Kamala Harris Takes Late Lead in CA AG Race

Submitted by Phillip Smith on Sun, 11/14/2010 - 7:44pm (Issue #659)

Drug War Issues

Politics & Advocacy

California's next attorney general? Let's hope so (Wikimedia)

Democratic California Attorney General candidate Kamala Harris has overtaken Republican Steve Cooley as absentee and provisional ballots continued to be counted. As of Wednesday afternoon, the last time the California Secretary of State's office updated the figures, Harris was leading 46.0% to 45.6%, a lead of some 30,000 votes out of more than nine million cast.

About 898,000 votes remain to be counted, with some 200,000 of them coming from Los Angeles County, where Cooley is the sitting county prosecutor. But Harris is whipping Cooley on his home turf, leading him by more than 12 points in the votes that have already been counted.

Cooley is adamantly opposed by California's medical marijuana community. He has been a persistent foe of Southern California medical marijuana dispensaries, and has argued that all dispensaries in the state are illegal.

One mathematical model that has proven accurate so far predicts that Harris will win a squeaker by about 13,000 votes. Now, it looks like that model was slightly too conservative.

Harris would be the first woman, the first African-American, and the first Asian-American to hold the office of California attorney general, and the first Indian-American to be attorney general in any state.

News Brief

Permission to Reprint: This content is licensed under a modified Creative Commons Attribution license. Content of a purely educational nature in Drug War Chronicle appear courtesy of DRCNet Foundation, unless otherwise noted.

Comments

jj (not verified)

Harris is no godsend

She'll still sell everybody out.

Mon, 11/15/2010 - 1:12am Permalink

A.J. (not verified)

African american, native

African american, native american, and asian?

I wonder what a baby between her and Tiger woods would look like...

Mon, 11/15/2010 - 9:36pm Permalink

Ellie (not verified)

Harris

she will definitely be better than Cooley

Mon, 11/15/2010 - 11:58pm Permalink

Brinna (not verified)

Harris not a bad choice

Seeing as though it looks like she'll win over Prison Industrial Complex spokesperson, Cooley, I would say she won't have a huge incentive to babble on about how "tough" on crime she is. So where does the "she'll still sell everybody out" sentiment come from? These are political animals, after all, and the good people of California apparently voted for the kinder, gentler version of AG (or at least the slightly larger half of them did). That suggests to me that Harris will follow the mandate of common sense (particularly if she wants to get re-elected). So I say, now it is time for the cannabis community to establish a good working dialogue with her.

Better than Cooley? In my lights, by a long shot.

Sun, 11/21/2010 - 6:20pm Permalink