Huey Solidifies Second-Place Finish; Will Face Hahn in Runoff

Republican businessman Craig Huey will face Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn in a runoff election for the vacant 36th Congressional District seat after outstanding ballots counted Thursday strengthened his surprising second-place finish.

Huey had a 206-vote lead over California Secretary of State Debra Bowen after all precincts reported in Tuesday night's election. The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/Clerks office tallied 10,327 outstanding ballots Thursday. Huey held an  750-vote lead over Bowen, said Marcia Ventura, a spokeswoman with the county election's office.

Most of the outstanding ballots were mail-in-ballots that had been turned in Election Day. Huey held an insurmountable lead since only a few hundred provisional and damaged ballots remained to be counted. The final results will be certified Friday, Ventura said.

Since no candidate received a majority of the vote, the top two vote-getters will square off July 12 in a special general election to fill the seat held by longtime Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice) who resigned in February to join a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

The largely coastal district has 345,232 registered voters, stretches from Venice to San Pedro, and includes Marina del Rey, Playa del Rey, Del Rey, Mar Vista, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach and neighboring communities.

The district skews largely Democratic with 45 percent of its voters registered as Democrats, compared with 27 percent registered as Republican and 22 percent declining to state their party preference, according to the California Secretary of State's office.

Most political observers figured that two of the three leading Democrats, Hahn, Bowen, and teacher and anti-war activist Marcy Winograd, who gained 41 percent of the vote against Harman in last year's Democratic primary, would face each other in a run-off election. Winograd finished fourth.

Huey, a tea party candidate, had the largest campaign war-chest of any candidate in the election with contributions and loans of $515,905 and $198,800 cash on hand at the end of the last federal campaign finance filing period in early May. Huey has loaned his own campaign $500,000 and received the rest of his financing in contributions.

“I am very thankful and deeply honored by the results,” said Huey, a long-time Torrance business owner who lives outside the district in Rolling Hills Estates, in a statement. “This district does not belong to any one party or political machine, it belongs to the people and they are responding to our message of fiscal sanity and more jobs.”