Harry defeats Anderson in Lake County Superior Court judicial race
- Elizabeth Larson
- Posted On
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – On Tuesday, Lake County’s voters elected the second woman to serve as judge in the county’s 157-year history.
Shanda Harry, a deputy county counsel for the county of Lake, ended the night with a preliminary vote count that gave her an 18-percent lead over District Attorney Don Anderson in the race for Lake County Superior Court judge.
“I think it’s incredible,” she said of the results late Tuesday night, adding, “I’m going from cautiously optimistic to being extremely optimistic.”
She said she started out with “nobody knowing who I was,” which made the Tuesday outcome all the more exciting.
With early absentees and 70 precincts counted, Harry received 7,333 votes, or 58.8 percent, while Anderson received 5,080 votes, or 40.8 percent.
The results remain preliminary until the official canvass is completed in one month, but even with thousands of ballots remaining to be counted, Harry’s lead over Anderson appears to be statistically insurmountable.
Lake County News was unable to reach Anderson for comment late Tuesday.
Harry, 45, now becomes the second woman elected judge in Lake County. The first was Judge Betty Irwin, elected in 1982 as a write-in candidate to the justice court. Irwin died in 2013.
In the race to succeed Judge Stephen Hedstrom – who chose not to run for reelection after this third term ends this year – Harry had been the top vote-getter over Anderson and attorney Andre Ross in the June primary.
In the months since, as she and Anderson went into a runoff, she had attended a seemingly endless stream of events in an effort to get to know Lake County’s voters and participated in debates with Anderson, including one Lake County News hosted on Oct. 3.
“It’s been kind of crazy,” she said of her schedule, estimating she attended about 10 events a week – including spending several nights a week campaigning – while holding down a full-time job and raising a young daughter.
Harry said her challenge from the beginning was name recognition. That was not a small concern, considering her opponent was Anderson, now nearing the end of his second term as Lake County’s district attorney.
She said she was convinced that if she could sit down and talk with every voter and explain her qualifications, she could convince them to vote for her.
She had help from her family in the campaign, with her father creating her signs and her mother handling the accounting.
Harry said her mother isn’t a crier, but in watching the Tuesday night results come in, she said her mother wept with relief and, more importantly, told her that she was thankful she had run for judge because it exposed her to many new things as well.
While the local judicial race had its specific issues, Harry acknowledged the larger nationwide canvas her race is set against, as more women have sought – and been elected to – public office in 2018.
She said she heard from a lot of people that they were glad women were stepping up. “I do think that in general people were looking for diversity,” she said.
Noting that women are well represented in the judiciary across the state, but not so locally, Harry said, “It was time for Lake County to have a female judge on the bench.”
Even if she hadn’t won, Harry said she would have found the experience of getting to know Lake County better as worthwhile.
However, now she is focusing on what has to come next as she prepares to take on her new role as judge early in the new year.
Harry said she needs to spend the next month closing out projects in the County Counsel’s Office. “That’s really my focus right now, is to make sure I don’t leave anything hanging.”
She said she will meet with the local judges to find out what the plan is in terms of what type of cases she will be handling so she can get a jumpstart on being ready.
Harry said she’s spoken several times already to Judge Hedstrom – in whose court she practices most often – and expects to do so again in the coming weeks.
If she were to take over Hedstrom’s docket, it would be the most familiar for her, but Harry said that when she last spoke to Presiding Judge Andrew Blum, he had indicated there would be changes in assignments.
In the last months before she takes the bench, there will also be some focused family time with her daughter. “My daughter is really happy to have me back in the evenings,” Harry said.
And, admitting that it will sound like what winning athletes say after big competitions, she added, “I am taking my daughter to Disneyland because she has been a trooper through all of this.”
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