Now that our primary is over, I thought it might be fun to go over some of the local races and take a look at why our Democrats fare so well in elections. First of all we are very lucky as Democrats to have such great candidates, and as the results of the primary show, the voters know how wonderful our office seekers are as well.

In San Jose we had three contested city council races, districts 2, 8 and 10. In district two there were five active candidates and one person who was still on the ballot but had suspended her campaign. Out of the five active candidates, only one was a Democrat, Ash Kalra, and he placed first with 40 percent of the vote. Now comes the interesting part : )

Second place went to.......... Jackie Adams (though barely as of this post she is ahead by 12 votes), another good Democrat. What is interesting here is that Jackie suspended her campaign for personal reasons, and did nothing by way of campaigning, not one thing, yet she ended up in second place, ahead of every Rep who was running. One of the Reps, Ram Singh, actively campaigned, but in his case no amount of campaigning was going to change the fact that he was one of the worse candidates ever to run for office (the very worst being Hon Lien).

Ram Singh, while informed on water issues, had little to no knowledge of any other city issues, procedures or pressing problems. Rumor has it that when Singh was asked about a current land deal in which Lew Wolff would build a soccer stadium in exchange for San Jose rezoning industrial land in Edenvale to housing, Singh reportedly had no knowledge of this issue. Hint to Singh: Read the Mercury once in a while.

According to the San Jose City Attorney, if Jackie Adams remains in second place her name must be on the ballot in November, which means that Kalra will most likely be our D2 city council person! Good job Ash, you worked hard, the voters love you, the Mercury endorsed you and we are looking forward to your leadership on the San Jose City Council.

District 8 is a bit more complicated, however once again Dems rule the results. There were two strong Dems in this race, Craig Mann and Rose Herrera. Mann was our endorsed candidate and he came in third. Rose Herrera came in first, and Pat Waite, a Rep, came in second after spending $60,000 of his own money.

Given that the runoff will be in November, and given that the combined vote total for Mann and Herrera are well above Waite's numbers, I expect to see yet another good Dem elected to San Jose's City Council.

Who is Pat Waite? Well he has been involved in many local organizations, mostly religious, not one city commission, no other elected office, no experience in working with city government, basically someone with a whole lot of money and time looking for a way to inject their agenda in San Jose.

I realize that I didn't touch the Supervisor races, and will take a look at those in a future post, but the bottom line there is that we have runoffs that feature ALL Dems! Not one of the Reps running was able to muster enough votes to even get into the runoff.

Have a great weekend.