OAKLAND — Election night results showed former Councilmember Loren Taylor holding a slim advantage over retired Congresswoman Barbara Lee in the race to become Oakland’s next mayor, though thousands more ballots tallied in the coming days could shift the outcome in either direction.
Across 49,000 ballots counted on Tuesday night, Taylor had 51% to Lee’s 49% in ranked-choice votes — a razor-thin margin that further revealed the split politics of a city at a crossroads. The overall turnout represented just below 20% of Oakland’s registered voters.
Charlene Wang held 50% of first-place votes in the race to fill a vacancy on the Oakland City Council, while the early returns on election night showed voters favoring by 64% a sales tax measure that could help ease the city’s financial crisis.
The mayoral race was far tighter — and is expected to be for days. Alameda County officials do not expect to release the next set of results until Friday.
Taylor, whose promise of more pragmatic leadership has helped him measure up against the political power of the city’s labor unions, was cautiously optimistic in a speech Tuesday night at his campaign watch party in downtown Oakland.
“It’s important that we count every vote,” Taylor said. “Democracy will prevail in Oakland and beyond.”
Lee, seen as a stabilizing force for a city in a crisis of leadership, struck an optimistic tone Tuesday night in her own speech to supporters.
“We all know this is going to be a long week, but we’re doing very well,” said Lee, imploring her supporters to remain “very vigilant.”
The special election marked the culmination of a five-month period of transition for Oakland, where 60% of voters removed former Mayor Sheng Thao from office last November.
Taylor — who narrowly lost to Thao in the 2022 election — would complete her term until November 2026 if he is elected over Lee, a progressive icon and veteran of Congress whose political gravity had widely been seen as too strong for any challenger to overcome.
“We came through a lot in the last 2.5 years,” Taylor told his supporters. “But God saw us through it, because my story is not finished yet. Because your story is not finished yet. Because Oakland’s story is not finished yet.”
Taylor and Lee were widely seen as frontrunners in the 10-candidate race. No other candidate had obtained 2% of the vote in returns posted by Tuesday evening.
In the six-candidate race for a City Council seat, it was a battle between two policy analysts. Wang led Kara Murray-Badal. Harold Lowe was in third.
The winner would fill the council seat in District 2, which spans Chinatown, Jack London Square and areas near Lake Merritt, including the Eastlake and San Antonio neighborhood.
The office was left up for grabs after Nikki Fortunato Bas left the council to become an Alameda County supervisor after last November’s election.
The mayoral race carried high stakes, with hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by labor unions backing Lee and by wealthy tech and finance executives supporting Taylor.
Voter turnout, though, had been low ahead of Tuesday — a sign, perhaps, of voter fatigue from a quick turnaround between elections and the specter of Thao’s ongoing felony corruption case that looms over City Hall.
Taylor made clear his intent to run again for mayor well before Thao’s recall election, while rumors of Lee’s candidacy began swirling even before the ex-mayor’s removal became official in December.
The hype around the former congresswoman was so strong that several prospective candidates dropped out of consideration as soon as she entered the race. Taylor, though, steadily continued campaign — a momentum reflected in polls that indicated the race was tight.
“The momentum is right,” Tasha Richardson, a family friend of Taylor’s, said Tuesday night at his campaign watch party. “He deserves it. He’s put in the work.”
Over at Lee’s watch party in downtown, attendees expressed little concern that the early results showed the longtime Congresswoman trailing Taylor, who also held the advantage for several days in the 2022 race, before Thao ultimately prevailed.
“We’ve seen with the last election — it’s way too early,” said Kev Choice, a prominent Oakland hip-hop artist and a supporter of Lee.
Choice added, however, that the results suggested that “it just shows it might be a closer race than people expected.”
On the campaign trail, Lee pledged to unify labor and business in a city that grew deeply divided during Thao’s tenure, while Taylor vowed to take a wrecking ball to a government that he described as fundamentally broken.
Each tried to depict the other as the establishment choice, with Lee picking up widespread political endorsements as she returned to being a full-time Oakland resident after 26 years legislating in Washington, D.C.
Lee supporters, in turn, painted Taylor as a “City Hall insider” partially to blame for the city’s perilous budget deficit.
Taylor, who served a four-year council term until 2022, was more keen to mention his background as a business consultant and biomedical engineer. He did not shy away from his alliances in the tech world, which has recently begun spending big on Bay Area elections.
Lee and Taylor did not disagree on many specific city policies, besides whether layoffs would be an option to resolve the city’s budget deficit.
Taylor promised he could make the “hard choices,” including worker cuts. Lee called slashing jobs a “last resort.”
Because of timing, whoever wins would play at best a supporting role in proposing the city’s next two-year budget — a process mainly led by Councilmember Kevin Jenkins, who has filled in as Oakland’s interim mayor.
City leaders urged voters to approve in Tuesday’s election a new tax, Measure A, that would add 0.5% to the cost of every good sold locally, placing Oakland on par with the highest sales-tax rate of any city in California.
The tax was expected to generate $20 million annually, helping the city to patch up a $140 million deficit that stems from public spending outpacing local revenues.
The council race in District 2 saw large amounts of spending for Murray-Badal and Wang, who sparred over police staffing for areas of the city that are struggling to fully recover from a wave of crime during the coronavirus pandemic.
Oakland employs ranked-choice voting, which allows voters to order their preferred candidates and transfers votes between candidates until someone wins a majority.
Ranked-choice results were expected to become available by the end of Tuesday night, though they will provide only a sample of the election outcomes — with many more ballots left to count.
County election officials said the next set of results, following election night, was likely to be released on Friday.
Shomik Mukherjee is a reporter covering Oakland. Call or text him at 510-905-5495 or email him at [email protected].
