The underwhelm of two-person primaries and other takeaways from Santa Cruz County’s election season

With the March 5 primary election nearly complete (86.6666% complete, to be precise — Lookout has called 13 of the 15 local races), the myriad impacts on Santa Cruz County are only just beginning to be understood.  

Further analysis will come as more data becomes available, including some votes that will be counted later Friday. Yet, some trends can be sifted out at this early stage. Here are five  things we’re thinking about as we translate what Santa Cruz County voters really said with their ballots.  

1. For the first time in 12 years, a woman will take votes on the board of supervisors

Although the primary results guarantee a woman will take a seat on the county board of supervisors in 2025, we must wait until November to know her name. Or, possibly, their names.

As many predicted, no candidate in the five-person District 2 race was able to garner more than 50% of the popular vote and claim outright victory. Similarly in line with predictions, Capitola Mayor Kristen Brown and Pajaro Valley Unified School District trustee Kim De Serpa rose as the two most popular candidates, and will advance to a head-to-head November runoff for the seat. Starting in 2025, the region spanning from Aptos to Pajaro Dunes and out to Corralitos will be represented by a woman.

And, for the first time since Ellen Pirie and Janet K. Beautz served in 2008, the board of supervisors in 2025 could feature two women; however, that question will be left up to District 5 voters in November.

Monica Martinez, the chief executive of the county’s largest social services nonprofit, Encompass, was more than twice as popular as any of her three opponents in the March 5 primary; however, her impressive 46.4% vote share was not enough to claim the seat, and she will face second-place finisher Christopher Bradford in the November runoff election. Bradford, a community organizer and small business owner, snagged 21.5% of the popular vote. Martinez certainly has momentum, but primary election results don’t often translate perfectly to a November general election, which typically brings out a larger, and different, electorate. 

2. Two-person primaries tend to shortchange the democratic process

A minority of registered voters in District 1 (49.6%) decided who would represent the entire district on the county board of supervisors for the next four years. The same held true for Santa Cruz City Council Districts 2 and 5, which saw 48.8% and 42.5% turnout, respectively. The only two-person primary races that drew a turnout of more than 50% were in Santa Cruz City Council District 1 (52.1%) and District 3 (50.9%).

As of Wednesday, the primary turnout countywide sat at 45.6%. Yes, local voters cast ballots at a higher rate than the meager statewide turnout of 34%, but compare this to turnout in the past two November presidential elections — 84.1% in 2016, 86.1% in 2020 — and shudder at the lack of participation.

Of course, lower turnout is expected in a primary, which makes two-person primary races a poor vehicle for choosing a representative. A third person entering any of these races would have created the chance that no candidate received more than 50% of the vote, requiring a runoff between the top two candidates in the November general election, when voter participation and diversity grows significantly. We don’t have demographic numbers on the primary yet, but primary voters tend to be a subset of “likely” voters, and a 2023 report from the Public Policy Institute of California shows that the state’s likely voters overindex as white, older, affluent and homeowners.

A better exercise might be to look at what percentage of registered voters actually supported the winning candidates.

For District 1 county supervisor, Manu Koenig’s 9,153 votes amounted to 24.6% support from the district’s 37,190 registered voters. In a primary, that’s enough to propel him to power for the next four years.

For the Santa Cruz City Council, Gabriela Trigueiro’s 1,798 votes as of Wednesday carried her to victory, but amounted to only 23.7% of all registered voters. Sonja Brunner won reelection in District 2 with only 25.9% support from all registered voters; Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson will serve a second term in District 3 despite receiving only 32.5% of registered voter support. In District 5, Susie O’Hara’s 25.7% support from all registered voters is enough to put her well ahead of opponent Joe Thomson. 

Would the winners change in a November runoff? Not necessarily, but a considerably larger portion of the electorate would anoint the political leaders, which is a win for the democratic process.

3. Measure M was soundly defeated, but what does that mean?

Measure M, the ballot initiative that sought higher affordability requirements and wanted to give voters a direct say before new developments could exceed existing height restrictions, received a resounding rejection from voters in the city of Santa Cruz. But how should we read this?

Measure M was born out of a distaste for the city’s downtown expansion plan vision, in which city planners once mulled allowing 17-story residential buildings (the city council has since capped it at 12 stories). The pamphlets and the campaign for Measure M — headed by grassroots group Housing for People, Not Unaffordable Towers — focused on building heights, with visuals that attempted to contextualize what 12-story buildings would do to Santa Cruz’s beach town feel.

Yet, the organized campaign to fight Measure M focused on its threat to affordable housing. Measure M sought to require new developments with 30 or more housing units to reserve 25% of those units for low-income tenants, an increase to the existing 20% rule. The region’s affordable housing organizations, with some funding help from private developers like the Santa Cruz Seaside Company and Devcon Construction, led the opposition with a message that a 25% affordability requirement would kill housing production.

So, how do we read Measure M’s defeat? Is it an endorsement of tall buildings? Or might it be a vote for maintaining the city’s accelerating speed of housing production? Broadly speaking, it is at least a vote for growth, which increasingly appears to be the political line in the city of Santa Cruz’s sandbox. 

4. The county board of supervisors retains its lone senior voice for the next four years, but a sea change is underway

Three-term incumbents Zach Friend and Bruce McPherson’s announcements last year that they’d forgo a chance at their fourth terms signaled that a sea change was afoot on the county’s board of supervisors. With only one term under his belt, Koenig stood alone as the only incumbent in a field of 11 candidates, and faced a well-organized and well-funded challenge from Lani Faulkner.

Able to eke out a win with 52.5% of the vote as of Tuesday, Koenig will begin 2025 as the elder statesman among the sitting supervisors, who will have only eight combined years of board experience across its five members. This is a sharp contrast to 2020, when supervisors boasted 44 years of combined board experience. A sea change indeed.

Still, Koenig will have his work cut out for him over the next four years. Faulkner, who had minimal name recognition ahead of the race, attempted to paint Koenig as an out-of-touch and largely absent representative. In a nonpartisan race, Koenig just barely overcame these criticisms; it’s now clear he represents a constituency that only narrowly prefers him, and even less so than in 2020, when as a newcomer he pulled 56.7% of the vote.

5. Santa Cruz Republicans buck statewide trends, sort of

Donald Trump still won Santa Cruz County; however, he had pulled just 68% of the county’s Republican vote, compared to 79.1% statewide as of Thursday afternoon. His only true opponent left in the race at the time of the vote, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, drew 26.4% of the vote among Republicans in Santa Cruz, compared to only 17.5% statewide. 

Outside of some voting precincts with 10 or fewer ballots cast in which he collected 100%, Trump’s strongest support came from the neighborhood around Second Street in Watsonville, where he collected 85.4% of the vote, or 70 of 82 ballots cast. The neighborhood around Cliff Drive in Rio Del Mar gave Trump his highest vote total of anywhere in the county: 461, which accounted for 65.3% of ballots cast. Notably, it’s the same area where President Joe Biden had his strongest performance among local Democrats, pulling in 90%, or 1,954 of 2,171 precinct ballots cast in the Democratic presidential primary. 

Haley also secured 100% of the vote in a handful of precincts where two or fewer ballots were cast; however, she was most popular in a precinct just south of the Mt. Hermon area, where she took 30 of 79 ballots cast, or 38% of the vote. She also received roughly 38% in the area around Harbor High School in Santa Cruz, where 36 of 96 ballots went to Haley. However, Trump outperformed Haley in every precinct where more than three ballots were counted.

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