I just got off of the phone with Tony Strickland. Needless to say, he is a bit anxious, as this race has ended up being not only the most expensive legislative contest this election cycle, but now it is the closest.
What’s the status of things? Well, FR readers probably know that this sprawling district is mostly in Ventura County, with a big portion of it also being in Santa Barbara County, and a sliver of it is in Los Angeles County.
Generally, Strickland performed better in Ventura County, and Jackson did better (by a slightly larger margin) in Santa Barbara County. In the tiny LA portion, which is up in the very conservative Santa Clarita area, Strickland performed much better.
Today, most of the outstanding absentee ballots in Santa Barbara were counted. The effect of this was to leave Jackson with a roughly 250 vote lead over Strickland. Between remaining absentee ballots and provisional ballots, there are probably around 7,000 votes left to cast in Santa Barbara County.
In Ventura County, it sounds like there are probably somewhere around 50,000 ballots left to count, and it’s really hard to tell what is left in Los Angeles County (though realistically it couldn’t be more than a few thousand at most).
Extrapolating from all of this information, including the much larger number of ballots left to count in the areas of the district where Strickland performed better… Well, let’s just say I would rather be Strickland than Jackson…
That said, the Democrats have lots of lawyers in Ventura County, and will invariably try to muck up the works. Let’s keep our fingers crossed for Tony!
Santa Barbara County will count its remaining absentee ballots over the weekend, and will start counting their provisional ballots on Wednesday. Ventura County is taking the weekend off, but starting Monday they will start to count the remaining votes…
This won’t be over for a good number of days yet…
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