Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Low Turnout Dooms Dave Cortese's Mayoral Hope

With an extremely low turnout of only 109,100 ballots casted,  Dave Cortese is losing the San Jose mayoral race to Sam Liccardo by 2%.   The most updated number shows that turn out in the general election is lower than in the June primary where there were 130,100 ballots.    Labor Unions still think that  their own Hispanic base and their last minute effort can turn the tide.  However, the trend is against Cortese all night long.  He is about 2,000 votes behind.

According to the Santa Clara County Registrar Office, there are still about 60,000 to 70,000 votes attributed to the mayoral race that have not been tallied.  Cortese is winning the Vietnamese-American heavily dominated districts - D7 and D4.    But he surprisingly is  losing in his own D8.


The Vietnamese-American community voted overwhelmingly for Tam Nguyen, an activist lawyer who was part of the recall Madison Nguyen effort, to represent them in San Jose D7.    Tam Nguyen is winning  by 9% with only 8,800 votes casted.   In the primary, there were over 10,500 people voted.  Even though there are still about 3,200 votes left to be counted, the trend is against his opponent all night long and for her to overcome a 9% deficit is not easy.

With Vietnamese-American voters compose of 35% of the electorate, if Tam Nguyen wins, the D7 will be controlled by Asian-American candidate for years to come.    There were 9 other Vietnamese-American candidates ran for various school board trustee seats.   Five won with large majority of the votes.

The biggest victory for the community of course is newly elected State Senator Janet Nguyen.  She will be the first highest elected Vietnamese-American in state legislature.  She won the 34th state senate seat.  A district that has been a Democratic seat.   This was the most closely watched race in the state with the local Democratic Party poured in over $3 million.   Nguyen raised $3.4 million while her opponent, Jose Solorio took in $2.6 million of direct contribution.   In the end,  Nguyen won in a landslide despite extreme dirty tactics by Labor Unions, trouncing Solorio 60% to 40%.   

 

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