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On Tuesday, Giselle Hale received 27% of the vote to Diane Papan's 76%.
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Months after Redwood City Mayor Giselle Hale ended her bid for California State Assembly and subsequently announced her departure from the city council, some voters are disappointed to be left without a choice in the Nov. 8 general election.
Just after her announcement, Peninsula for Everyone, a housing advocacy nonprofit and Hale endorser, tweeted that while the organization respected Hale’s decision to step out of the race, they were disappointed to lose “the opportunity to elect a pro-housing legislator in AD21 this term.”
While Hale is still on the ballot for state assembly, she officially suspended her campaign in late June, just two weeks after making a last-minute comeback to secure her runoff spot against San Mateo Deputy Mayor Diane Papan.
Some constituents on Twitter said they voted for her anyway. One person said he was “so proud to vote for Giselle Hale for #AD21 instead.” Another Redwood City resident, in a tweet, agreed and called her “the better choice.” Others wondered what might happen if Hale were to win the majority vote despite having dropped out.
The choice to accept the win would be Hale’s, said Jim Irizarry, San Mateo County assistant assessor-county clerk-recorder and assistant chief elections officer, adding that per state law, her name, once on the ballot, could not be removed. However, he said that the final winner, if she were to gain a majority of votes, would be up to the state to determine.
Hale did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday night.
“If she were to get the majority of the votes—I think I know the answer—she would be declared the winner by the mere fact that people did vote for her,” he said. “But she would need to accept it.”
Rather than face Papan in the race for Assembly District 21, Hale decided to pull away from politics entirely, a decision she made as a deliberate effort to protect and prioritize her family.
“A lot of the press has written about my children, but it was actually really hard for my husband,” she told the Pulse in July. “I think there’s something about watching your spouse get torn apart that is really difficult. Especially because he sees the things that I sacrifice in my family. And for my friends too.”
Hale, who launched her campaign for state assembly in January, was not alone in describing her race as unusually negative. In a column for the San Mateo Daily Journal, Mark Simon characterized her race against Papan as an example of “a willingness to push beyond our historic standards of conduct and rhetoric and reach for the unnecessary overstatement.”
Describing an “onslaught of mailers,” primarily pro-Papan and funded in large part by real estate and other special interest groups, Simon called the accusations—such as those tying Hale to Donald Trump through an audition for The Apprentice—“purposely misleading to the point of absurdity.”
Hale, who was elected to the city council in 2018, said the experience of campaigning for state office was even more challenging than she had expected.
“I knew that there would be some big differences between this and a council race. People told me, ‘when you run for a state race, it’s a money race, you’re never going to be able to reach every voter at their doors or through a coffee or a debate,’” she said, blaming a lack of accountability and transparency around campaign finance laws, for outsized spending on Papan’s behalf. “But the reality is that often the money that matters is the outside money.”
Housing Providers for Responsible Solutions and Future PAC spent over $4 million in support of campaigns, including Papan’s, and against others, such as Hale, according to a report from Politico.
As to whether such public criticism is simply a part of politics, Hale said what she experienced was beyond the usual.
“People who have been around in politics for years have told me there’s no one dead or alive who has experienced this level of attacks,” she said, describing her campaign as an isolating experience. “There’s really nowhere to look to as a candidate about how to deal with this.”
While preliminary results put her in third place during the June primary, trailing Papan and lone Republican Mark Gilham, Hale ultimately pulled ahead of Gilham with a 322-vote lead.
Papan, who won nearly 70% of precincts in Redwood City, Redwood Shores and North Fair Oaks, easily claimed her seat at the top of the ballot. Meanwhile, Hale won just under 25% of Redwood City area precincts.
