In Chula Vista, Republican Mayor John McCann appears on track to win reelection.
Francisco Tamayo, the Democrat running against McCann, told KPBS he called McCann Tuesday night to concede after early returns showed McCann leading by a significant margin.
McCann has garnered 59% of the early votes cast and is leading Tamayo by almost 9,000 votes, according to the latest results from the San Diego County Registrar of Voters.
So far, about 47,000 votes have been counted in the race. About 65,000 total votes were cast in the last mayoral election in 2022, which McCann won.
Tamayo, an information technology specialist and trustee for the Chula Vista Elementary School District, was vying to unseat McCann this year.
In an interview Tuesday evening, McCann told KPBS he was excited to get back to work.
“As I say, this is Chula Vista’s decade,” he said. “I’m looking forward to working with my colleagues and the regional partners to making Chula Vista even better.”
During the campaign, Tamayo criticized McCann for not taking a stronger stance on the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. On Tuesday, Tamayo said he wanted to see the mayor do more when it came to supporting Chula Vista’s immigrant community.
“We can have political parties, we can have our preferences,” he said. “But at the end of the day, we're governing for the whole city — and the whole city includes our immigrant neighbors.”
Still, Tamayo said McCann had done much for Chula Vista and had earned his second term.
The race for mayor of San Diego County’s second-largest city has been a high-profile one. It was unclear whether Tamayo could mount a substantial challenge to McCann, who has served on-and-off on the City Council for two decades and is well-known.
Both candidates have faced public scrutiny in recent years. Tamayo faced questions over his successful effort to oust a fellow Democrat from the district board. McCann also drew criticism over his advocacy for a South Bay business owner convicted of fraud.
McCann had a significant financial advantage over Tamayo. The incumbent mayor raised and spent over $350,000 in campaign contributions, according to campaign finance reports. Tamayo, meanwhile, raised just $18,000, the reports show.
Why it matters
Chula Vista is a charter city with a council manager system. Under this system, the city council selects a city manager to oversee the day-to-day operations.
City councilmembers propose and debate local laws and policies. They make important decisions on how to spend public tax dollars, including expanding municipal services or cutting public programs to fund other priorities.
The mayor of Chula Vista mostly serves as another member of the city council, but with a few added responsibilities. For example, the mayor has more of a say in what items are on the weekly city council agenda.
The mayor also typically represents the city at many official events and in regional bodies like the San Diego Association of Government (SANDAG) — although Chula Vista’s Democratic majority has voted to strip McCann of a number of those duties.
By the numbers
Most of McCann’s money comes from individual donors, according to the campaign finance data tracker The Ballot Book. The majority of McCann’s money came from outside the city, with just a quarter of his donors actually based in Chula Vista.
McCann also personally loaned his campaign $10,000 late last year.
The majority of Tamayo’s money came from a $10,000 loan that Tamayo personally gave his campaign.
About two-thirds of Tamayo’s remaining funds came from individual donors, with the rest coming from a committee tied to the Los Angeles-based labor union Western States Regional Council of Carpenters.
