Wow
Despite many late absentee ballots and provisional ballots left to be counted, here are my midnight observations:
1. Mary Flynn and Scott Gruendl will maintain the top two spots. Now the big question is whether Tom Nickell can hold onto his 40 vote lead over Mark Sorensen for the third seat. I do not think incumbent Dan Herbert can overcome his 729 vote deficit behind Nickell once all the ballots are counted.
2. It's also too close to call between Maureen Kirk and Steve Bertagna. There's a 234 vote margin which is still within striking distance for Bertagna to overtake Kirk, but my bet is that she holds onto her lead.
3. My biggest surprise is how badly Anthony Watts fared. I felt that Andrea Lerner Thompson and Kathy Kaiser would fight for the third seat, but both of them might join incumbent Rick Rees as winners. Watts is behind Lerner Thompson by 736 votes and Kaiser by 763 votes, which is a significant margin. But since the school district is larger than the City voting base, there might be enough uncounted votes for him to catch up. I doubt it, but it's possible.
4. If the News & Review endorsed Nickell, I suspect he'd be up by 300+ votes over Sorensen considering how many more votes Flynn and Gruendl currently have over incumbent Herbert. Right now, Flynn received a whopping 2,227 votes more than incumbent Herbert, while Gruendl received 1,883 more votes that his soon-to-be former colleague Herbert.
5. But increasingly, newspaper editorial endorsements have less influence on our local elections. If the City Council and Supervisor races hold up, the E-R editors will probably wonder why more voters aren't in agreement with them.
And not surprisingly, some of my predictions held on and others were off the mark.