Kamala Harris Now Holds Slim Lead Before Absentees Counted

San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris

The latest numbers (100% of precincts counted) from the Secretary of State Debra Bowen (who was re-elected last night) show that San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris has a pretty good chance to become the first female attorney general of California:

Kamala D. Harris    DEM 3,292,836    45.9%
Steve Cooley        REP 3,277,998    45.7%
Timothy J. Hannan   LIB 179,594      2.5%
Peter Allen         GRN 184,841      2.6%
Diane Beall Templin AI 124,841       1.7%
Robert J. Evans     PF 116,690       1.6%

That's a lead of 14,838 votes. There are still absentee ballots and provisional ballots outstanding. Absentee tend to be more conservative than the electorate while provisional can be either liberal or conservative, so basically all we can say is that Harris has done amazingly well in her first statewide race for office. Even if she loses the race, maybe she should consider running for Dianne Feinstein's U.S. Senate seat in 2012?

UPDATE 11/03/2010 4:37PM
The Registrar Recorder/County Clerk of Los Angeles County is reporting that it has some 399,960 votes to be counted. Assuming that Harris maintains her 53%-39% edge in these Los Angeles County ballots, then this should results in at least an increase in Harris' lead of 50,000 votes (assuming a 12-13 point lead for Harris in these ballots). I think we can safely say that Harris has pulled this one out. In the rest of the counties there are probably no more than 800,000-1,200,000 votes to be counted, since Los Angeles generally has about 1/3-1/4 of all votes cast statewide. Cooley would have to win all those non-LA County ballots by a greater margin than 53-47 (or 6 percentage points more than Harris) assuming there are 1.2 million ballots outstanding, and would have to win by a margin greater than 54-46 (or 8 percentage points greater than Harris) if there are only 800,000 non-LA ballots outstanding to be counted. Both scenarios seem to me to give Cooley a very unlikely chance of winning. Of course it's possible, but not very probable, that the outstanding ballots could have an overwhelmingly different character than all other ballots and be very pro-Cooley but that's a very low probability possibility. Congrats to Attorney-General-elect Kamala Harris!