Measure L, and opposing Measure N — each time ending up on the winning side.  But maybe he doesn’t need to run for Mayor so much.

For two seats on the City Council, as of today (Nov. 9) it’s still a little close to call.  Kris Murray leads James Vanderbilt by 597 votes; he leads Gail Eastman by 368.  Provisionals and paper ballots are pretty much all that’s left.  That will boost Dr. Jose Moreno, who is 3,881 votes behind Eastman, but clearly not enough.  It probably won’t make a difference among the ordering of the top 3 either.  Doug Pettibone and Jerry O’Keefe both polled well given that they had dropped out of the race.  Donna Acevedo polled about 300 votes ahead of JoJo Moreno, who ended up last.  Murray’s winning margin is entirely accounted for by 1000 VBM ballots that supported her but not Gail Eastman. Eastman will probably be a good sport about being stabbed in the back, though.

Brea

Money from downtown developer Dwight Manley, including an almost comical display of “No Murdock” red-circle-and-slash banners on Manley’s high-profile downtown properties, decided this election for three seats.  Mayor Brett Murdock had irritated Manley by not falling in line behind a proposal that would be very good for Manley and not so good for Brea taxpayers; Manley has gotten his revenge.  Republican Cecilia Hupp was the top vote-getter with 24.3%; Steve Vargas got 20.4%; Brea Treasurer Glenn Parker got 17.3%; and Murdock got 13.6%, with two others trailing.  This was a quintessential Dishonest Dave Gilliard campaign, built on lies and distortions — but whatever works, right?  Now we’ll see what Manley gets for his money.

Buena Park

Three seats went to incumbents Beth Swift and Steve Berry, who will be joined by Virginia Vaughn.  OJB’s candidates, Brian Beger and Greg Ferguson, finished 6th and 7th out of eight.  The good news: Baron Night didn’t win either.

Costa Mesa

Two seats open.  The biggest continuing story of the election at this point is who will join Katrina Foley on the dais next year.  Foley got 26.5% of the vote; as of this writing, evil incumbent Mayor Jim Righeimer has 21.4% and former Councilmember Jay Humphrey has 21.3% — a difference of 23 votes.  OJB, presuming that the provisional ballots (most of what remains) will favor Humphrey, has already called the election for him, but is not actually betting any money on it.  Lee Ramos has 15.0%; four other candidates trailed with about 5% or less.  Between this and the resounding defeat of Measure O, “Riggy Charter #2,” this was a resounding repudiation of Righeimer — but that won’t matter if he and his two allies remain in control of the Council.

Cypress

Had no information on the candidates before; have no information on them now, except that Paulo Morales, Jon Peat, and Stacy Berry will be on the dais.

Dana Point

OJB liked Chuck Rathbone and Jody Payne.  Rathbone finished last, but Payne is alive in one of the few races still undecided.  Endorsed Republican John Tomlinson came in first with 13.6% and Richard Viczorek came in second with 13.1%.  After that, though, Joe Muller is currently in third with 12.6%, 56 votes ahead of Payne and 99 ahead of Alan Wickstrom.  I seem to recall that we have some OJB readers in Dana Point — so perhaps the OJBump will work better for Payne than for Rathbone.  However, Dana Point is small enough that only about 100 of those provisional ballots (assuming that all cities are equally likely to have them, which they aren’t) would come from there, so there may be little opportunity for Payne to make up this margin.

Fountain Valley

All incumbents reelected, margin over the 4th place finisher was about 1500 ballots, or 4%.  Ho-hum.

Fullerton

The incumbents, Doug Chaffee and Greg Sebourn, were reelected with 25.0% and 20.3% of the ballots respectively.  However, the forces of retrenchment (currently represented on Council by Jennifer Fitzgerald) may be more powerful than one would think.  If either Larry Bennett, who finished third with 18.1%, or Rick Alvarez, who finished fifth with 11.1%, hadn’t run, my guess is that the other one would have gotten enough votes to overtake Sebourn.  Given the expectation that Chaffee was going to win, and that there was therefore only one seat truly open this time, I tend to think that not too many people voted for both Bennett and Alvarez, who were in direct competition.   Local favorites Jane Rands and Sean Paden finished fourth and sixth respectively with 12.8% and 10.2%.  Did Sebourn voters bullet vote him, split their second votes between them, or what?

