Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee appeared to be well ahead in her reelection bid against three challengers based on early vote totals Tuesday night.
Lee had 85.5% of the vote in the first round of the ranked-choice contest, while former bank executive Julius Robinson had about 6%, community activist Brenda Grisham had 4.3% and frequent candidate Mindy Pechenuk had about 4.2%.
The initial vote numbers came in at a little after 9 p.m., with more totals expected throughout the night.
Lee won the job in an April 2025 special election to replace Sheng Thao, who lost a recall election and is now embroiled in a federal corruption trial.
A Texas native, Lee served Oakland and northern Alameda County in Congress from 1998 to 2025. She also served in the state Assembly for six years and the state Senate for two. She earned an undergraduate degree from Mills College in Oakland and a master’s degree in social work from UC Berkeley.
She volunteered with the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and worked on the 1972 presidential campaign of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to seek a major political party’s presidential nomination.
Grisham is a public safety and victims’ rights advocate who helped lead a successful campaign to recall former Alameda County district attorney Pamela Price.
Her campaign website describes her as a business owner who has fought to improve neighborhood safety and government accountability, among other things.
Pechenuk, raised in Brooklyn, New York, is a Republican who was active in the recalls of Thao and Price. She describes herself as an educator and has run for state Assembly twice and Oakland’s at-large City Council seat once but has not yet won an election.
She also ran in the 10-candidate special election to replace Thao as mayor and was eliminated in the sixth of nine rounds of ranked-choice voting.
Robinson says he spent 47 years in banking, investment and community development.
