Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao talks with a guest, left, and Elizabeth Echols, right, president of the East Bay Regional Parks District Board of Directors, during the election night watch party for Lateefah Simon, candidate for California's 12th Congressional District District, at the Oakland Museum of California in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
OAKLAND — A day after early returns showed the recalls targeting Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price and Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao on the path to success, the first potential candidates to succeed them began to emerge.
The political posturing came despite hundreds of thousands of votes remaining uncounted, and both leaders holding out hope for a late surge in support among voters who waited until Election Day to cast ballots.
As of Wednesday afternoon, election officials had tallied 233,000 ballots, with about 400,000 to 500,000 more — about two-thirds of the overall vote — still left to count. Alameda County Registrar of Voters Tim Dupuis said his staff planned to continue processing ballots in the coming days, with no timeline yet for finishing the job.
Still, with 207,000 votes counted, both recalls were succeeding by a roughly 2-to-1 margin. Barring a significant change, the results could send shockwaves through the highest levels of the East Bay’s political scene.
“In both cases, voters who have become very impatient and very frustrated decided to lash out,” said Dan Schnur, a political analyst and continuing lecturer at UC Berkeley. He framed it as a “manifestation of the same anger we saw nationally” in the contest for president.
“Voters were looking for an opportunity to show their displeasure,” he added. “And in both cases, they let loose a lot of feelings that had been bottled up for a long long time.”
At about noon Tuesday, Price’s Protect the Win campaign issued its first statement since the election, urging people to “be patient” while ballots are counted. She suggested that the substantial voter turnout for the presidential election could yet help her prevail.
“There are still so many more ballots to be counted, and in areas that I know we did well in getting our message out,” the campaign’s statement said. “I am optimistic that when all the votes are counted, we will be able to continue the hard work of transforming our criminal justice system.”
Thao’s campaign spokesperson on Tuesday evening said the campaign hoped later returns would improve her chances, as they did in the 2022 election, but the mayor has been mostly silent.
If recalled, Price would remain in office until the results are certified, and at that point the highest-ranking officer in her office — currently Chief Assistant District Attorney Royl Roberts — would be expected to take over, said Supervisor Lena Tam.
The five-member Alameda County Board of Supervisors would then be tasked with appointing an interim district attorney, a scenario that’s never before happened in the county. That replacement would serve until the next general election in 2026.
Still, the exact details of that replacement selection process remained unclear Wednesday, and messages sent by this newspaper to Alameda County Counsel Donna Ziegler were not returned.
County supervisors Nate Miley and Tam said they had been approached by several current and former county prosecutors expressing interest in succeeding Price, but they both declined to name names.
Tam and fellow Supervisor David Haubert on Wednesday declined to provide their preference for any potential successor to Price. But Miley said he wants someone who’s “no-nonsense”; specifically, he suggested “somebody like Brooke Jenkins,” the district attorney in San Francisco who succeeded Chesa Boudin after his recall in 2022.
“People are definitely lining up,” Miley said Wednesday.
One of them is unsurprising: former Alameda County prosecutor Amilcar “Butch” Ford — one of Price’s loudest critics — said he would apply for the job if Price is booted from office. Ford, who now works for the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, was charged by Price in summer 2023 in a misdemeanor case that was later dismissed, and led some to question whether the district attorney was targeting political rivals.
The processes for replacing Thao, if necessary, would be vastly different — and could give Oakland voters a chance to weigh in on the city’s next leader.
Oakland officials said a recalled mayor would be removed after the City Council approves the certified election results, a vote not expected until mid–December.
Under the city’s charter, Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas would assume the role of acting mayor, though the next person in line, Councilmember Kevin Jenkins, would be tapped in January if Bas is elected as a county supervisor. She was trailing in that race by nearly seven percentage points on election night.
The city would then hold a special election 120 days after Thao leaves office. Already, former Councilman Loren Taylor, who came second to Thao in the ranked-choice 2022 mayoral election by just half a percentage point, said he’d run again for mayor.
“The field hasn’t been established,” Taylor said in an interview Wednesday. “I’m not imagining someone I’m running against. I am focused on what Oakland needs and preparing a platform and plan of action that directly responds to that.”