Garden Grove

The Mayor’s race ain’t over yet.  (Well, it is for Albert Ayala, who finished third with 15.0% and should perhaps find another hobby, like running for U.S. President.)  Bruce Broadwater leads Bao Nguyen by 138 votes, or 0.6%.  Garden Grove probably has a higher than normal number of provisional voters, so while that gap is daunting it’s not necessarily insurmountable.  About 5% of the county’s ballots came from Garden Grove this time; if that holds up then GG can expect about 1900 of them.  If they all contain votes for Mayor, and none for Ayala, then Bao would need to lead 1019 to 881 to tie.  That’s only 53.63% — doable.  If we toss out 15% for Ayala and 5% blank on that race, then we’re left with 1520, in which case Bao needs to lead 829 to 691 to tie.  That’s only 54.54%.  Just for fun, if only 1000 of them count for one of the two of them, Bao needs 569 to 431 — that’s 56.9%.  Difficult, but still enough to keep OJB tuned in!

In the Council race, Phat Bui and Kris Beard won going away, with 23.6% and 23,1% of the vote respectively.  John O’Neill was third with 14.9%, which is a little more than 4000 votes behind Beard.

Huntington Beach

This is the single worst result of this election — yes, even worse than Kris Murray or Jim Righeimer winning.  The team of Connie Boardman and Joe Shaw was ousted by a “developer’s slate” that want to continue to build HB dense and ugly.  Barbara Delgleize led the eleven candidates with 14.5% of the vote, with Mike Posey, Billy O’Connell, and Erik Peterson coming in between 12.1% and 11.5%.  Boardman and Shaw finished fifth and seventh with 9.8% and 8.9%.  Two people who Vern considered reasonable Republicans — Lyn Semata and Hector Valdez — finished sixth and ninth, with 9.5% and 6.1%.  The environmental havoc likely to be wreaked by the majority is hard to imagine.  Hopefully it will outrage people enough for Connie and Joe to join Jill Hardy on the ballot in the Presidential election year.

Michael Gates also turned City Attorney Jennifer McGrath out of office with 56.9% of the vote.

Irvine

What’s settled in Irvine is that the second Agran Era is over.  Beyond that, all we have to work with is the odds.  Irvine cast a little over 7% of the votes in this past election.  If it has a proportional number of provisionals — and it probably has more than average — that would be about 2700 of them.

In the Mayor’s race, Steven Choi leads Mary Ann Gaido by 885 votes.  Katherine Daigle took 11.4% of the vote; if she did the same in provisionals that would lower the number of ballots to be split between the two leading candidates to about 2400.  Gaido would need to win 1643 of those 2400 votes to Choi’s 757.  That’s about 68.5%.  Hard to imagine, right?  Yes — with one proviso: in the UCI Campus precincts, Gaido beat Choi by a margin of 978 to 344.  (You can look it up in the Statement of Votes; it’s on page 819.)    And that is 74.0% even.  Now, how likely is it that all of the provisionals will have votes for Mayor and that those votes will be in proportion of the UCI precincts?  Not very likely — but expect this to be much closer than expected.  (As for Daigle — we don’t know who if anyone would have been the second choice of people who voted for her if she had not been in the race, but my bet is that more would have gone for Choi than for Gaido, although I expect that most just would have skipped it.)

In the City Council race, the situation is much more fluid.  Lynn Schott had been leading Jeffrey Lalloway among Republicans until Lalloway just surged ahead of her by a 25-vote margin of 15,491 (23.0%) to 15,466 (22.9%).  Melissa Fox is 358 votes behind Schott with 15,108 (22.4%).  Agran has 19.5%; Evan Chemers has 12.1%  Fox will probably do much better on provisional ballots than will Lalloway or Schott; the question is: how many provisionals with votes for any of them will there be?  About as many ballots contained votes for Council as for Mayor.  Let’s estimate that 2000 of the 2700 to be expected contain votes for either Lalloway/Schott (pretending for now that a provisional voter who supports one will support both) or for Fox.  (We’ll try a lower estimate in a moment.)  If there are 2000 provisionals, then to win Fox would need to lead by 1180 to 820 — or 59.0%.  In what I expect is student-dominated provisional voting in Irvine, that’s not unrealistic.  (In the UCI Precints, she led Lalloway by 966 to 251; Schott received 344.)  So in a two-way race with Lalloway, she’d be getting 79% if it were just student voters.  If there were 1000 provisionals naming her or Schott, she’s need to beat her 680 to 320 — and that’s only 68.0%.  If only 500 provisionals counted, she’d need 430 to 70 — and getting 86.0% might be a tad difficult.  But the percentage that qualify with her or Schott on the ballot won’t likely be that low, which means that she can still win this.  (With Lalloway instead of Schott, each of the hurdles mentioned above scales up by about 1% or so.)

