Santa Monica Mayor Richard Bloom is holding onto his slim lead over Assemblywoman Betsy Butler in their contest for the 50th Assembly District, according to new results released Friday.
Bloom and Butler are separated by only 103 votes after another 98,896 ballots were processed by roughly 4 p.m. on Friday afternoon, according to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s Office.
Bloom has 71,192 votes so far, totaling 50.04 percent of the vote. Butler trails by only .8 percent.
Malibu results reflected the district divide as Butler received 2,040 votes in locally, while Bloom received 2,154.
Bloom’s campaign remains cautiously optimistic, said Brian Adams, Bloom’s manager.
“We’ve never been behind,” he said.
There are still another 693,762 ballots to be counted countywide, with the next update scheduled for Tuesday at 1 p.m.
It’s unclear how many of those will count for the 50th Assembly District, which includes 298,211 registered voters.
Bloom’s campaign sent out an e-mail Friday afternoon asking donors to step up one more time to help pay for a team of specialists that includes attorneys, staff and experienced volunteers to supervise the counting and ensure that it is “fair and evenhanded.”
This is the home stretch of a campaign that has been waged for over a year through a brutal, four-candidate primary and into the general election.
For the first time, two Democratic candidates faced off against each other thanks to the new system that moves the top two vote-getters into the general election.
To make it more complicated, both are running in a brand-new district created by a citizen-led redistricting commission rather than politicians.
Money has poured into the campaign, with Bloom raising over $500,000 in 2012 alone and Butler raising $1.3 million in the same time frame.
Butler’s campaign could not be reached by presstime.
A previous version of this story ran in the Santa Monica Daily Press.