12th State Senate seat becomes a cliffhanger, and it’s still not
official
The race between Rusty Areias and Jeff Denham has taken another
turn, this one giving the Salinas Republican a 2,057-vote lead.
12th State Senate seat becomes a cliffhanger, and it’s still not official
The race between Rusty Areias and Jeff Denham has taken another turn, this one giving the Salinas Republican a 2,057-vote lead.
As absentee votes were counted, Denham pulled ahead Wednesday afternoon – a week after election day — capturing 70,745 to Areias’ 68,688. Libertarian David Eaton grabbed 6,581 votes, or 4.4 percent – more than double the usual amount of votes cast for a third party.
As of Wednesday afternoon, an estimated 8,000 provisional and absentee ballots waited to be counted from Stanislaus County, where conservative voters gave Denham the edge, and Monterey County, where voters have sided with Democrat Areias. San Benito County voters also gave a 10-point margin to Areias.
“I wouldn’t put this to bed just yet,” said Phil Pauly, Denham’s campaign manager.
Likewise, Areias’ camp was optimistic.
“We’re not running out of road yet,” said Bob Sanders, campaign manager for Areias.
Wednesday afternoon, Sanders said his team was expecting a bump from provisional ballots, which tend to be heavily Latino. Provisional ballots are cast when someone moves and has a new polling place. They are counted after the absentee ballots that arrive on Election Day.
When it became clear that it was going to be one of the two tightest races at the state level, campaign representatives from both major party’s state headquarters staked out election offices in all five counties of the newly formed 12th State Senate District as ballots were counted.
On Friday four of them – two Democrats and two Republicans — peered somberly over the shoulders of San Benito election supervisors Lillian Pereira and Kim Hawk as the women validated signatures on provisional ballots. As a new vote count was taken, the election watchers raced to call their candidates with the results.
“This is the hottest race in the state,” said Democrat William Sanchez of Los Angeles, in between crunching numbers and placing calls from John Hodges’ elections office to party officials.
In the wee hours of the morning after the election, the point spread between the two diametrically opposed candidates was only half a tenth of a point: Areias lead by a mere 226 votes in the district that includes parts or all of five counties, including San Benito and half of Monterey.
Neither candidate is willing to throw in the towel, because the race has fluctuated madly since the first precincts were reported a week ago. At first Denham had the lead by 14 percentage points, then Areias gained and held the majority by a healthy margin. Areias’ lead dwindled down to a handful of votes, then Denham caught up, fell behind – and on and on.
Last Wednesday, when campaign workers discovered that some 21,000 absentee and provisional votes were still uncounted in Stanislaus County – which leans toward Denham — and another 9,000 had to be tallied in Monterey – heavily pro-Areias — no one on either side dared mention the word “concede.”
“The wild card in this is Monterey (County),” said Sanders. “This is obviously going to come down to the provisionals in both counties. The provisionals, we believe, will favor Areias. ”
On Wednesday afternoon, the Monterey elections office still had 330 provisional and 1,500 absentee votes to tally. Stanislaus County was still verifying signatures on provisionals but the amount to still tally is unknown. Election workers were not available to answer questions.