La Habra

No race this year.

La Palma

Steve Hwangbo was reelected with 42.6% of the vote.  The race between late entry (she wasn’t even in our preview) Michele Steggell and Christine Barnes was quite close, 85 votes separated, but in La Palma that’s the difference between 29.5% and 27,9%, so this is not likely a “close race.”

Laguna Beach

Incumbents Kelly Boyd and Tony Iseman were both reelected with 23.1% and 22.9% of the vote.  Rob Zur Schmiede got the third seat with 22.7%.  Michele Hall was next with 14.3%.  Resume liar Jon Madison finished fifth of seven with 8.6%.  Our man Eli Grossman did not do well.

Laguna Hills

No race this year.

Laguna Niguel

For three spots, OJB’s candidates currently rank 4th, 5th, and 6th out of 6  (Our influence in the Niguel may be limited.)  But the guy in 4th place, Matt Clements, is only 34 votes behind John Mark Jennings — that’s 20.6% to 20.4% — so he still has a chance of joining Elaine Gennawey and Fred Minegar  on the dais.  Our excitement is dampened, however, by the fact that the only reason we favored Clements is that, unlike Jennings, he did not post his endorsements.  (If, like OJB, you wonder how Wendy Gabriella did in her home town, she got 33.5% of the vote, about 1.5% better than overall.  She did best in Silverado, then Aliso Viejo.)

Laguna Woods

This too has one of the county’s still undecided races.  Incumbent Bert Hack got 25.4% of the vote, but Rae Tso and Carol Moore are separated by just 16 votes, at 21.9% and 21.8%.  OJB knows nothing about either of them.  We apparently left Laguna Woods out of the ballot guide.  We do not know how that happened and apologize to all of our Laguna Woodsmen and Woodswomen.

Lake Forest

Scott Voigts (15.9%), Jim Gardner (15.1%), and Drew Hamilton (14.4%) took the prizes.  Tom Cagley, one of our semi-endorsed candidates, finished fourth with 13.5%, 337 votes back.

Los Alamitos

No race this year.

Mission Viejo

The most populous element of the fictional city of Nuevo Viejo had three seats open.  The two incumbents, Dave Leckness and Rhonda Reardon, finished fourth and fifth with 13.9% and 11.7% of the vote.  City Commissioners Ed Sachs and Wendy Bucknum finished second and third with 18.9% and 15.5% of the vote.  And coming in first?  It’s our endorsed candidate Col. Greg Raths!  OJB endorses a winner in South County!  YESSSSS!!!  Congratulations to our friend the Colonel; be humane in your leadership, sir!

Newport Beach

By the end of things, we only really cared about the fate of Roy Englebrecht, who did not do well.  The Execrable Dave Ellis slate swept and we shall not name them.  We understand that our truck drivin’ mike believes that they will destroy the city; if so, I invite him to come live in Brea — or closer by in Costa Mesa if Humphrey defeats Righeimer.

Orange

Pretty good results, actually.  Tita Smith was reelected as Mayor with 81.9% of the vote.  Kimberley Nichols was elected to Council with 28.5% of the vote, about 8% ahead of Joe Dumitru.  Fred Whitaker was reelected with 30.5% — but two out of three ain’t that bad!  (Unfortunately, two out of five ain’t that good — and that’s where I understand that things now stand on the City Council.)

Placentia

Change has come.  City Treasurer Craig Green defeated Joseph Aguirre for the second seat on City Council.  He will now form a coalition with Chad Wanke — who finished first — and Jeremy Yamaguchi to roll back detested policies of the previous Council majority.  I don’t know exactly what they have in mind, but if I worked for the City of Placentia I might freshen up my resume.

