Is a Runoff Election on Horizon for 1st District Supervisor’s Race?

One week after last Tuesday’s March primary election, the outcome remains uncertain in the race between incumbent 1st District Supervisor Das Williams — standard-bearer for the Democratic, environmental progressive camp — and challenger Roy Lee, a Carpinteria city councilmember and restaurant owner. As of this Tuesday night, Lee, also a Democrat, had an edge over Williams of 510 votes. 

County election workers have cautioned that it could be several weeks before the final votes for this year’s all-but-entirely mail-in ballot election are counted, and it could be until Thursday before the fate of the 1st District race is apparent. Should Lee maintain his lead, this will go down as an epic, if unexpected, upset.

One of the biggest festering unknowns is how many ballots cast by 1st District voters are there still to be counted. Williams’s campaign manager Spencer Brandt estimated there were 9,000 as of Monday. He concluded that if Williams were to take 52 percent of those ballots — mailed in to county elections no later than last Tuesday — he could catch Lee and hold onto his seat. Brandt declined to speculate as to how Williams — an experienced politician renowned for his chops as a campaign strategist — could be so vulnerable to Lee, a well-liked political neophyte. 

“I’ll be doing my Monday-morning quarterbacking once it’s Monday morning,” Brandt said. “Right now, it’s still Sunday night.” 

Brandt said Williams’s campaign knocked on 15,000 doors, made 51,000 phone calls, and sent out six mailers. Some have suggested Williams might have underestimated Lee and did not spend all the money he raised. 

Not clear, according to Brandt, is how many of the still-to-be-counted votes were cast by 1st District voters and how many were cast elsewhere in the county, or the party breakdown of these voters and what neighborhoods they came from. 

Traditionally, the Democratic Central Committee has specialized in last-minute get-out-the-vote drives among otherwise low-propensity voters living in higher-density working-family or student neighborhoods. This year, however, there was a dearth of excitement in top-of-the-ballot races, with President Joe Biden’s nomination a preordained outcome among Democratic voters and Donald Trump’s among Republicans. 

Brandt said turnout in the 1st District was 44 percent — not nearly as low as the 23 percent first reported Tuesday night but still 20 percent lower than it had been four years ago during Williams’s race against Laura Capps.

Given the closeness of the outcome, there remains more than merely a theoretical possibility of a runoff election between Williams and Lee in November. In the context of a two-person race, this would be highly unusual. A runoff is required when neither of the candidates secures 50 percent of the vote plus one. Given that a small but significant number of voters opted to cast ballots for write-in candidates, it’s conceivable — albeit unlikely — that neither Williams nor Lee reaches the 50 percent threshold.