Election was a nail-biter, but all in all, few surprises

It has been an exhausting week with wild mood swings across the political spectrum.

There is still much to be resolved, but in the end, this election — from the mayor of San Diego to president of United States — has unfolded pretty much as expected — or should have been.

Assemblyman Todd Gloria had been the favorite to become San Diego’s next mayor since before the March primary. Despite the gyrations of the campaign, that never really changed, even though some polls showed his race against City Council member Barbara Bry might be close. The results so far show it wasn’t.

At the national level, plenty of analysts expressed skepticism of a Joe Biden landslide.

That was possible, but wishful thinking among some Democrats may have made that seem probable; hence, many went to bed crestfallen in the wee hours Wednesday morning. Many of their Republican counterparts ended election night in high spirits.

How many times were we warned that what has happened would likely happen? Don’t put too much stock in Tuesday night’s results, was the word. Expanded use of mail ballots virtually guaranteed an overtime election, and the continuing vote counts would trend toward Biden.

That caution was thrown to the wind by both Democrats and Republicans, whose moods soon would flip along with swing states.

Take Georgia. In the early going, the Peach State seemed headed for Trump’s column, but his lead disappeared over the intervening days. Some polling was off in this campaign overall, but pre-election polls in Georgia seem pretty good in retrospect.

An average of polls in Georgia by the political website fivethirtyeight always showed it to be a close race — within the margin of error for months — with Biden leading by about 1 percent, give or take, since the beginning of October.

None other than Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders accurately predicted all of this would happen in an Oct. 23 appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”

“It could well be that at 10 o’clock on election night, Trump is winning in Michigan, he’s winning in Pennsylvania, he’s winning in Wisconsin,” he told Fallon. “... But then the next day, and the day following, all those mail-in ballots start getting counted, and it turns out Biden has won those states.”

He also said the president would go on television

and claim he won the election. That happened, just not as early as Sanders suggested it would.

Trump’s other reactions — claiming election fraud and demanding vote counts be stopped after Tuesday — were also predictable, given that he had been saying that for months. As for the flurry of legal action, that started months ago, too.

One surprise was that Republicans picked up some seats in the House, when there were predictions Democrats would expand their majority.

In hindsight — and, yes, there’s a lot of that in this column — maybe that shouldn’t have been too surprising. In the wake of the 2018 blue wave, several Republican leaders, including San Diego County GOP Chairman Tony Krvaric, said Republican voter enthusiasm would increase dramatically in 2020 with Trump on the ballot.

Republican turnout may have helped the GOP win back a couple of California congressional seats it lost to Democrats in 2018. That also may be a factor in Republicans likely hanging on to the deep red 50th Congressional District, where former Rep. Darrell Issa has been expanding his lead against Democrat Ammar Campa-najjar.

Otherwise, Democrats pretty much ruled the election in San Diego County, and some candidates may have paid a price for being associated with Trump.

The biggest local election in partisan terms was in the District 3 county supervisors race. If GOP incumbent Kristin Gaspar won, the Republicans would hold their decades-long majority on the Board of Supervisors. She won’t.

Ballot counting continues, but Democrat Terra Lawson-remer held a 17point lead as of Friday night. Her eventual victory will give Democrats a 3-2 majority on the board.

Gaspar won a narrow election in 2016 in the north coastal district, which voted heavily against Trump. Two years later, she ran as a Trump Republican in an unsuccessful congressional bid, supported his disputed immigration policies and met with the president at the White House.

She couldn’t distance herself from that when running for re-election, even though she sought to portray herself as aligned with Democratic Supervisor Nathan Fletcher, with whom she has feuded, and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, whom she has criticized over the state’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Lawson-remer, a former senior adviser in the Obama administration Treasury Department, brought a lot to the campaign in terms of policy knowledge and political muscle — she was backed by the local Democratic Party and labor unions. She put Gaspar on the defensive over her record at the county, but the incumbent’s link to Trump remained a potent liability.

A Gaspar victory would have been a shocker.

Gloria, a Democrat, will take over the San Diego Mayor’s Office from termed-out Republican Kevin Faulconer. A former City Council member and interim mayor, Gloria early on built a broad coalition ranging from the Democratic Party and labor unions to the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Bry, also a Democrat, went on the attack by raising questions about Gloria’s role in Faulconer’s disastrous real estate deal that allowed the city to take over a high-rise building at 101 Ash St. But the strongest charge was that Gloria knew more than he let on about some of the problems of the transaction, and that was never proved.

It’s not clear if the accusations hurt him much, or even how much voters were paying attention to them.

The San Diego City Council, meanwhile, looks to increase its Democratic majority from 6-3 to 8-1.

While much of what happened in this election didn’t come out of the blue — no pun intended — that’s not to say there wasn’t cause for uncertainty. The 2016 presidential election showed that the expected doesn’t always come to pass.

And even if the trajectory of the presidential race was foreshadowed, that hardly took the edge off the stress it has caused — especially during a deadly pandemic that is only getting worse.

Looking at this in the rearview mirror, there have been few true surprises.

Perhaps the most peculiar one — though a mere footnote now — was Fox News calling Arizona for Biden long before the other networks did.

Tweet of the Week

Goes to Stuart Stevens (@stuartpstevens), a Republican political consultant with a friendly admonishment on Wednesday to still-distraught Democrats.

“To my new Dem pals, I’m begging you, be happy. Please. @Joebiden is racking up more votes than any candidate in history. You flipped Az, Mi, Wi, NE2. You’re going to flip Pa. & probably Ga. You beat an incumbent president. You elected first Black woman VP. Savor it. You won.”