Only 26.8% of eligible Santa Barbara County voters participated in Tuesday’s primary election, according to the latest official tally—a low turnout, blamed on a topsy-turvy statewide ballot, that could mold campaign tactics as November runoff contests heat up.
Nowhere locally was the impact of voter indifference more evident this year than in the North County, where results showed only 15.7% of more than 31,650 eligible Fifth District voters had cast ballots, leading to razor-thin margins in a three-way race for Santa Barbara County supervisor.
Santa Maria High School teacher and school board member Ricardo Valencia at last count was only 154 votes, or 3.34%, ahead of Santa Maria City Council Member Maribel Aguilera, an attorney. In turn, Aguilera was beating Cory Bantilan, a top aide to outgoing Supervisor Steve Lavagnino, by 183 votes, or 3.96%.
“It definitely makes every vote count,” Bantilan said Wednesday as he pondered his political future, noting Fifth District turnout is often low. “That’s been true for years.”
By comparison, 39.85% of eligible county voters participated in the last off-year California primary in June 2022. That same year, when Lavagnino ran unopposed, 20.65% of eligible Fifth District voters turned out; it was the first election there after officials redrew the district’s boundaries in 2021.
More recently, 41.97% of eligible voters countywide turned out for the March 2024 primary, driven to the polls largely by that year’s presidential election.
Numbers that send a signal
Assuming the margins in Fifth District hold, Valencia and Aguilera will face off in a head-to-head general election contest over the next five months, because neither won a primary majority.
But no matter who winds up on the ballot, Tuesday’s numbers suggest that turning out every vote possible with an efficient and effective ground game could easily be the deciding factor in the race.
“The ground game is going to be extremely important,” Aguilera said, predicting that a larger slice of voters will likely tune in for the general election. “It’s exciting, but there’s a lot of work ahead.
“Every conversation. Every door. Every voter that you talk to matters,” she said, adding the full final primary results with demographic breakdowns could shed more light on what drives voter turnout in the Fifth.
The outlook differed along the South Coast, where just shy of 30% of eligible voters cast ballots Tuesday in the race for Second District county supervisor. Incumbent Laura Capps won her re-election bid handily, at last count beating graduating college student Elijah Mack with 76% of the vote.
Capps on Wednesday said she’d knocked on hundreds of district doors during the campaign, and along the way heard a common refrain repeated up and down the state—that people were holding their ballots as long as possible to strategize a strong pick in the 61-candidate primary for California governor.
If that tactic was indeed widespread, a significant number of Santa Barbara area ballots were still working their way through the mail.
The Santa Barbara County Elections Office was expected to issue a ballots-that-need-to-be-counted report on Thursday afternoon before 3 p.m.
“I’m hopeful that the numbers will uptick,” said Capps, who’s recently advocated for elections integrity.
In April, she and Supervisor Roy Lee led a unanimous Board of Supervisors vote that advanced public education on election safety and voting rights—to help prepare people, they said, for the possibility that federal immigration enforcement officers might attempt to intimidate or deter voters.
