With nearly 12 percent of the vote, Christensen has built a 35-thousand vote lead over Ainye Long, a San Francisco Unified math teacher, and a 44-thousand vote lead over George Yang, a software engineer from Redwood City.
On Election night, Christensen trailed both by a few thousand votes, but gained daily as final mail-in and provisional ballots were counted.
As of Thursday, 18 days since the primary election in pursuit of his second and final term, Thurmond has more than 46 percent of the vote. He needed at least 50 percent of the vote in the primary to avoid a runoff election, one of two statewide constitutional offices with that requirement.
Christensen is vice president of education policy for the California Policy Center. He previously held several positions in the state Capitol, as a legislative consultant in the state Senate, adviser to former Republican Sen. John Moorlach, and a finance budget analyst for the Department of Finance.
A late entrant to the race, he raised only 39-thousand in the primary, compared with two million dollars by Thurmond, and will have to start again from scratch.
