Who needs elections when the leftist always wins?

In Oakland, Loren Taylor, a moderate Democrat, was on track to win the mayor's election by about five points on election night, after the last one, far-left Sheng Thao, was thrown out by recall following corruption charges. Seems the crime, the taxes, the losses of the major league ball team, the airport hotels, and the In-N-Out Burger, the homeless takeover, as well as the economic ruin in all-blue city was enough for even Oakland's residents.

But well, with extended counting, all of a sudden, we learn that actually, Oakland residents would like to keep things exactly the way they are.

According to CBS News:

Oakland mayoral candidate Barbara Lee was congratulated by Loren Taylor on Saturday after the latest election update showed her ahead by thousands of votes.

"This morning I called Congresswoman Barbara Lee to congratulate her on becoming the next Mayor of Oakland," Taylor said in a statement. "Thanks to the heart, grit, and vision of our fearless team and supporters, we built a movement that resonated across Oakland, echoing the national dialogue about the waning relevance of a Democratic  Party that puts old-guard politics over improving the lives of everyday people. I pray that Mayor-Elect Lee fulfills her commitment to unify Oakland by authentically engaging the 47% of Oaklanders who voted for me and who want pragmatic results-driven leadership."

The Alameda County Registrar of Voters released the latest election numbers on Friday, and the update showed Lee was ahead of Taylor by almost 5,000 votes.

District 7 Councilmember Ken Houston congratulated the former congresswoman on Friday after the update.

"She's humble. She's like, 'Wait till it's over.' Which she should be. Me, I'm saying you can't catch up with 5,000 more votes, right, because the people spoke," Houston said.

Humble? No, the old lizard knew the fix was in.

You can hear the lingering bitterness in Taylor's congratulatory statement, jumping right in to plead with Lee not to forget the 47% of the voters who didn't vote for her. Lee won by 50.6%, getting just over the finish line, which is how they always happen.

And Taylor's got a lot to be bitter about. In the last mayoral election against Thao, he was ahead, too, until at the last minute, when Thao suddenly pulled ahead to win by ... 700 votes.

So again, just missed it. In a swing year, with so many failures of government, it seems passing strange that somehow, voters want the same old same old.

Lee outspent Taylor ten to one and had the media in her back pocket. Taylor had the endorsement of the pragmatic San Jose mayor who has kept his city from becoming another San Francisco. On election night, Taylor came out ahead by 5,000 votes, a sizable number, in line with the region, which generally swung moderate, and included San Francisco.

Then with mail votes, and in Oakland's case, ranked-choice votes which seems to have had the biggest impact on the outcome, the numbers flipped. Nope, they don't want change.

Part of the problem is that guys like Taylor and his supporters suspect incompetence, rigging and election fraud, but they are unwilling to 'go Trump' and call it that.

Timothy Dupuis, Oakland's registrar of voters, is an appointed character by the Board of Supervisors, who makes nearly a half a million in salary and bennies, so he's loyal to those writing his paycheck. which doesn't necessarily include voters. He's been accused of fraud and incompetence in the past, with the longest vote-counting period in California in the 2024 election. In 2022 he actually called a wrong result. Democrats on the short end of this have tried to get him thrown out, except that nobody wants to say the 'f' word because it might make them ... like Trump.

So in he stays, incompetent as ever or something worse.

Democratic groups "walk a delicate line," as the San Jose Mercury ever so delicately put it. They want to be nice people, they don't want to be like Trump, who understands well big city political shenanigans and knows how to respond to them -- loudly, directly, and relentlessly, because he has their number.

Trump had one election stolen from him and won well on election three. Taylor is going to have to eat another razor-thin loss after the numbers flipped on him

It's sad, really. In a swing year, to say that Oakland voters didn't want any change is really quite the gaslight. Now they've got an octogenarian dinosaur in office with the farthest of the far-left of positions, ready to hike taxes, let the criminals out, and make even more residents flee than those who already have.

What a sad story. Chicago, a city famous for its election stealings, "elected" a far leftist after a disastrous collapse by its previous leftist mayor and the result has not been good. Now Oakland goes down the same path, set to shrivel to even a smaller and more Detroit-like city than it already is with a radical leftist spewing the same old garbage.

It's not going to get better over there. Kiss it goodbye.

Image: Joe Parks, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0 Deed