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Cypress
Tentatively OJB-endorsed Anne Hertz and Frances Marquez prevailed easily. (Even our tentative endorsements pack a wallop!) DPOC endorsed only Marquez.
Dana Point
District 4
Mark Frost, with 62%, beat OJB-leaning Gary Newkirk.
District 5
Michael Villar, with both the OJB and DPOC endorsements, won 82% against Benjamin Tyler Bebee.
Fountain Valley
Glenn Grandis, with 21%, and Ted Bui, with 18.6%, beat Vern-and-posthumous Gus Ayer-endorsed Cheryl Brothers (17.1%) and Greg-endorsed former CA-39 candidate Mai Khanh Tran (16.7%) and three others. OJB is thwarted in FV!
Fullerton
District 1
OJB triple-endorsed Fred Jung leads Andrew Cho by 319 votes and 2.6%.
District 2
Ryan-endorsed Nick Dunlap leads Greg-endorsed Faisal Qazi by 20%. (Two stragglers combined for 22%. Yes, you can solve this using algebra!) I hope that Dunlap is a good as Ryan says he is!
District 4
Bruce Whitaker beat Aaruni Thakur by about 250 votes and 2.6%. A forecasted late blue shift of late votes never arrived. That means that Ryan sweeps Fullerton!
Garden Grove
Mayor
Only because of OJB’s (admittedly hesitant and partial — Greg hesitantly agreeing with an informed commenter while Vern almost but not quite leaning to Bui) endorsement, Steve Jones won the Mayor’s race with 61.6% — about a 33% margin over Phat Bui and two stragglers.
District 2
John O’Neill beat OJB-leaned Julie (Not the Bad) Diep by 820 votes and a bit over 7%.
District 5
Stephanie Klopfenstein beat OJB-endorsed Robert Tucker with a bit over 70%. (Because you wondered: it means “tapping/striking stone, as with a door knocker.)
District 6
Former Supervisor candidate and enthusiastic OJB-endorsee Kim Bernice Nguyen did better than nice, winning District 6 with over 75%.
Huntington Beach
Shock and Dismay! With three seats open, former professional wrestler UFC/Mixed Martial Arts champion and Pamela Anderson Jenna Jameson beach boy toy Tito Ortiz (whose real first name is apparently Jacob!?) got the most votes (42,214, or 14.83%) followed by OJB-endorsed Dan Kalmick (30,294, or 10.64%) and Natalie Moser (30,167, or 10.60%). She Who Must Not Be Endured Gracey VDMark is in fourth (23,351, 8.20%). OJB-super-endorsed Oscar Rodriguez is in fifth with (21,687, 7.62)%, and Matt Harper is in seventh (20,046, 7.1%) behind Brian Burley, leading eight other stragglers.
Oscar’s distant loss — about 8,500 votes behind Moser! — is a terrible blow with potentially lasting consequences for the city. His betrayal by so many of his slate-mates’ voters — when he’s the one who brought the leftist votes to Kalmick and Moser — may undercut future such alliances.
This race desperately needs a good autopsy — and it will receive one here. (It will require interviews, so this sounds like a job for Vern!)
Fullerton got measures S and U correct also.
Expect a lot of threats to public services and property as a result.
Well, what would you have Fullerton do now? They can’t cancel past pension obligations in the regular course of things. Should they commence the long-forecast bankruptcy?
(If so, they’d better clean up the FPD first, because they won’t be able to escape future “wrongful death” suits.)
Garden Grove –
you made me go back and check, I never said anything good about Steve Jones, a garden-variety kleptocrat and friend of Lou’s who even LOOKS like Curt Pringle (I can’t even remember what party the guy’s in.) BIG Poseidon lover.
