Election 2016: Steve Bradford, Warren Furutani top field with Isaac Galvan

Election 2016: Steve Bradford, Warren Furutani top field with Isaac Galvan. Two veteran former lawmakers, Democrats Steven Bradford and Warren Furutani, appear headed toward a November showdown in the 35th state Senate District, but the race is still unsettled until late ballots are counted.

Bradford received 36.4 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s primary election and is assured of a spot in the fall general election. But Furutani’s status as the runner-up is tenuous because only 1,516 votes separate him from the third-place finisher and more than 570,000 late and provisional ballots remain to be counted in Los Angeles County.

Final returns today revealed that Furutani captured 23.9 percent of the vote and Democrat Isaac Galvan collected 22.4 percent. Republican Charlotte Svolos garnered 17.4 percent of the vote.

The race is deemed a “close contest” by the Secretary of State’s Office website.

The two top vote-getters will advance to the Nov. 8 general election.

Voter registration in the district — which straddles the 110 Freeway and stretches north to Watts and south to the Port of Los Angeles — is overwhelmingly Democratic (60 percent compared to 13.9 percent Republican and 21 percent with no party preference). The 35th District includes all or parts of Carson, Compton, Gardena, Hawthorne, Inglewood, Lawndale, Long Beach, Watts, San Pedro and Torrance.

Bradford, 56, and Furutani, 68, are both familiar figures in the South Bay. Bradford was the first black elected to the Gardena City Council, where he served for more than 12 years.

He captured an Assembly seat in a 2009 special election and was re-elected in 2010, representing the newly drawn 62nd District that included El Segundo, Gardena, Hawthorne, Inglewood, Lawndale, Lennox, Marina del Rey, West Athens, Westchester and Venice Beach. He has been out of public office since 2014

Furutani began his career in public service in 1987, when he became the first Asian Pacific American elected to the board of the Los Angeles Unified School District representing the South Bay-Harbor Area.

He was elected to the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees in 1999 and most recently served in the state Assembly representing the 55th District before he was termed out in 2012.

Galvan, 26, was the first Latino elected to the Compton City Council three years ago and lists his top priorities as job creation, increasing the state’s investment in higher education and reducing greenhouse emissions. In February, one of his brothers was killed and another wounded in a shooting in East Los Angeles.