State has big role in House control
Dems get sliver of hope from 11 undecided races
Democrats will retain control of the Senate, after the widely anticipated “red wave” failed to emerge.
Now attention has shifted to the battle for the House — and especially to California, home of 11 of 19 not-yet-called races. Republicans are currently ahead in six of those races, and Democrats are ahead in five. Most are in Southern California or the Central Valley.
Republicans remain favored to narrowly win a House majority. But in the nation’s most populous state, the large number of ballots yet to be counted have given Democrats a faint sliver of hope.
“The House is really going to come down to California,” Dave Wasserman, a House race analyst with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, said on MSNBC Friday. On Sunday, after new
numbers came out, he tweeted: “Dems need a miracle.”
Of the 218 seats needed for a majority, Republicans have won 212, while Democrats have won 204, according to the New York Times elections tracker.
In California, the ballots released Saturday in California “were still good but not good enough for Dems,” New York Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn tweeted Sunday morning. There are “lots of votes left,” Cohn said, but Democrats need to do seven to 12 points better in some key districts than they have done to date in the post-election tally.
Many of the later counts are mail-in ballots, said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
Mail-in ballots, Election Day drop-offs and provisional ballots take longer to count and verify. And a greater majority of vote-by-mail ballots are cast by Democrats, Levinson said.
“That’s not surprising, because Republicans have said over and over again that you can’t trust the vote-by-mail system, you can’t trust absentee balloting and so you need to go in on Election Day,” Levinson said.
Mail-in ballots “seem to be going well for Democrats so far but they have some big gaps to close,” Cohn tweeted Friday. Levinson also thinks a Democrat majority in the House is “an uphill climb.”
“Basically every domino would have to hit for Democrats to keep control of the House. I still think it’s more likely than not that they don’t, but I will say that’s a lot more tempered prediction than I would have had even 72 hours ago,” Levinson said.
Wasserman tweeted Sunday that two House races are the most uncertain. Both are in California — Districts 13 and 22, both with a Republican currently in the lead — and Democrats would probably need both of them to have a chance of retaining a House majority.
In District 13, Republican farmer John Duarte is running against Adam Gray, a Democrat who represents Merced in the state Assembly. Both are running for Congress for the first time in the district, which was newly formed after redistricting in 2021. The district is in the San Joaquin Valley and covers all of Merced County, most of Madera County and parts of Stanislaus County, Fresno County and San Joaquin County.
Gray is a moderate Democrat who has focused on water issues, infrastructure and bolstering Central Valley health care, according to the Fresno Bee. Duarte, owner of Duarte Nurseries, has campaigned on water issues, the high cost of living, school choice and public safety. As of Friday, the most recent update, with 61% of the votes counted, Duarte led Gray by just 84 votes, according to the Associated Press.
In District 22, Democrats have long targeted Republican Rep. David Valadao, R-Hanford (Kings County), in a Central Valley spot that leaned further left after redistricting.
Valadao is one of only 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach President Donald Trump last year for instigating the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. But Trump never endorsed a challenger to Valadao, a silence attributed to the congressman’s relationship with House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield — a Trump loyalist whom the former president has referred to as “My Kevin.”
Valadao faced a strong Democratic challenger in Rudy Salas, a conservative Democrat who has served 10 years in the Legislature. Plus, the newly drawn district supported President Biden by 13 points in 2020. Valadao was leading by 5 percentage points as of Friday, the most recent update in the race.
Democrats hoped that newly redrawn districts would help them oust longtime Republican Rep. Ken Calvert of Corona (Riverside County) in District 41. Democrats rallied around former federal prosecutor Will Rollins, backed by former California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer.
Trump won Calvert’s old district by 7 percentage points in 2020, but would have won by only 1 point in the new district. Rollins, who is gay, has been courting the LGBTQ community in Palm Springs, which was added to the district during redistricting. But Calvert has pointed out that 70% of the new district is the same as the old one — and he’s been serving in office since 1992.
Calvert led by 3 percentage points Sunday night..
“If the Dems don’t turn around CA41 or surge elsewhere, I find myself wondering whether overseas/cured ballots in CO-03 (Colorado’s Third District) are their next best path” to retaining a majority in the House, Cohn tweeted. “Just not many options if they can’t break through in one of these districts.”
Wasserman tweeted Sunday that the latest batch of ballots in CA-41 was “another big blow to House Dems’ path to 218.”
In another closely watched race, in Orange County, Rep. Michelle Steel, R-Seal Beach, was leading Democrat Jay Chen by 7 percentage points. Earlier this year, Steel was thought to be vulnerable after redistricting forced her into a less-friendly battleground. Instead of running in the more conservative coastal district where she won in 2020, Republicans slotted Steel to run the 45th Congressional District, where Democrats have a 5point registration advantage.
But Steel’s supporters were confident because her new district included the Vietnamese hub known as Little Saigon, which boosted her district’s Asian American slice of the electorate to 35%. Vietnamese voters were an integral part of the coalition that helped carry Steel to victory in 2020 over incumbent Democrat Harley Rouda, who is white.
Chen, Steel’s opponent, is the son of Taiwanese immigrants, a U.S. Naval Reserve officer, school board member and owner of a real estate firm. He thought he could parlay Steel’s opposition to establishing the commission to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection and against the bipartisan $1.9 trillion American Recovery Plan last year into a victory.
Many Democrats thought Christy Smith had the best chance to flip a GOP-seat in Southern California, in the CA-27 district. In 2020, Smith lost to Rep. Mike Garcia, RSanta Clarita (Los Angeles County), by just 333 votes. Plus, after redistricting, the district became friendlier to Democrats who claim 40% of the registered voters in the new turf, compared with 30% registered Republicans.
Garcia, a former Navy combat pilot who opposed impeaching Trump, has carved out a conservative record while serving the House minority. He co-sponsored legislation that would enact a nationwide ban on abortion, even though an August Berkeley IGS poll found that 70% of Los Angeles County voters disapproved of the Supreme Court decision overturning the Roe v. Wade decision that protected abortion rights. He also opposed the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes a provision that put an annual cap on out-of-pocket costs for Medicare recipients.
In addition to defeating Smith in 2020, he bested her in a special 2019 election to fill the remainder of Democrat Katie Hill’s term after Hill resigned. Garcia led by 11 percentage points as of Saturday night, and Smith acknowledged in a tweet that she wasn’t likely to surmount his lead.
Orange County Rep. Katie Porter is not only a rising star in the Democratic Party, but one of its best-funded candidates — she raised $24 million for her 2022 campaign.
Yet she was drawn into a more Republican district and faced an experienced candidate, Scott Baugh, who once served as the top Republican in the Assembly. Despite Porter’s advantages, Cook Political Report rated the race a “toss-up” a week before Election Day. Porter had a 3 percentage point lead on Saturday night.