More than a week after election results started rolling in, Larry Turner on Wednesday conceded the race for mayor of San Diego to incumbent Todd Gloria.
Gloria holds a 56,000-vote lead over Turner, a San Diego police officer, with around 140,000 ballots left to be counted countywide, but Turner had hoped late votes would break for him.
Instead, Gloria widened his lead, cruising to a second term with a 55.3% to 44.6% win. Turner blamed "special interests and developers" for outspending his campaign.
Local attorney Steven Richter donated $1.7 million to the conservative Lincoln Club of San Diego's political action committee. Much of that went toward Turner's campaign.
Democrats responded by raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in a political action committee of their own, led by Stephen Cushman, one of the biggest champions of and consultants for Gloria's proposed "megashelter" at Kettner and Vine.
"Our campaign was more than a political race, it was a movement," he said in a statement Wednesday. "A movement which proved that we can overcome the factors that divide us, and instead focus on what unites us, for the good of our community. Our team and our volunteers came from all walks of life, across the political spectrum, and formed one coalition: We are the San Diego Party — non-partisan, independent, and common-sense."
Gloria declared victory the day after the election, before his lead had widened to 11 points.
"Please accept my heartfelt thank you for helping me win re-election as San Diego's mayor," Gloria said last week to his supporters. "We have an incredible opportunity to move San Diego forward on all the critical issues we talked about in this campaign, and that's in big part thanks to you."
Gloria was initially elected in 2020, in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic downturn. He earned the endorsement of then-Senator Kamala Harris in 2020.
His first term has been a challenging one, as San Diego faced a slew of problems, including increasing rates of homelessness and housing costs, the rising threat of fentanyl, questions about the city's infrastructure following the Jan. 22 storms and the worsening of the ongoing Tijuana River Valley sewage pollution crisis.
Last year, former unofficial city ambassador and basketball legend Bill Walton made news by calling out Gloria's response to homelessness as inadequate. Walton died in May.
Gloria has touted his administration's efforts to build more housing, repair the city's aging infrastructure and provide more shelters for the homeless.
Gloria has also pivoted to taking a tougher stance on crime and being less forgiving to the homeless unable or unwilling to stay in shelters.
In September, he joined residents and business owners in downtown San Diego's East Village neighborhood to endorse a plan seeking to completely ban homeless encampments and tents downtown, as well as having faster police response times, stronger sentences for smash-and-grab crimes and forcing people with addiction and mental health issues into state conservatorship.
