It’s official: it was determined Friday afternoon that Challenger Jeff Rosen defeated District Attorney Dolores Carr Tuesday in an upset victory by a previously unknown 15-year prosecutor.
At the close of Tuesday’s poll, Rosen held a 2,217-vote lead, but the County Registrar’s office determined Wednesday it would still have to count 77,000 provisional and mailed ballots to determine a victor.
By mid-week Rosen’s lead shrunk slightly to 1,724. Late Friday afternoon, however, the difference jumped to 2,854, and at 4:04 p.m. an email from his campaign announced he would be making a statement. Three minutes later, a concession statement from DA Carr arrived. “Today’s results from the Registrar of Voters Office indicate that while the voters of Santa Clara County were deeply divided, the DA’s race has been determined,” she wrote. “I am proud of the honest and honorable campaign that we ran, and I am grateful for all of the support we received. I feel privileged to have served the community as the first female District Attorney in Santa Clara County, and I am proud of what we accomplished.”
At his campaign office in Santa Clara, Rosen delivered a speech in which he thanked supporters, colleagues and family. “I would like to publicly thank Ms. Carr for her public service to this community as a deputy DA, judge, and DA,” he read. “While I certainly have had my disagreements with her, I respect the fact that she was willing to serve. I am reaching out to her supporters and making it clear that tomorrow is a fresh start, a new page, and I look forward to working with them for the betterment of our community.”
He reiterated his campaign promise to create a Conviction Integrity Unit and restore the Cold Case unit when he takes office on January 3, 2011. “Together, we changed business as usual in this county,” he read.
After nearly a century of district attorneys who reigned until retirement, Rosen defeated a sitting DA by a razon thin margin – 1.14 percent of the vote. Carr, the county’s first female district attorney and a former judge, was elected in 2006 following the retirement of George Kennedy after 16 years. Her tenure was beset by accusations of conflicts of interest and judgment errors that critics in her office and in the news media were quick to point out. One week before the election, reports surfaced that Carr’s office asked the county crime lab to halt testing of physical evidence in the De Anza rape case.
Rosen waged an aggressive campaign that focused at first on Carr’s missteps and made ethics a theme of his campaign. A seasoned prosecutor of high-profile homicides, he offered no management credentials. However, as he racked up high-profile endorsements from ex-DA Kennedy and Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, as well as a number of prosecutors who work under Carr, Rosen seemed to take on the patina of someone who could lead. He articulated a vision of tough but fair justice in television commercials and secured the endorsements of community newspapers in Palo Alto, Morgan Hill and Gilroy, as well as of the countywide Mercury News daily and the Metro weekly.
Rosen is the first candidate to successfully challenge an incumbent DA in almost a century.
Final Totals
With 1,177 of 1,177 precincts counted.
Jeff Rosen 127,185 (50.57%)
Dolores Carr 124,331 (49.43%)
Let’s just hope that as a lame duck DA, Carr doesn’t pull any more of her ethical shenanigans. Adios, Dolores. Dont let the DA Office door his you in the @$$ on the way out….
Congratulations to Jeff Rosen.
Please. She made some minor errors, none of which were malicious (and the biggest of which was finally determined to actually be an error committed by the Sheriff’s Department). The election is over, and she lost. You can quit pretending to believe her infractions were some sort of major deal.
I guess Rosen can be thanking God that only 15% of voters actually voted in this election, or else that small win of less than 2K votes could have come out very differently. The wonderful and arrogant Scott Herhold’s relentless bashing of DA Carr, Rosen’s gift at twisting the truth and holding out false hope to the De Anza rape victim, and the Merc’s continual bias reporting of the facts surrounding Carr’s missteps didn’t hurt either. Rosen using victim’s of violent crimes to win this election will someday come back and bite him in the ass, and when it does, I want a front row seat, a box of freshly popped popcorn, and a Pepsi please.
You sure give a lot of credit to the Mercury. Since most on this site seem to think the Mercury is a dead newspaper and they pride themselves on telling us over and over again how they don’t read it anymore. For a paper with no readers it is surprising that you think it had such an impact in this or any other election. Unless, of course, most of the posters on this site are just delusional windbags who don’t know what they are talking about. Tell me it isn’t so.
O. Really,
Unfortunately, the Merc does carry a lot of weight because people are too lazy to go to forums, speak to candidates themselves, or look for the facts before deciding on something or someone.
Almost every story they print appears on TV on the nightly news. You know TV, where most people get their “information” from. UGH~
So, ONE incumbent lost a bid for re-election.
The NEWS is that the rest of them didn’t.
I ask then: “What really changed?”
In the grand scheme of things, who or what where the gainers and losers from this election, or is this election just another inconsequential twitch in the one-party status quo of local politics?
Did labor gain or lose?
Did the tea partiers gain or lose?
Did republicans, democrats? liberals? conservatives gain or lose?
Or, was this simply an election about personalities and personality cults?
I see one far reaching consequence of the election: the passage of Prop 14, the so-called “Open Primaries/Top Two Runoff” initiative. This proposition is devastating and it’s consequences will have a REAL effect in November.
The two major party nominees and highest vote getters for the major parties are unacceptable turkeys to the majority of California voters. Democrat Kamela Harris is a feckless politically correct San Francisco Democrat on steroids with a terrible record on criminal prosecutions. Republican Abel Maldonado sold his vote on tax cuts to Schwarzenegger in a stinky deal to be appointed Lieutenant Governer.
THIS is the election where a third party candidate would have an eager and receptive electorate. In particular, if the Libertarians focused all of their energies on nominating and supporting a Ron Paul type candidate acceptable to the Tea Partiers, history COULD be made.
I have heard that court challenges to Prop 14 are in the works. I hope so. This idiotic exercise in “do-gooder” politics is having the predictible OPPOSITE effect on what its backers and voters expected.
It is the self-serving handiwork of the permanent political class, notably Abel Maldanado, and it is OBSTRUCTING the voter’s options. It must be thrown out.
Is it okay to mention the partisan issue now that the race for this non-partisan office is over?
Non-partisan elective offices are crucial for grooming credible candidates for higher office. Each party gets involved in these non-partisan races because the outcomes help shape the future political landscape not only at the local level, but by providing experienced candidates who can move up to higher office (state and federal.)
I’m actually pleased to see that the power of incumbency is not absolute, but concerned with the role the press and insider power brokers continue to play in the process. If it doesn’t get reported, did it happen? If it gets lots of play in the newspaper that has an agenda, is it the most important issue at stake?
As far as the DA office itself, I think its run by a bunch of career do-gooders who specialize in looking good more than doing good and use the color of authority to prosecute criminal matters in a shotgun approach (lets charge them with anything and everything and they’ll plea down and something will stick.) Old school adversarial, lock em up and convict them because they had to do something to get cited but the police approach. I think many DA lawyers play like ball-players trying out for the big leagues and play the conviction game where keeping their numbers looking good is more important than doing the right thing. Liberal or Conservative, the bottom line is that the DA (and delegated representatives serving in each courtroom) are in control and you need to “respect their authoritay” to quote Cartman from South Park.