The hotly contested race for Oakland was called yesterday for Jean Quan, a former City Council member whom The Bay Citizen described as “hard-working but less-than-exciting”.
Quan won the race against Ron Dellums after the city’s ranked-choice voting system was fully tallied. According to The Bay Citizen, voters are able to put down a first, second and third-choice on their ballot, which are considered in the final vote tallies if no candidate obtains 50% of the electorate. After election night, Quan had a nine-point deficit behind opponent Don Perata, who found a loophole in the campaign finance laws to vastly outspend his opponents.
Political observers said the “anybody but Don” movement — voters who were suspicious of Perata’s ethics after a five-year corruption probe by the FBI — helped carry Quan to victory and keep Perata off ballots as a second choice.
“She ran a very focused campaign to be the second-place candidate” for a lot of voters, said Jim Ross, who ran third-place finisher Rebecca Kaplan’s campaign. “She never spoke ill of anyone except Don Perata, and she really became the leader of the “not Don Perata” sentiment in Oakland. And that’s how she became everybody’s second choice.”
It will be interesting to see how Quan fares after winning by such a narrow margin (less than a percentage point, after the ranked-choice votes were included in the final tallies), and particularly whether Quan will suffer difficulties having won by a majority of “second-choice votes” — hardly a mandate from voters.
Quan’s victory is the second Asian American “firsts” out of the Bay Area this election cycle: with Gavin Newsom’s victory as lieutenant governor, I wrote last week how David Chu will be San Francisco’s first Asian American acting (or appointed) mayor. It’s exciting to see both men and women making Asian American history this elction cycle!
