Less than 48 hours to wait, and maybe the fingernails won’t last that long.
By 9 a.m. Thursday, the City Clerk has promised to announce the final count, and presumably the winner, of the skintight 8th District Los Angeles City Council race between the incumbent Bernard Parks and Forescee Hogan-Rowles.
On the day before the day before, the sunny challenger did not disappoint.
“We are hopeful and very optimistic,” she told the newspaper this morning.
“We are very confident.
“Our field effort was unsurpassed. We believe the final votes will demonstrate that.”
With tens of thousands of lagging votes being tabulated, Ms. Hogan-Rowles trails by 1,076 — 6858 to 7934.
Fascinatingly, she does not have to overtake Mr. Parks, just drag down his proportion of the light vote total to beneath 50 percent to force a May 17 runoff in the only Council race remotely close.
Two weeks ago tonight, on Election Day, Mr. Parks claimed outright victory because he won 50.89 percent. Ms. Hogan-Rowles is at 43.99 percent, which is incidental, especially since this is a three-way race.
The third candidate scored a slice of bread, 797 votes, and that’s all. Sources say you probably could argue both ways, that he took votes away from both candidates.
In a message to supporters this afternoon, Ms. Hogan-Rowles said:
“Approximately 30,000 absentee ballots have been counted. We are waiting for 16,000 provisional and snag ballots to be processed. Many of them are from the 8th District.
“We continue to wait. I am hopeful of a positive outcome for our campaign.”
The personality difference between the permanently upbeat Ms. Hogan-Rowles and the stoic Mr. Parks scarcely could be wider.
She told the newspaper that she has spent the last fortnight “reaching out to supporters,” spraying optimism wherever she has gone.
At a celebratory dinner for dozens of campaign volunteers, the tone scarcely was that of a second-place finisher.
Instead, with infectious music in the background, they rehashed the race “and what we plan to do going forward.’