And I was wrong, wrong, wrong about Kim B Nguyen, and you were originally right half a year ago when you called her a Lou Correa tool. Me and Donna fell in love with her when we heard her at the Supervisor-primary debate, she was so smart, progressive and energetic. I learn that it was all an act, and that she was there and in that race at Lou’s behest to try and take votes from Sergio and help Pulido make the primary – a plan that didn’t work. NOBODY in that Supe race was good in retrospect, just as well we kept Do. Kim came out late in this last race as a passionate champion of Avelino, hysterically pretending my Avelino song was racist. By the way, that went like this:
About KBN: Oh, crap. Well, Lou’s sponsorship doesn’t mean that she didn’t mean what she said in that speech. Her coming out for Avelino late in the game means that she did so under duress — probably from Lou’s Renfield, Claudio — just before an election where she needed his support. (Look it up, Claudio). I don’t think that that says much about what she’ll do on Council with 4 years left before her next election.
As for Jones: I considered this an “OJB endorsement” because Ryan was silent, you seemed equivocal about Bui and didn’t mention Jones either way, and I went along with the view of a commenter who had put in a lot of work evaluating the races and took a seriously dim view of Bui. (I remember thinking “this guy deserves to control at least one endorsement, so let’s make it this one.”) I’ve re-edited the to equivocate even more, but if you’d like to change it to be just my (and “Joshua’s” endorsement, that’s fine.
Huntington Beach –
I’m afraid you have one-time accidental porn star Pamela Anderson mixed up with actual professional porn star Jenna Jameson – it’s the latter who lived with Tito for a while. Easy mistake, they look real similar, and both Jenna and Pamela were big PETA supporters!
I have a call out in Surf City for someone to provide a Tito Watch column here.
The council results were not surprising or that bad. Of course the shiny celebrity was gonna come in first, but two decent Democrats filled out the bill. And Oscar was the toughest climb, the least likely to make top three, because he is the best and also outspoken, and also Mexican! He’ll be back and he’s not going anywhere.
I’m afraid that you’re right. I’ve re-edited the text, leaving strikeout type as my badge of shame. (Damn, now Chumley is going to make fun of my relative lack of knowledge of porn stars and noveau-sport fighters!)
I also munged the fact that — despite appearances — he was not a professional wrestler but an UFC/MMA champion.
The two Democrats elected were decent, as you say, but Oscar is and was outstanding. That’s a big enough difference to make me grieve for our old hometown. Saying that someone lost because he was non-famous Mexican and an outspoken critic of injustice, doesn’t exactly salve the wound.
By the way, rumblings are that Kimberly Carr may want to run for Supervisor — why, why, why??? — so that would likely take the Council from 4-3 to 5-2. On the other hand, Posey and one of the other Reeps also wants to run, so that would tie it at 3, possibly forcing an election.
Kim Carr running for Supe would “likely” reduce the Dems on Council? Only if she won, which does not seem likely. Posey is running, but Erik Peterson dropped out to back Moorlach.
Yes — I should have made the “if she won” explicit in the “whywhywhy”.
Posey potentially could win the seat, though. And candidates from Newport Beach and elsewhere are probably coming in too. Democrats will, I hope have only one candidate — and I don’t think it should be Kim Carr. How about Harley Rouda?
While I don’t mind Moorlach on the State Senate (as a scold and scourge), I’m less happy about his being on the Supes. But better him than Posey (or NB’s Will O’Neill), I suppose.
Harley lives out of the district, too far south, in Laguna Beach. I can’t think of a real good Democrat offhand who could win in that district. I was telling Mike Fox that Melissa would make a good Supervisor, but Wagner’s not up for years.
I should have added that for me the worst thing — even worse than Oscar’s loss — was Beastlie VDMark’s finishing so high that she has to be considered a front-runner for any special election they might hold (as well as for 2022.) I expect that Tito/Jacob would endorse her, but I’d think that Delglieze, Posey, or Peterson would prefer not to risk that result in a special. Could be wrong!
Anyway, I don’t want to roil the water in Surf City, but: maybe I just don’t realize how much sway Carr has district-wide, but I would think that she’d have a hell of a lot less than, oh, Gina….
Bushala swept Fullerton. 4-0. Another 2020 shutout.
True. I’m not sure why he supported Fred Jung, but I’m glad that he did.