With 10,000 additional ballots counted since the end of this Tuesday’s mid-term election, Santa Barbara mayoral candidate Eric Friedman’s lead over rival Kristen Sneddon has narrowed slightly but significantly , dropping from 479 at the end of election night down to 374 this Thursday afternoon at 3 pm.
At this rate, it could be a while longer before the city’s mayoral contest — pitting two sitting councilmembers, both Democrats, against each other — is decided. Given that the next release of voting results won’t be till Tuesday, November 10, at 3 p.m., this coming weekend could prove long and agonizing for both Sneddon and Friedman, not to mention those for whom the identity of the new mayor is a matter of pressing concern.
At this stage, 45 percent of the total possible ballots in the city’s mayoral race have been counted. That’s up from 35 percent on election night. With more than about 30,000 city ballots outstanding, political handicappers and prognosticators speculate it’s within the realm of mathematical possibility that Sneddon — backed by the Democratic Party — could surpass Friedman. But that assumes the current trend favoring Sneddon holds steady. Where that’s concerned, the trend-lines are a little mixed.
On one hand, the three City Council candidates backed by the Democratic Party — Devon Wardlow, Ian Baucke, and Gabe Escobedo — all saw very slight drops in their margin of victory, though they all remained safely and uncatchably ahead. On the flip side, Fifth District Supervisors candidate Ricardo Valencia — an outspoken progressive backed by the Democratic Party — saw his lead over rival Maribel Aguilera — a declined-to-state candidate backed by North County business oil and ag interests, not to mention the Republican Party — rise from 1.4 percent to 4 percent. The race between Sneddon — whose values sway to the progressive side of the aisle — and Friedman — a middle-of-the-road Democrat backed by his former boss Congressmember Salud Carbajal and by downtown real estate and business interests — appears to be the tightest mayoral contest within living memory. The other two mayoral candidates — Wendy Sims-Moten and Matt Kilrain — attracted 1,900 votes between the two of them, taking 5.8 percent and 2.4 percent of the ballots counted thus far respectively.
