OC Political

Apologies for the blogcation this week.  We forgot to tell readers we would be taking time off for Day of the Independent Hungary on June 19 and Argentinian Flag Day on June 20.  We were going to celebrate Canadian National Aboriginal Day and Prince William’s 30th birthday on June 21, but then Thomas Gordon blogged about Barack Obama’s assertion of executive privilege à la Richard Nixon.  Now back to the show…

On Monday, I blogged the city-by-city breakdown in AD-72, which showed Mayor Troy Edgar (R-Los Alamitos) and Businessman Travis Allen (R-Huntington Beach) the top two in four cities, OC Board of Education Member Long Pham (R-Fountain Valley) and Planning Commissioner Joe Dovinh (D-Garden Grove) the top two in two cities, and Pham and Edgar the top two in Garden Grove.

Today, we look at the surprise result in AD-74.

First, let’s recall the districtwide numbers:

So let’s take a look at how the voting broke down in the six cities of AD-74: Newport Beach, Huntington Beach, Irvine, Costa Mesa, Laguna Woods, and Laguna Beach.

74th Assembly District results in each city

(Thanks to Matt Rexroad and Chandra Sharma at Meridian Pacific for the map, which I’ve cropped here and to which I have added graphics.  Note that the population numbers on the map apply to each whole city, not just the portion of the city in AD-74.  Huntington Beach is divided nearly 50/50 between AD-72 and AD-74 while 2/3 of Irvine is in AD-74, with 1/3 of Irvine in AD-68.)

In each city, the candidate with the larger head came in first while the candidate with the smaller head came in second:

• Rush came in first with Mansoor second in Irvine, Laguna Woods, and Laguna Beach.
• Mansoor came in first with Rush second in Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa.
• Mansoor came in first with Daigle second in Newport Beach.

These results were consistent in all six cities across both absentee and poll voters.

Here’s the percentage breakdown by city, with the winner’s percentage in bold and the runner-up in italics:

Now here’s that list of cities by number of voters in AD-74:

• Newport Beach: Mansoor
• Huntington Beach: Mansoor
• Irvine: Rush
• Costa Mesa: Mansoor
• Laguna Woods: Rush
• Laguna Beach: Rush

For our visual learners:

The results show that despite enormous spending on behalf of Daigle by Berkshire Hathaway Heir and Santa Clara County Republican Party Chairman Charles Munger, Jr. (as we blogged about here, here, and here), which eventually totaled well over half a million dollars ($579,040 to be exact), plus another $89,687 in independent expenditures from labor unions, the power of incumbency and grassroots activists enabled Mansoor to overcome the hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bay Area/labor union money spent on behalf of Daigle.  Similarly, the power of party label enabled Rush to overcome the hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bay Area/labor union money spent on behalf of Daigle (much like the power of party label enabled Republican Jose “Joe” Moreno [not to be confused with Anaheim City School District Trustee Jose F. Moreno] to overcome the $246,761 in labor union money spent on behalf of Democrat Julio Perez).

And here’s a quick video courtesy of OC Political Reader and Lake Forest City Council Candidate Dwight Robinson that boils the AD-74 result into a nutshell: