How Oakland’s tight mayoral race may reach the finish line ...Middle East

OAKLAND — Loren Taylor and Barbara Lee are locked in a tight race to be the next mayor of Oakland, a special election that has politically divided the city — including on clear geographic lines — and which may not be decided for weeks.

Taylor, a former city councilmember, held a 51% to 48% ranked-choice lead on election night over Lee, the former East Bay congresswoman — about a 1,100-vote margin.

Alameda County election officials tallied 49,000 votes on Tuesday night, and on Wednesday they estimated that about 42,000 additional ballots still need to be counted. An unknown number of ballots mailed by election day have not yet arrived.

Elsewhere on the ballot, policy analyst Charlene Wang held 50% of first-place votes in a race to fill an Oakland City Council vacancy, while voters were favoring by 64% a sales tax intended to ease the city’s budget crisis.

The outcome isn’t final in the council race, which would fill the city’s District 2 that represents Chinatown, Jack London Square and areas around Lake Merritt such as Eastlake and the San Antonio neighborhood.

The mayoral race, which featured a total of 10 candidates, is fully up for grabs.

How Oakland’s new mayor will ultimately be elected

The next set of results are expected to be released Friday, and further vote counts will be announced every Friday after that. That may sound like a long wait, but Alameda County’s top election official said fewer result drops actually help his team count faster.

Stopping the count — that is, pausing the vote-processing machines — to post results online more frequently would disrupt an extensive tallying process, said Tim Dupuis, the county registrar of voters, in an interview.

“Imagine me putting 42,000 envelopes in front of you and telling you to slice each of them open and pull out what’s inside,” Dupuis said Wednesday, attempting to demonstrate the scale of work ahead for his office.

It could be at least a couple weeks before the race is decided. Dupuis has a full 30 days after April 15 to certify the election, but he said Oakland city officials can request for it to happen earlier if the outcomes are no longer in question.

Deja vu?

The first returns on Tuesday night gave Taylor some more breathing room, but Lee’s voters had narrowed the gap by night’s end.

For many voters, the trajectory might feel like “deja vu,” as Noah Finneburgh, a former campaign consultant for ex-Mayor Sheng Thao, put it on election night. Thao overcame an early deficit to Taylor in the 2022 race, surging past him in later returns to win.

It is harder to predict any clear trend, however, from the results that are available this time around. The second batch of about 4,200 votes, which favored Lee, exclusively represented ballots cast in person at polling places on election day.

The first batch, which gave the edge to Taylor, were entirely ballots submitted by mail. Ballots cast at polling places are now fully tallied, meaning every new set of results going forward will be either mailed votes or those dropped into ballot boxes.

In other words, there’s no definitive understanding of whether ballots mailed later will side with either Lee or Taylor.

Where Lee and Taylor are getting their votes

It’s still early, but already a major theme of the election is the clear divide in where Lee and Taylor’s respective voters live.

Across the first 49,000 votes, Lee is leading in precincts across the West Oakland, the city’s downtown and the large swath of town east of Lake Merritt — all the way to the flatlands near the San Leandro border.

Taylor’s support is much more concentrated in the Oakland hills, where typically wealthier and more politically moderate communities see far higher voter turnout than in lower-income neighborhoods. He is also leading in a couple of District 2 precincts south of the lake.

The picture of the race is incomplete with so many more ballots left to tally. And county election officials have no answer to a key question of which areas the remaining votes were cast from.

Will ranked-choice votes shape the outcome?

Soon after this news organization reported last week on a lack of clear ranked-choice alliances in the mayoral race, Lee announced a slate of herself and fellow candidates Suz Robinson, Renia Webb, Elizabeth Swaney, and President Cristina Grappo.

None of the other candidates in the 10-candidate race secured 2% of first-place votes in early returns. But with the margin between Taylor and Lee so thin, vote transfers from the others running could still make a difference.

Lee is outflanking Taylor in vote transfers from Webb and Tyron Jordan, the respective fourth- and second-place candidates. Taylor is getting more votes than Lee from third-place Mindy Pechenuk.

Those could play dividends, but it’s still way too early to say how much.

Shomik Mukherjee is a reporter covering Oakland. Call or text him at 510-905-5495 or email him at [email protected].

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