On the day their former City Council representative pleaded no contest to sex abuse charges, San Jose District 3 residents moved closer to picking his successor.
Gabby Chavez-Lopez and Matthew Quevedo have jumped out in front, followed by Anthony Tordillos, Irene Smith, Adam Duran, Tyrone Wade and Phil Dolan, according to the first batch of voting results released Tuesday night by the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters.
While Tuesday’s special election final results remain up in the air, the City Council race will likely head to a runoff on June 24, with the crowded field preventing any of the candidates from receiving a majority of the vote.
Chavez-Lopez has received 30% of the vote, followed by 22.4% for Quevedo. However, Tordillos has received 20%, leaving him trailing Quevedo by 156 votes to get into the runoff.
The seven-person field is vying to replace disgraced former City Councilmember Omar Torres, who resigned from his seat on Election Day last year before changing his plea Tuesday that requires him to register as a sex offender and could impose a prison sentence of up to 24 years.
Torres’s scandal prompted District 3 residents to lobby for a special election — despite the multi-million dollar price tag — due to the increasing distrust in local government and residents’ push to have a say in choosing their next representative. While the City Council agreed to hold a special election, it also opted to fill the seat temporarily through an interim appointment process that resulted in engineer and businessman Carl Salas serving as the district’s representative until a winner of the election emerged.
Unless a candidate receives a majority of the votes, the two highest vote-getters from Tuesday’s election will move on to a runoff on June 24. The final tally will not be known for at least a week because mail-in votes will be eligible to be counted through April 15 as long as the envelopes were postmarked by April 8.
The ultimate winner of the District 3 seat — which represents downtown San Jose and its surrounding neighborhoods — could also play a huge role in determining how successful San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan is at implementing his policy agenda next year because of the thin voting advantage his bloc on the City Council currently holds.
Pundits had opined that the runoff was always the most likely scenario due to the large field and the number of strong candidates, making it a toss-up for who advanced to the next round of voting.
The leading contenders heading into Tuesday’s elections were Quevedo, Mahan’s deputy chief of staff, Chavez-Lopez, the executive officer of the Latina Coalition of Silicon Valley, Tordillos, an engineer at Google and the current chair of the city’s planning commission and Smith, a pro tem judge, and the most recent challenger to Torres in the 2022 election.
Quevedo’s policy platform largely mirrored the agenda Mahan laid out in his budget message, focusing on tackling the homelessness epidemic, increasing community safety, cleaning up neighborhoods, growing the economy and building more housing.
While Mahan has recently unveiled policy proposals that have garned more attention across the state and that some view as controversial, Terry Christensen, a professor emeritus at San Jose State and political expert backing Chavez-Lopez, said the affiliation has most likely buoyed Quevedo’s chances.
“I think it’s mostly positive because a lot of people like what Mayor Mahan is doing,” Christensen said. “The people who don’t like him were never going to vote for him anyway.”
Chavez-Lopez, labor’s preferred choice for the seat, centered her campaign around improving safety and cleanliness, increasing housing density and streamlining development, ensuring small business success and creating a vibrant, inclusive downtown core.
Meanwhile, Tordillos tried to differentiate himself from the current ruling class and disassociated himself from special interests and lobbyists as he prioritized homelessness, affordable housing development, public safety, and improving downtown vibrancy.
Quevedo, Chavez-Lopez and Tordillos also stood out from their peers in their ability to amass huge sums in campaign contributions.
While Smith did not have the same fundraising prowess, she has banked on a level of name recognition to get the word out about her campaign, which centered around bigger, faster, more cost-effective homelessness solutions, fiscal responsibility, spurring downtown business and improving the citizen input process.
Although the race had seemed cordial in the weeks leading up to Tuesday, political advertising recently become more negative, with either the candidates or independent expenditure committees backing them blasting their rivals in perhaps what could be a precursor to the types of attacks in the next round.
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