By gosh I think we did it... It's Congressman McNerney

12:13 a.m. This may be premature, but at 74 percent of the precincts counted, Democrat Jerry McNerney is holding a 3-4,000 vote margin over Republican Congresscritter Richard Pombo. His margin has held since the beginning of the count. And fully 80 percent of the San Joaquin County results, where Pombo was pretty certainly to lead, have come in. There, Pombo leads by only about 2,000, while McNerney leads in Alameda, Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties by enough to surpass Pombo's San Joaquin. And those other counties haven't reported as large a fraction of their votes as San Joaquin. Could decency and sanity be about to defeat corruption and arrogance?

Hey -- maybe I'm about to be proved wrong. I didn't think any Democrat who wasn't named Machado could win this district.

It's been a long time since I worked, even briefly and peripherally, on a tough winning campaign -- I guess Jeff Adachi's election as San Francisco Public Defender in 2002 was the last one. I've worked on so many worthy, necessary, but doomed campaigns that I'm shy about committing myself on the tough ones. But really, we can't expect good outcomes if we can't find the courage to throw down.

I didn't really throw down on this one, just worked a few shifts at the end. McNerney will make a good, thoughtful Congressman. Congratulations (prematurely, but I need to go to bed) to Jerry McNerney and all the hundreds of residents of House District 11 who gave months of their lives to the task of replacing their corrupt representative.

1:01 a.m. With 90 percent of precincts reporting, Jerry is at 52.3 percent, up by over 6000 votes. Awesome.

The Sierra Club helped too.