November 7, 2024 -- With 1,000 more votes tallied Thursday, the United slate backed by Santa Monica's political establishment took another step closer to sweeping the race for four City Council seats.
Pier Board Chair Dan Hall, increased his leading vote total to 16,493, followed by Planning Commissioner Ellis Raskin with 16,435 votes, according to results released by the LA County Registrar at 4:32 p.m.
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Rounding out the top four were fellow United slate members Barry Snell, a Santa Monica College trustee, with 15,696 votes and Natalya Zernitskaya with 15,651.
Mayor Phil Brock, who leads the rival Safer Santa Monica slate focused on law-enforcement, was 1,158 votes behind Zernitskaya, while Councilmember Oscar de la Torre was 2,309 votes behind.
Fellow Safer slate members Vivian Roknian and John Putnam, who are local business owners, remained in seventh and eighth place with 12,787 and 11,266 votes respectively.
They were followed by Rent Control Board Chair Ericka Lesley with 7,064 votes and street performer Wade Kelly with 1,675.
It is unclear how many votes have yet to be counted. Assuming Santa Monica voters turned out at a similar 79 percent rate as in 2020, there would be about 13,000 votes outstanding.
But that could be a high estimate. The vote counts released by the County registrar have been dwindling since the 12,605 votes were counted on election night.
On Wednesday afternoon, 2,919 votes were added to the total, while only 969 votes were added on Thursday.
If the 2020 Council race is any indication, Brock won with a total of 19,319 votes. In that race, there were 2,742 more registered voters than there were this year.
In the current Council race, Hall has added 3,888 votes since election night, while Brock has added 3,294.
Former Mayor Denny Zane, the co-chair and a founder of Santa Monicans for Renters' Rights (SMRR), called the top four vote tallies -- which were separated by fewer than 850 votes -- "one of the most compact" in the political organization's 45-year history.
"It kind of shows a slate discipline among voters," Zane said. "This is a demonstration the the fundamentals are back from before."
Longtime political consultant Sharon Gilpin, who has run campiagns for SMRR-backed candidates, agreed.
"SMRR has the list" of voters, Gilpin said. "They're refined it over three or four decades. They know who their people are. They've been doing this a long time."
Zane believes SMRR's "Democratic coalition" -- which includes the local Democratic Club and the hotel workers union -- will once again be the "governing coalition" after losing control in 2021.
"Our priorities are what the voters' priorities are," Zane said. "And while they care about homelessness and crime, the fundamentals are, 'Can I afford to live here?'"
In 2020, SMRR-backed incumbents lost three Council seats -- as many as they had lost in the previous 26 years-- after a voter revolt spurred by the coronavirus shutdown and the May 2020 riots ("Santa Monica Voters Usher in New Era," November 6, 2020).
Six months later, the establishment lost the Council majority when Councilmember Kevin McKewon abruptly retired and was replaced by Lana Negrete ("McKeown Abruptly Retires," May 26, 2021).
The SMRR-backed slate regained two seats in 2022, and needs to win two seats in the current race to regain the majority on the Council, which it has controlled for most of the past 40 years ("Who Runs the City?" September 20, 2024).