Rancho Santa Margarita

Here’s sort of a shock: Jesse Petrilla lost his Council seat.  He finished fourth out of seven, with 13.6%.  Jerry Holloway, Brad McGirr, and Mike Vaughn took the three seats with 18.4%, 18.3%, and 17.8% of the vote.  We ended up supporting the victors because Jesse Petrilla gives us hives.

San Clemente

This is just crazy: I read the ballot statements of the candidates for San Clemente’s three seats, did a little background research on them, and decided to endorse incumbents Tim Brown and Lori Donchak as well as City Commissioner Kathy Ward.  And they all won!  I am totally in tune with San Clemente voters!  Well, sometimes.  This once.

San Juan Capistrano

This was a very contentious race here in OJB town.  You can read about it on our Ballot Guide.  I started out supporting incumbents John Taylor and Larry Kramer and opposing Derek Reeve.  And then commenters come along and say “you can’t support Taylor and Kramer, they’re developers building this rotten hospice across the tracks from the hospital and they hired Dave Ellis.  You should support Reeve.”  Vern was convinced, so we supported Reeve.  Then it turns out that Reeve is a race-baiter.  So we dropped that.  By the end, I think that last thing we said was to bullet-vote Pam Patterson, who, as a constitutional attorney opposing corruption, would either be very bad or very good.  She came in first, with 17.7% of the vote.  (I presume that we’re mostly responsible for that.  Note to skally: that’s more light dry facetiousness.)  Next came Reeve (16.9%) and Kerry Ferguson (15.1%) who I understand to be aligned with Reeve.  Kramer had 11.5%; Taylor had 10.6%.  Two that I originally thought were pretty good —Rob Williams and Jan Siegel — finished sixth and seventh.   Two others trailed.  Good luck, SJC.  Just don’t mess up that lovely neighborhood near the train station and we’ll get along OK.

Santa Ana

Miguel Pulido beat Roman Reyna, 50.1% to 34.6%.  The incumbent Council members — Michele Martinez 52.2% in Ward 2, David Benavides (55.0% in Ward 4), and Sal Tinajero, (63.8% in Ward 6) — also all won.  Tinajero received the most votes by about 2,000, but that may be due to late-arriving mini-scandal regard his opponent.  As Martinez and Benavides have both already been the Presidential year candidates against Pulido, it should be Tinajero’s turn in 2016 — but it’s not clear that he’ll do it.  Among the Council members, he’s been the warmest towards Pulido recently (which still falls short of warm) and is on the outs with Benavides and Reyna, at a minimum.  I wonder how hungry Jose Solorio is going to be for a new gig by then.  Or if Lou Correa loses his bid for Supervisor….

Seal Beach

Ellery Deaton won in District 1 with 68.6% against two opponents.  Mike Varipapa received 56.6% in District 3.  The only remotely close race was in District 5, where Sandra Massa-Lavitt beat Anne Seifert with 53.8% of the vote.  OJB has no strong feelings about any of this.

Stanton

OJB does have strong feelings about this: Stanton blew it.  It reelected D. J. Shawver, Brian Donahue, and Rigoberto Ramirez with 23.0% to 24.2% of the vote, when Kevin Carr got 15.3% and Bryan Palomares got 13.6%.  And it passed the tax that the Council wanted on its impoverished residents.

Tustin

Both incumbents elected without challenge.  We refuse to report the vote totals because why did they even bother?

Villa Park

We’re getting tired.  Nelson, Colacott, Fascenelli.

Westminster

For Mayor, Tri Ta beat Andy Truc Nguyen with 85.1% of the vote.  I believe that that takes the prize this go-round.  For Council, Tyler Diep got 34.4% and Margie Rice got 29.9% to beat Chi Charlie Nguyen and Alin Hamade.

Yorba Linda

Old YLRRR got HMRRR’d.  Peggy Huang won a new seat with 24.3% and Tom Lindsay was reelected with 23.8%.  Jeff Decker came in third of six with 13.0%.  I suppose that this means another recall.  Fine with me — it creates jobs!

Next, in Part 3 — School Boards, Special Districts, and Local Ballot Measures!