After the final tally came in on Friday, Republican Assemblymember Sam Blakeslee didn’t manage to cross the 50 percent threshold needed to give him the District 15 Senate seat outright. There was a brief window last week, as workers sorted through the last 17,000 mail-in and provisional ballots, when it was statistically possible for him to clinch it, but by Friday, the final count gave him 49.49 percent to Former-District 27 Assemblymember John Laird’s 41.73 percent. Blakeslee will face Laird, and long-shot candidates Jim Fitzgerald and Mark Hinkle, in an Aug. 17 runoff.
Independent Fitzgerald took 5.88 percent and Libertarian candidate Hinkle won 2.89 percent of the pie, and it’s hard not to notice that if those votes had gone to Laird, he would have sailed into the seat with 50.5 percent.
The candidates carried the parts of the weirdly shaped district as expected—Laird prevailed in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, while Blakeslee took San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara. The part of Santa Clara County in District 15—including bits of Los Gatos, Almaden, Saratoga and Monte Sereno—considered to be a bit of a swing district, ultimately swung slightly for Blakeslee. And while Laird picked up strong Santa Cruz support, the turnout was the lowest of all five counties—only 27.85 percent as opposed to 37.87 in San Luis Obispo.
“For the run-off election we’ll finally have a level playing field … without an election date devised by the Governor to confuse voters,” wrote Laird in a statement released Friday afternoon. “We now have time to take our message to voters and engage in a serious debate about the issues facing California and the 15th Senate District.” The key word there is “debate”—Laird said before June 22 that his opponent would not appear jointly with him, a luxury he said he would not allow Blakeslee in the lead up to the run-off.
Sacramento will be watching the race closely, as a win for Laird means the Democrats would be a single vote away from a supermajority in the state Senate.
