With the full count from Tuesday's polls finally in, it looks clear: Republican Diane Douglas has more votes than Democrat David Garcia in the race for state Superintendent of Public Instruction. But Garcia's camp isn't ready to give up, holding onto hope that the early ballots dropped at polling places on Tuesday may allow him to make up the difference.
See also: Garcia Not Ready to Concede in State Superintendent Race
At present, with all 1,566 precincts reporting, Douglas tops Garcia by a 1.68 point margin, representing nearly 21,000 votes. She earned more votes than Garcia at the polls and on the early ballots tallied so far, even beating Garcia by a very thin margin--1,776 votes--in Maricopa County.
But in a statement on his Facebook page, Garcia said he was encouraged to have made up some ground as the counting of early ballots began. "The numbers are trending as we had hoped, and we remain very optimistic," he wrote.
Garcia's camp says there were still 223,000 ballots left to be counted as of this morning, and their calculations show the Democrat would need about 54 percent of those votes to overcome the current deficit. And the gap has slowly lessened as those ballots have been tallied, so Garcia won't be conceding just yet.
The Secretary of State's office told the Garcia campaign it may take until the middle of next week for the final count.
Diane Douglas did not return requests for comment.
Garcia, an ASU education professor, was widely endorsed by both sides of the aisle. Douglas ran her campaign on a single platform: stopping Common Core.
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