Challenger Ryan Taylor has taken an 82-vote lead over incumbent Cassandra Abram in the race for Turlock’s District 3 city council seat.

With Tuesday’s deadline now past for properly postmarked ballots to be accepted by the Stanislaus County Registrar of Voters office, a clearer picture is beginning to take shape of the city’s most competitive race.

Abram’s lead shrank to 28 votes after county registrar Donna Linder’s report last Friday, and her update tally on Monday revealed that Taylor had overtaken Abram, who is seeking a second term.

With more than 5,100 ballots already counted (there were nearly 5,700 ballots counted in D-3 four years ago and almost 6,000 tallied in 2018), Abram appears to be running out of daylight.

“We don’t have the ballots sorted by area until the day we open and count them,” said Linder. “So, we do not have numbers for specific races.”

However, this most recent update accounts for about 750 new ballots, and Taylor had a net gain of 110 votes. Based on recent history, there could be as many as 1,000 votes still to be counted in D-3. Abram will be looking to make a similar surge – though late voting tends to favor Republican candidates.

City Council seats traditionally are non-partisan posts, but Taylor trumpeted his admiration for slain conservative pundit Charlie Kirk throughout the campaign and sent out mailers that painted Abram as a “radical” who wants to “raise taxes” – dog-whistle terms for “liberal.”

Abram has never made known her political affiliation.

Incumbent Mayor Amy Bublak and incumbent Councilmember Kevin Bixel (District 1) retain large leads over their opponents – Jim Reape (641 votes) and Jeremy Rocha (725 votes), respectively.

In the District 4 state senate race, Republican Alexandra Duarte, who has never held political office, increased her lead to 17,000 votes (52.7 to 47.3 percent) over Democrat Jaron Brandon, a Tuolumne County supervisor – a race that appears all but over. She is the wife of former District 13 congressman John Duarte.

The 323,000 votes already cast in the D-4 election far surpasses the 260,000 cast in the 2022 election between a pair of Democrats: deposed incumbent Marie Alvarado-Gil (who later changed her party affiliation to Republican) and Tim Robertson.