As I walked into the John Avalos campaign party in Roccapulco around 11 pm, Sup. David Campos told me, “It’s the best party in town!” And he was right. The speeches were just getting underway on the stage and there was a palpable energy in the large crowd even though many of them had been out campaigning since early in the morning. Read more »

With 100 percent of the vote in -- sort of -- the election is shaping up this way:

Barring a real surprise, Ed Lee will win a four-year term.

Ross Mirkarimi is positioned 10 points ahead of Chris Cunnie, and ought to survive the RCV count to win the sheriff's race.

George Gascon is too far ahead to catch.

The turnout was a miserable 31 percent.Read more »

And it doesn't look good for anyone except Ed Lee.

John Avalos has done really well -- he's in solid second place, almost 10,000 votes ahead of Dennis Herrera, who is in third. But he's also 15,000 votes behind Lee -- and that margin is entirely the absentee vote. Lee was 20,000 votes ahead in the absentees; if Avalos had been able to stay close in the early-vote race, he'd be very competitive right now. But it's going to be hard for him, or anyone else, to make up the vote difference.Read more »

Dennis Herrera remains hopeful. “I want to see how the next round of votes goes,” he said.

But there was one thing that he was clear about: he does not like ranked choice voting. “I love the runoff system,” he said. “I have differences with candidates that need to be aired and it’s really hard to do it in a ranked-choice system." Read more »

Well, we can call the election on most of the initiatives.The two bond measures, A and B, are going to win handily. Prop. C and Prop. D are both going to win, but Prop. C is going to have more votes -- and thus be the one that takes effect.

I think the sales tax (Prop. G) is going down; the election-day vote is almost even yes and no, and it needs two-thirds to win. Not going to happen.

The "neighborhood schools" measure is going to lose. So are Props. E and F.

Oh: George Gascon will be the district attorney for the next four years. Not even close.

The next round of numbers are in, and the first clear trend is the Ross Mirkarimi is surging. Mirkarimi is 36 percent, to 28 percent for Miyamoto -- but when you back out the absentee vote, he's getting 45 percent of the election-day votes. Cunnie is going to finish second. If turnout is good, Mirkarimi's in very good shape.Read more »

Leland Yee arrived at his campaign party defiantly hopeful despite being in fifth place. “The night is still young, and we continue to wait for the results,” he told reporters outside.

Then he went inside to a party packed with young volunteers and told them: “I’ve never had a better crew of individuals -- and a younger crew of individuals -- than in this election.” He said his campaign accomplished a lot: “No longer will San Francisco be run by machine politics. No longer will the power brokers run City Hall.”

We’re not sure how he arrived at that conclusion.

This one's going to be interesting. In my hasty first post I wrote that Chris Cunnie was trailing Mirkarimi, but in fact, the second-place candidate is Paul Miyamoto. That's interesting because I didn't think Miyamoto could win -- but he's obviously getting some benefit from the strong Asian vote. I figured Cunnie was the real threat to Mirkarimi, and I still think he is -- but Mirkarimi did well enough in the absentees that he's probably going to get a fair number of Miyamoto's second-place votes.Read more »

For starters, they show that turnout is going to be low. Some people predict that the absentees will represent almnost half the votes cast; if that's the case, then total turnout will be around 30 percent. I think that's low -- but it's a safe bet that fewer than half the registered voters have gone to the polls.

If the low turnout trend continues, then Ed Lee's lead is insurmountable.Read more »

The absentees are in, and it's no surprise that Mayor Ed Lee is in the lead. In fact, he's way in the lead -- he's got 39 percent of the 67,000 absentees. I expected him to have a big advantage here, since he did a lot of early GOTV.

Worth noting: John Avalos, the most progressive of the major candidates, is in second in the absentees. That's a very good sign for the Avalos campaign. But Lee is almost 20,000 votes ahead of Avalos and Dennis Herrera, and that, folks, will be very hard to make up.

The district attorney's race is over; George Gascon has won.Read more »