Seaside’s incumbent Mayor Ian Oglesby is poised to defeat his two challengers by a landslide.

Incumbent Ian Oglesby appears to have won the three-way race for mayor in Seaside after securing a commanding lead in the results released Tuesday night by the Monterey County Elections Office. 

The results show Oglesby receiving 4,558 votes, a 56.3 percent majority. He is trailed by Jon Wizard, a current councilmember, with 2,400 votes, or 29.6 percent. (Joseph Smith, a far-right Republican-endorsed candidate, who has promoted conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic propaganda, brought in 1,141 votes or 14.1 percent.)

The vote count available so far comes almost entirely from mail-in ballots received ahead of Election Day.

The main fault line separating Oglesby and Wizard, who serve together on city council, appeared this spring in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis and the ensuing nationwide debate on funding for law enforcement. 

Wizard took to the streets with hundreds of peaceful demonstrators who demanded accountability and justice for communities of color over patterns of police abuse and the entrenched racial inequality of American life. Wizard was celebrated by some but vilified by others, who zeroed in on his use of the phrase “defund the police.” 

As a councilmember, he has argued to take some of the police department’s funding and put it toward community service in hope of alleviating some of the conditions that lead to the involvement of law enforcement in the first place. Some critics of Wizard’s position on police funding have mounted a recall campaign against him in a process that will play out in the coming weeks and months. If enough petition signatures are gathered, a recall would go on the ballot in a special election. 

Oglesby, meanwhile, positioned himself as a defender of the local police department while also expressing solidarity with the overall movement of Black Lives Matter and racial justice. His brand of politics earned him endorsements from church leaders and civil rights leaders. 

When you look at the diversity of my support, that is the community of Seaside,” Oglesby says.

The two candidates have maintained a cordial and productive relationship on Seaside City Council even while running against each other for the past few months. On one recent occasion, for example, Oglesby and Wizard voted together on the allocation of city funds to local community groups against a majority that voted to allocate funds to certain other groups. 

Oglesby has pledged to continue working productively alongside Wizard on council. 

“I’m not going to make him the bad guy,” Oglesby says. “I’m not claiming to have the best ideals, or the only ideals. We all have to take turns.”

In Seaside's two city council races, Dave Pacheco has a strong lead, with 4,072 votes as of 10pm Tuesday night. The second-highest vote-getter is Alexis Garcia-Arrazola, with 2,269 votes, just eight votes ahead of Regina Mason, followed by Tinisha Dunn who is trailing by 113 votes, then dentist/businessman Ayman Adeeb.