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.
That’s tonight, though — I’m getting reports that a lot of precincts had a lot of election-day absentees turned in. That could bump the turnout a few points — and since election-day absentees tend to break roughly the same as election-day votes, it will help Mirkarimi.
John Avalos really showed the strength of the progressive vote tonight and established himself as a leader in the movement. He and his campaign have a lot to be proud of; he lacked the big money and IE efforts that the other candidates had and he ran an impressive campaign. But without the type of early-voting effort that the Lee campaign had, it appears there was no way anyone could win this race.
That’s part of the lesson for progressives — the Avalos campaign surged in the last two weeks, but it was already too late. Those early votes can be decisive, and tonight, it appears they were.