Oakland, Nevada races still undecided, as are frontrunners on potential A’s stadium plans

I didn’t post an election day roundup yesterday because I was waiting for results in the Oakland mayor’s race and Nevada governor’s race, both of which may impact the Oakland A’s, whose owner is seeking $1 billion in infrastructure money for a stadium in Oakland or, if that doesn’t work out, possibly some unknown amount of money for a stadium in Las Vegas. So let’s see how those races are doing:

The Oakland race is actually a little more decided than the above chart shows: Oakland uses ranked choice voting, and those are only the first-place votes. If you eliminate the lower-placing candidates and redistribute their votes to voters’ second, third, and so on choices, which is how RSV works, then Loren Taylor has a 53-47% lead over Sheng Thao at last count. But because that calculation has to be redone every time more votes come in, it’s not definitive until every vote is counted.

What a Taylor win would mean for a potential A’s stadium development at Howard Terminal  is even less clear. He’s previously called the project a possible “win-win” but only if Oakland gets “the best deal possible for the city and making sure we don’t lose out in the long run.” Thao, meanwhile, has said “I could get to a yes on this project — but yes only if” there’s an affordable housing component and the city isn’t responsible for any future costs. That’s a lot of hedging, so we’ll just have to wait and see to what degree either current councilmember would pick up Mayor Libby Schaaf’s plan and run with it.

As for Nevada, the big question is whether Clark County sheriff Lombardo can secure the 50% needed to avoid a runoff with hold onto a 4% lead over current governor Sisolak with less than 20% of the votes to be counted. We’ve previously covered their respective public positions or lack thereof on a possible Vegas MLB stadium — Sisolak might consider tax breaks or infrastructure spending, while Lombardo is just generally “pro-business” — but how that would shake out in terms of actual cash toward a stadium that hasn’t even formally been proposed is completely uncertain.

So we’ll just have to wait and see, which is where the whole A’s stadium saga has been for a while already. Finding elected officials who want to throw public money at a sports team remains fairly easy, but actually finding a billion or so dollars in public money to throw is somewhat more difficult, which is why sometimes you get a Buffalo Bills deal that seemingly happens overnight, and sometimes you get an A’s situation that has been going on since, I’m pretty sure, the late Pleistocene. It’ll likely take another day or two for the election results to shake out, and then significantly longer than that to see what difference, if any, they make for the A’s future options.