O’Connell was referring to the last time a county resident was elected to statewide office: Thomas Bard, who laid out the plans for Port Hueneme, left office in 1905 after serving in the United States Senate. He was the last Central Coast candidate to have been elected to a statewide seat until O’Connell’s victory.O’Connell returned to Oxnard High School as a teacher and basketball coach before he became interested in politics. As an aide to former state Senator Omer Rains, O’Connell soon found himself running for Assembly against Republican Brooks Firestone. O’Connell won, and he never lost an election as he moved up from the Assembly and into the State Senate. . .and his friend, Firestone, was elected to O’Connell’s vacated assembly seat.The closest O’Connell ever came to defeat was in fact an impressive showing in the March primary for the superintendent of public instruction seat. Although O’Connell had launched an aggressive campaign to win the post outright, he fell short of the required 50 percent of the vote and Smith was a surprising second place.But O’Connell campaigned hard, traveling up and down the state. “
Jack O’Connell: State Superintendent of Schools post goes to local guy
November 15, 2002
Santa Paula News
By Peggy Kelly
Santa Paula TimesA local guy, a.k.a. State Senator Jack O’Connell, managed to do something that no one else running for office across the country accomplished on Election Day: O’Connell got more votes than any other candidate in the United States, 3,309,404, making him California’s new State Superintendent of Public Education.O’Connell, who has represented Santa Paula for 20 years after he was first elected to the Assembly, garnered 62 percent of the votes statewide, in sheer vote numbers beating out even Gov. Gray Davis by almost 167,000 votes.O’Connell won an easy victory over Anaheim School Board Trustee Katherine Smith, who had 2,052,366 votes, 38 percent. In fact, Smith barely squeaked past O’Connell in her home district of Orange County, beating him by only about 12,000 votes in a district that saw almost 500,000 residents go to the polls.O’Connell was surrounded by family and supporters Tuesday night at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, the election night headquarters of state Democrats.“It’s exciting,” said O’Connell, who was reluctant to declare victory even though the first polling results - sans Los Angeles and San Francisco counties, which had election night computer problems - showed him leading. “I’m a local guy. . .it looks like we’re making Ventura County history here.”
