The Sunshine Blog: The home stretch of the election, Tulsi and Trump and our beloved governor

The incredible loss of votes: Hawaii's primary this month featured fewer candidates than it has seen in a decade, but the general election will be even more lonely, especially on Oahu.

A total of 279 candidates ran in the primaries, but barely more than half – 141 – are still campaigning ahead of the general election on November 5.

All elections in the City and County of Honolulu were decided in the primaries, including the mayoral election and five City Council elections. (It's a good thing we have a presidential election on the ballot.)

There is more going on on the neighboring islands:

• Hawaii County: one runoff election for mayor and two races for city council.
• Maui County: Due to different election rules, there is no clear winner in the primary election in Valley Island, where there are seven contested and two uncontested council races.
• Kauai County: Completely different rules apply here, as 14 candidates are competing for seven seats on the local council.

In the meantime, all Hawaii voters can cast their ballots in three contested elections for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs.

In the state's House of Representatives, where all 51 seats were up for grabs at the start of this election cycle, 35 seats remain to be decided in November. In the state's 25-member Senate, eight seats are still contested.

You may be wondering how many of the 141 candidates in the general election responded to Civil Beat's Q&A. So far, 86 have.

Some of these are being published for the first time this week, as they come from Maui County Council candidates who were not on the primary ballot. Responses from all of the general election candidates who bothered to send in their surveys will be republished on the Civil Beat homepage in the coming weeks. You can also find links to them on our just-released general election ballot.

By the way, we will again name the lawbreakers – the candidates for the parliamentary elections who did not participate in the poll. But first we will once again invite them to tell our readers why they deserve their vote.

Tulsi appears again: On Monday, Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who now calls herself an independent, endorsed former President Donald Trump.

“If you love our country as much as I do, if you care as much about peace and freedom as we do, then I invite you to join me in doing everything we can to save our country, to elect President Donald J. Trump and send him back to the White House to do the hard work of saving our country and serving the people,” she said in Detroit.

Gabbard, who scored points against Kamala Harris in the 2020 primaries when both women ran against Joe Biden, is now expected to advise Trump on his debate preparations with Harris. If he wins, there is talk that Gabbard will join a second Trump administration.

The Democratic National Committee, for its part, dismissed the endorsement as, well, odd. It issued the following statement:

“Gabbard and Trump have a lot in common – they have both earned praise from white supremacists and other extremists, celebrated the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and campaigned on behalf of dangerous voter deniers. Instead of focusing on winning the support of hard-working Americans, Trump is more fixated on winning the support of extremists like Gabbard and RFK Jr. – and they will do nothing but weigh down his sinking campaign ship.”

His kind of city: Gov. Josh Green led Hawaii's delegation to the DNC but managed to do a little fundraising on the side. The event was held Wednesday, a day after the state roll call vote, at Sycamore Hills Golf Club in Fort Wayne, Indiana, according to the fundraising appeal Green filed with the Hawaii Campaign Spending Commission.

Fort Wayne residents Michael and Gretchen Gouloff were responsible for the fundraiser. Michael Gouloff runs an architecture firm and the couple runs Blessings in a Backpack, which provides food for children in schools.

Green continues to do well nationally. Last month, Morning Consult released its latest poll of all 50 governors and put Green in 10th place with a 60% approval rating. He's even more popular among Democrats in Hawaii, with 77% approval—not on the same level as Kentucky's Andy Beshear, Michigan's Gretchen Whitmer or Minnesota's Tim Walz, according to Morning Consult, but high enough that Democrats nationally are likely paying attention to Hawaii's chief medical officer.

We can count on: The latest edition of Hawaii State The Data Book has been published and is full of interesting and insightful information.

The compilation includes population, education, environment, economy, energy, real estate, construction, business, government, tourism and transport. Topics of interest for the blog include:

• With 24,080 employees, fast food and counter workers are once again the largest occupational groups in Hawaii.
• The national average daily rate for hotel rooms continues to rise, reaching $377 per night in 2023.
• The cattle and calves population was the largest since 2010 and totaled 148,000 head in 2023.
• More than a third of all the state's roads and highways (approximately 2,877 kilometers) are located on Oahu. Only eight of them are unpaved.
• The number of cremations is four times higher than that of burials.