[Updated: Tue., June 9, 2026, 10:45am]
With 43,000 additional votes counted in last week’s June primary, judicial race challenger Luis Esparza has officially defeated incumbent Judge Thomas Adams, who has served on the bench for 50 years.
As of the most recent count, Esparza, a private attorney with a one-person office, is 2,891 votes ahead of Adams. Last Friday, Esparza was only 230 votes ahead. With only around 1,300 votes left to count now, a 2,891-vote advantage at this late stage — the election was held last Tuesday — would be statistically impossible for Adams to reverse.
Not since the 1970s has a challenger upset an incumbent judge in Santa Barbara County. Esparza said he didn’t think Adams would be running for re-election when he entered the race, and he was backed by a hodgepodge of activists from disparate backgrounds. Supporting him were people with the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and former City Councilmember Jason Dominguez, who reportedly ran Esparza’s campaign. Also backing Esparza was the Republican Central Committee.
Adams had aroused the wrath of certain activists long associated with the Democratic Party and feminist circles — such as EJ Borah — who cited a letter of admonition Adams received from the statewide judicial council for conduct unbecoming of a judge. The council faulted Adams for throwing a 40-page legal document at a young public defender whom Adams claimed should have attempted to resolve the subject of that dispute with the prosecuting attorney first. He claimed he did not throw the document as charged but insists that he dropped it where he thought a table would be.
In the race for the 5th District supervisor, it appears that Ricardo Valencia and Mirabel Aguilera — both homegrown children of Mexican immigrants who represent different sides of the political aisle — will make it to the November runoff. Their respective leads over third-place finisher Cory Bantilan, who for the past 15 years served as 5th District Supervisor Steve Lavagnino’s right-hand man and district director, has only expanded since the last vote count recorded on Friday.
Bantilan, a reformed Republican in the time of Trump, now trails Santa Maria City Councilmember Aguilera — a decline-to-state candidate who the Republican Central Committee blessed by urging Republican voters to oppose Bantilan — by 370 votes. She in turn trails Valencia — a high school teacher, school board member, and a loud and proud progressive ― by 849 votes. Should these results hold steady, November’s runoff promises to be as down-and-dirty a political donnybrook as the 5th District has seen since the 1980s.
Otherwise, the new numbers change little. Tom Steyer still won the governor’s race countywide but by even larger margins, with Xavier Becerra coming in second.
Laura Capps and Gregg Hart — bulwarks of the local Democratic Party establishment — both won their races by overwhelming majorities, but Hart, an assemblymember, will have to face Republican Sari Dominguez again in the fall.
Representative Salud Carbajal beat Republican Bob Smith by 20,000 votes, but because of the state’s “top two” primary system, they will also face one another again this fall.
