The unofficial final results are in and (barring the highly improbable) former OC Supervisor John Moorlach has defeated Assemblyman Don Wagner, 50.4% to 44.1%:

Unofficial final SD37 special

Moorlach raised a competitive warchest, but was out-raised and out-mailed by Wagner. However, 20 years as a county elected office gave Moorlach a significant voter recognition advantage district-wide, magnified by the compressed time-frame of a special election. Given the miserably low turnout, enough of the heavily Republican electorate voted for the conservative Republican they knew better to give Moorlach a bare majority – but more than enough to avoid a run-off.

OC Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley stuck with a prediction of voter-turnout in the low-20s, but it was actually beyond anemic – 14%.

One politico has done some math and explained to me there’s an outside possibility Wagner to could up enough votes by Friday to pull Moorlach just below 50% and push this to a May run-off. I don’t know; according to the OC Registrar of Voters, there are 5,473 ballots left to count and Moorlach leads by 4,221. I’m not a mathematician, but that scenario strikes me as unlikely given Moorlach’s percentage increased with each update: 49.7% 49.8%; 49.9%; 50.4%.

But stranger things have happened. As John Hrabe points out on Calnewsroom.com:

But, as Political Data Inc.’s Paul Mitchell has pointed out on Twitter, those percentages don’t include roughly a thousand votes in the tally. Presumably, a large number of those ballots are for write-in Democrat Louise Stewardson. When looking at the raw numbers, Moorlach’s 34,208 votes – out of 69,071 ballots cast – drops him below 50 percent.

We’ll see by the end of the week.

This was a hard-fought and bitter campaign, as campaigns usually are. As Chris Nguyen has rightly noted, campaigns in which there is little philosophical difference between the candidates are usually even nastier. Regardless of the official, certified outcome, the winner is going to be a conservative Republican. It’s time for tempers to cool and focus to shift toward party-building, rather than indulging reprisal instincts.

Stay tuned.