The election results were announced at 5 PM at the CoHo and are now available online. The headline says it all: Cardona/Wharton won by 545 votes over Peacock/Bakke in what seems likely to be a strong grad/undergrad divide (there were 1,914 grads and 3,728 undergrads who voted, as well as 162 co-terms).
In Senate results, SOCC candidates took 10 slots (including 9 of the top 10), with SUN taking 4 and an independent, Khaled “Shawi” Alshawi, also being elected. As I mentioned in my earlier article, I don’t think that this has to do so much with an outpouring of desire for change across campus and more to do with strong leadership by SOCC (whose leaders did very much desire change). This result (which is almost the inverse of my earlier “predictions” (which, you will see, were couched in warnings about their actual predictive value)) speaks to SOCC’s incredible organizational capacity and ability to mobilize its core supporters. The variation in winning SOCC vote totals (highest-lowest) was over 350 votes, so it’s clear that not everything was due to straight down-the-line voting, but based on what I’ve both seen (chalking, flyer presence, and especially the Thursday night door handle flyers) and heard (phone calls to group members to ensure turnout) of their efforts, it seems certain that an energized base and heroic organizational effort helped propel them to this result.
Congrats to the winners and impressive efforts all around!
Edit: received the turnout numbers and replaced my estimates (1450-1500 grads and 2700-2800 undergrads) with the true figures.