Kristen Sneddon Wins Santa Barbara Mayoral Race

With only a smattering of votes left to be counted in this Fall’s midterm elections, Santa Barbara mayoral candidate Kristen Sneddon has amassed a statistically insurmountable lead over her chief mayoral rival, councilmember Eric Friedman.

Friedman, a nine-year councilmember famous for spinning late night soliloquies full of historical references and quotations, conceded defeat earlier in the day.  “I’ve been better and I’ve been worse,” Friedman said. “But I congratulated Kristen and thanked her and wished her well.” 

The number of votes left to be counted, he said, did not open wide enough statistically to credibly contemplate a possible victory. “At the end of the day, I’m grateful to be able to have run for office in a city where voters took the issues as seriously as they did and studied our positions as hard as they did here,” he said.  

Kristen Sneddon, also a nine-year councilmember, will be sworn in as the city’s next mayor this January.  The race was neck-and-neck since last Tuesday night when the polls closed, first with Friedman ahead by a few hundred votes and then with Sneddon catching up a couple days later and then passing him. 

As of this Thursday afternoon. Sneddon had expanded her margin of victory to 579 votes. Calibrated in percentage points, Sneddon is poised to become the city’s next mayor with 46.23 percent of the vote with Friedman trailing close behind with 44.58 percent. Former school board member Wendy Sims-Moten took 6.39 percent and Matt Kilrain .387 percent.

With Sneddon as the city’s next mayor, the council dais will now tip decidedly to the progressive left. When all the victorious candidates are sworn into office this January, Sneddon will be joining three newly elected candidates Ian Baucke, Gabe Escobedo and Devon Wardlow. All four strongly support the idea of a rent stabilization ordinance, though Wardlow has expressed serious reservations of the specific proposal that the council recently adopted. They will be joining a council on which councilmembers Oscar Gutierrez and Wendy Santamaria — both also strong supporters of the adopted rent stabilization measure.

By contrast, councilmember Friedman — like Sneddon a lifelong Democrat — has opposed any variant of rent stabilization. As a result, his campaign was generously bankrolled by property management and real estate interests. While his campaign raised far more than Sneddon’s did, Sneddon — endorsed by the Democratic Central Committee — seems poised to ride the mid-term’s Big Blue Tsunami to victory. 

Based on cursory analysis, Sneddon turned the race around thanks to the later and last-minute ballots; conventional campaign wisdom and anecdotal observation both strongly indicate these ballots hewed decidedly in Sneddon’s favor, part of the widespread national repudiation of Donald Trump and his MAGA brand of politics that made last week’s mid-terms so transformational an event. 

Ironically or perhaps coincidentally, it was Trump in 2016 who galvanized Sneddon to first run for office. A City College geology professor, Sneddon expressed outrage at Trump’s contemptuous brand of climate science denialism. She believed in science, she said at the time, only in the context of a wild-haired notion. 

Back then, she effectively crashed the Democratic Party, but with strong support from the likes of former State Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson, county supervisors Laura Capps and former Santa Barbara Mayor Helene Schneider, not to mention the Democratic Women’s Committee and the Santa Barbara Women’s Political Committee, influential political organizations then as they are now. In this race, however, neither of these organizations endorsed Sneddon or any of the candidates running for mayor. With four candidates in the race, it was explained, neither Sneddon nor Friedman could amass the 60 percent majorities the organizations required. 

On the campaign trail, Sneddon once again sounded the alarm over climate change and sea level rise but also objected strongly to the heavy-handed strong-armed tactics deployed by ICE agents as part of Trump’s second term campaign to deport as many immigrants as possible. Friedman — strongly endorsed by his former boss  Congressmemember Salud Carbajal Salud Carbajal the most prominent Latino politician in Santa Barbara County — stuck more to issues of governance and the nuts and bolts of budgets and budget reserves. 

But even with the Blue Tsunami, the results were exceedingly close. Two of the council’s signature achievements — the State Street Master Plan and the Rent Stabilization Ordinance–have sparked referendum signature gathering drives by opponents. Assuming that both efforts have secured the required number of signatures from city residents who are registered to vote, both will soon become the focus of knock-down drop-dead referendum battles in the months ahead.

Sneddon said she is looking “forward to getting to work” with her new colleagues on the council.

“We have a lot to do and we’ve got a great team to do it,” she said. “I want to thank every person who voted in this election. Every vote, no matter who it was for, was a vote for democracy and this record turnout shows how much we care.  Each candidate for mayor has a deep love and commitment to this community and I am sure we will each continue to work together in the future.”