In viewing the final results for the District 2 primary election, it’s difficult to ignore one glaring fact: 70% of the voters voted against incumbent Democrat Jen Campbell.
Campbell did win 67 precincts — as you can see by the graph – but many were by slim margins and all were only with a plurality. That is, Campbell failed to take any precincts with a majority of the votes.
The sole Republican, Linda Lukacs gained 19 precincts, Lori Saldana took only 4 precincts — all in Ocean Beach, and Joel Day, from Clairemont, only took 1 precinct, also in OB. The other major candidate, Mandy Havlik (whom the U-T failed to individually include) — from OB, failed to take any precincts.
One way to look at the results is that the “protest vote” against Campbell was immense. Despite Point Loma turning “blue” years ago, many Peninsula precincts turned out for the Republican candidate, Lukacs. And overall, it appears that most of Ocean Beach voted for someone other than Campbell.
Yet, Campbell had enough pluralities in enough precincts to come in at the top.
Here is our replication of the U-T map (go here for the San Diego Union-Tribune interactive map).
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It’s now clear who benefited the most by the new version of District 2, with the addition of east Clairemont and the loss of Pacific Beach: Jen Campbell.
And let’s not forget that a year ago or so, Campbell staffer was accused of trying to influence the redistricting map for District 2. Looks like he succeeded: https://obrag.org/2021/12/it-was-a-bad-day-for-jen-campbell-replaced-as-council-president-while-questions-raised-whether-she-illegally-influenced-redistricting-process/