With nearly 10 percent more of the ballots cast in this year’s June primary now counted, judicial race challenger Luis Esparza has now eclipsed incumbent Judge Thomas R. Adams, a 50-year veteran of the bench.
Based on the most recent count — with as many as 35,000 more votes possibly yet to count — Esparza, a private attorney with a small practice and varied caseload practice, now has 230 more votes than Adams. In percentage terms, Esparza has 50.03 percent of the vote and Adams has 49.67 percent.
The votes were tight almost as soon as county elections officials started counting the ballots. But if Esparza were to beat a sitting judge, that would mark an exceptionally rare occurrence. Typically, judicial races are genteel and uncontested affairs with judges getting appointed by the governor as vacancies open up usually because of age. While many election contests are nominally nonpartisan in nature, judicial races come close to being that way.
Adams was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown back in Brown’s first term of office and has never left. Esparza is a declined-to-state candidate with quasi-libertarian leanings when it comes to party preference, but he won the endorsement of the county’s Republican Central Committee. Given the low-key nature of the public campaigns waged by both candidates and how little known both candidates are outside the narrow confines of courthouse circles, any endorsement is bound to have impact.
Esparza campaigned as being more representative of the community as a whole; Adams campaigned on his extensive record of judicial service and some of the innovations he pushed for. Esparza stated when he jumped into the race, he didn’t think Adams was going to run.
At that point, Adams, having been admonished by the state judicial council for reportedly throwing legal papers at an attorney, had told the state council he didn’t expect to run again. Adams also denied having thrown the papers as described in the council’s admonition.
With so many votes reportedly left to count, the outcome is hardly certain.
