Days after Tuesday’s election, four California congressmen are losing in races that remain too close to call.

Days after the election, four members of Congress from California were trailing Thursday in races that remained too close to call.

Democratic Reps. Gil Cisneros and Harley Rouda of Orange County and GOP Rep. Mike Garcia of Santa Clarita ( Los Angeles County) were trailing by less than a percentage point with 4.5 million votes still uncounted statewide. In the Central Valley, Rep. TJ Cox of Fresno was down by about 2 percentage points.

For Cisneros, there’s a distinct feeling of deja vu. Two years ago, he was running behind former GOP Assemblymember Young Kim after election night, only to claw back into the lead as provisional and latearriving mail ballots were counted. The Yorba Linda Democrat wasn’t declared the winner until more than a week after election day.

On Tuesday, Kim took a tiny lead and has hung on to it. But in California and most other states, the late votes tend to skew Democratic, with many of them from young and occasional voters unfamiliar with ballot procedures. Ballots

postmarked by election day that arrive by Nov. 20 also will be counted.

Republican Orange County Supervisor Michelle Steel has eked out a small lead over Rouda in a district where the GOP has a 5percentagepoint edge in registration. Rouda, DLaguna Beach, won the seat in 2018 by beating longtime Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher.

“We feel good about where things stand but will continue monitoring as more results come in,” said Lance Trover, a spokesperson for Steel.

As of Thursday, Orange County had about 235,000 votes left to count.

Democratic Assemblymember Christy Smith was leading Garcia by a handful of votes in her bid to take back a seat the party lost in a special election in May. This is the rubber match for the seat that includes parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

The seat was left open when firstterm Democratic Rep. Katie Hill resigned late last year in the aftermath of a sex scandal. Smith finished ahead of Garcia in the March primary, but was beaten badly in the May runoff that sent the former Navy pilot to Congress

to finish Hill’s term.

For Cox, the election is looking like a rerun of 2018. In that race, he trailed GOP Rep. David Valadao of Hanford ( Kings County) by more than 6,000 votes the day after the election, but beat the incumbent by 862 votes in a contest that wasn’t final until early December.

Although this year’s race is closer, Cox again finds himself running behind Valadao.

“We’ve been through this before,” Cox said Wednesday in an email to supporters. “We owe it to the Valley to get this right, ensure each and every vote is counted, no matter who wins.”

In another close race, Republican Darrell Issa had a 52% to 48% lead over Democrat Ammar CampaNajjar for the San Diegoarea seat left open by the resignation of GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter Jr., who was sentenced to federal prison for campaign finance violations.

Democrats are confident the state’s vote count will play out as it did two years ago, when the party’s candidates flipped seven GOP seats.

“In 2018, five of our candidates were behind by two, five or even 10 points,” said Andy Orellana, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional

Campaign Committee. “The initial returns were strong for us and we expect Los Angeles, Kern and Orange counties to trend our way.”

There were few other surprises in the state’s congressional elections. Three other Democrats who flipped GOP seats in 2018 — Reps. Mike Levin of San Juan Capistrano ( Orange County), Katie Porter of Irvine and Josh Harder of Turlock ( Stanislaus County) — all easily won reelection.

“It has been the honor of my life to serve my home town in Congress the past two years,” Harder said in a statement. “We proved that we can get more done by finding common ground than fighting each other.”

No Bay Area congressional contests were remotely close. The stillchanging vote count for the region’s allDemocrat delegation ranged from 90% for Oakland Rep. Barbara Lee to 66% for Rep. Anna Eshoo of Palo Alto. In San Francisco, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi crushed fellow Democrat Shahid Buttar with 79% of the vote.