Early election results posted Tuesday night show that Tim Grayson, an assemblymember, has a bigger lead in the race for Steve Glazer’s seat in the state Senate for District 9. Marisol Rubio, a council member from San Ramon, was behind by about 12 percentage points.

There are a lot of Democratic candidates running to replace Steve Glazer, who did not run for reelection because he had too many terms. More than 500,000 people live in District 9, which includes Martinez, Concord, Antioch, Brentwood, and large parts of Contra Costa County that are not cities or towns.

By Tuesday evening at 8 p.m., election officials had counted more than 188,000 ballots.

These early tallies only show a small part of all the votes that will be counted in the final results. Over the next few days, mail-in ballots and votes cast in person on election day will also be counted.

This is Grayson’s seventh year in California’s Assembly. He is 57 years old. As the son of a public transit worker and member of the Teamsters union, he brags about the things he has done in the past to make it easier to build affordable housing near transit hubs, create more green energy jobs in Contra Costa County, and take on “big banks and pharmaceutical companies.”

He has also been against plans to build a water tunnel under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and against the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s efforts to get voters to agree to another tax hike in 2026.

Before he was elected to the Concord City Council in 2010 and 2014, Grayson worked as a general contractor and owned a small business. He also served as mayor for a short time.

Since being first elected to the California Legislature in 2016, Grayson has been criticized for how he has voted while representing the 15th District, which includes Martinez, Brentwood, and large parts of Contra Costa County that are not in any city or town.

The former Concord councilmember, police chaplain, and Christian pastor chose not to weigh in on nearly a dozen important bills during the last week of the 2023 California Legislature’s session.

These bills were mostly about protecting renters, protecting the environment, providing reproductive health care, protecting LGBTQ+ rights, making the public safer, and keeping an eye on technology. He gave health reasons that don’t seem to match up with legislative records.

Some people think of Grayson as a moderate Democrat who is good for business, but Rubio says that his history of missing votes and huge campaign donations show that he is really just a puppet of big businesses that “paddles left and right” to please everyone who has an interest in a policy.

She specifically mentions Courage California, a progressive grassroots advocacy group that has put Grayson in its “Hall of Shame” since he was a new state legislator in 2017. The group says that Grayson’s grades show that he is “a frequent recipient of big oil money and sidestepped votes on significant fossil fuel and emissions bills this session.”

This is the second time Rubio, 51, has run for this Senate district. His first attempt, in the March 2020 primary, failed.

In November 2022, Rubio was elected to the San Ramon City Council. Before that, she was elected to the Dublin San Ramon Services District and served as a director and vice president.

She also serves on the boards of the Sierra Club California and its San Francisco Bay chapter, as well as of several other nonprofits that fight for the rights of women to have children and people with developmental disabilities.

The Latina elected official says that her 30 years of experience working for social justice, her training in neurobiology, and her own struggles with medical issues give her a unique perspective that will help her write laws that will help District 9 deal with problems like healthcare, climate change, industry, and housing.

There were only about 800 votes separating Grayson and Rubio in the March primary election. They got 51% and 49% of the roughly 30,000 votes cast, respectively.

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