A handful of tight races in the Golden State could help determine whether Democrats can maintain some ground amid unexpected GOP victories.
LOS ANGELES—As Trump was projected to win the presidential election late Tuesday night following a series of crucial swing state wins, it was also clear that Republicans had retaken the Senate, where they gained two seats for a majority of 51.
Under a second Trump administration, a GOP-led Senate would play a crucial role in shaping policy and the judiciary.
“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate. We have taken back control of the Senate—wow that’s good,” Mr. Trump told his supporters in a speech from his home in Mar-a-Lago.
But according to preliminary election results as of early Wednesday morning, there was still no clear winner in the battle to control the House, with more than 100 races yet to be called.
Particularly in California, where the vast majority of voters—more than 80 percent—use vote-by-mail ballots, results can typically take days or even weeks for a final count.
That left a narrowing but still viable path for Democrats to hold ground in a dramatically shifting landscape.
The state’s Congressional delegation includes 40 Democrat and 12 Republican representatives. Democrats need to win a total of five seats in this election in order to wrest the majority away from Republicans.
Among the 22 U.S. Congressional districts considered “toss-ups” by the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan organization, five are in California, including several rematches that were decided on a razor-thin margin in 2022 in districts that flipped Red after going to Biden in 2020.
As of Nov. 1, Cook Political Report analysts had deemed the race for control of the U.S. House “as close as it’s ever been,” with neither party having a clear advantage in a majority of seats.
California Heartland
The San Joaquin Valley—California’s heavily Latino heartland and hyper-productive agricultural center—was the battleground for two such races.
In the 13th District, which covers a large swath of the Valley after redistricting moved it inland, incumbent John Duarte flipped the seat red for the first time since the 1970s in one of the closest races in the country in 2022—with a margin of less than 600 votes out of 133,600—making him one of the most vulnerable House Republicans in 2024.
Both Duarte, a fourth-generation farmer, and his Democratic opponent, former State Assemblymember Adam Gray, campaigned as moderates willing to work across the aisle on issues such as cost of living and the water supply—a key concern for farmers in the district, which includes Merced County and parts of Stanislaus.
Duarte was ahead nearly 10 percent in the primaries, while Gray had a slight advantage in the district, where 41 percent of registered voters are Democrats, compared to about 30 percent Republicans.
But by early Wednesday morning, the two candidates were still neck-and-neck, with Duarte showing a slight lead at 51.0 percent with 49 percent of votes counted, according to The Associated Press.
California’s 22nd District, also in the San Joaquin Valley, includes Kings County and parts of Tulare and Kern counties. Democrats had a presumable advantage in the majority-Latino district with 41 percent of registered voters, compared to 27 percent Republican and 23 percent no preference, although the picture is more mixed at the county level.
In 2022, the race between Republican incumbent David Valadao and Democrat Rudy Salas was decided by less than 3,200 votes.
With a background in dairy and agriculture, Valadao campaigned as a “proud son of the Central Valley,” while Salas, who previously served five terms in the state assembly, pointed to his own beginnings laboring in agricultural fields with his father before attending UCLA.
Valadao held the seat on-and-off since 2012, losing it in 2018 and then recapturing it in 2020. He was one of few Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
In the run-up to Tuesday, recent polling showed the Democratic challenger with a 2-point lead over Valadao, at 47 to 45 percent, respectively.
But by Tuesday night, with 46 percent of votes counted, Valadao had pulled ahead with 54.1 percent of the vote.
In northern Los Angeles County, Republican incumbent Mike Garcia and his Democrat challenger George Whitesides remained in a dead heat into Wednesday morning—both had nearly 50 percent of the vote, with about 57 percent of ballots counted, according to The AP.
Garcia first won a congressional seat in a 2020 special election to replace former Democratic Congresswoman Katie Hill, who resigned following an inappropriate conduct scandal. He managed to fend off challenges from Democrat Christy Smith, beating her in November 2020 by a 333-vote margin, and again in 2022.
During his campaign in District 27, which includes the high-desert communities of Lancaster, Palmdale and Santa Clarita, Garcia, the son of Mexican immigrants and former Navy fighter pilot, painted Whitesides, a former chief of staff for NASA, as an “extreme liberal” who had only recently moved to the area. Whitesides vowed to take on crime and support law enforcement, signaling a more moderate break with his party’s progressive platform.
Other Races
On the Senate side, longtime Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff handily fended off a fading challenge from former Major League baseball player Steve Garvey, a Republican, for the prime U.S. Senate seat long held by the late Dianne Feinstein.
But in one of the most contentious toss-up races in the state—and one of the most expensive U.S. House races in the country—Republican incumbent Michelle Steel faced an aggressive challenge from Democrat Derek Tran in District 45.
As of early Wednesday morning, Steel led Tran by more than five percentage points, with 65 percent of ballots counted.
Steel is seeking her third term in the district, which runs through Los Angeles and Orange Counties and is home to a large Asian American population—around 38 percent—including Little Saigon, the largest Vietnamese community outside of Vietnam.
As election day neared, most polls had the candidates neck-and-neck, while high-wattage Democrats, including Bill Clinton and Adam Schiff, came out in support of Tran in an effort to pry the seat from Steel, who was endorsed by Trump in October and campaigned with Steve Garvey.
Both have close ties with the Asian American immigrant community. Steel, who was first elected to Congress in 2020 after serving on the Orange County Board of Supervisors, came to the U.S. from South Korea, while Tran, a veteran and personal injury attorney who has never held political office, said his family fled communist Vietnam.
Tensions have flared as the candidates questioned each other’s fitness to represent the district’s large Vietnamese population, and more broadly, its powerful Asian American voting bloc.
Both candidates support Prop. 36, the statewide ballot measure that would reintroduce harsher penalties for some crimes including hard drug possession and retail theft.
In Riverside County, east of Los Angeles, Republican incumbent Ken Calvert faced a stiff challenge from Democrat Will Rollins in a rematch of a 2022 battle that he won with less than five percent of the vote.
In the primaries, Calvert led Rollins 53 to 38 percent, while polling leading up to the election showed a tied race in District 41, which leans Republican but includes staunchly blue enclaves like Palm Springs.
By early Wednesday morning with 63 percent of ballots counted, the race remained tight as Rollins emerged with a narrow lead of 51 percent of the vote, a difference of a few thousand votes between them.
Calvert criticized his opponent for aligning with what he characterizes as a failed agenda of California progressive Democrats—policies leading to higher taxes and gas prices, and increased crime and homelessness—while Rollins described Calvert’s tenure as “marred by corruption and extremism.”
“The control of the House of Representatives could very well come down to who wins this race,” Calvert wrote in an Oct. 12 post on X. “We can’t afford to lose control to radical liberals.”
Rollins is a retired federal prosecutor who highlighted on his website his role in prosecuting Jan. 6 “insurrectionists.”
In another Congressional race that was not considered a toss-up and was expected to lead Democrat, Republican Scott Baugh is unexpectedly leading the race against California state Sen. Dave Min with 50.6 percent of the vote in California’s 47th Congressional District in Orange County, according to preliminary results.
In the March 5 state primary, Baugh won the top spot with 32.1 percent of the vote over Min’s 25.9 percent in the 10-candidate race. Democrat Katie Porter currently represents the district, but she did not seek reelection to the House. Instead, she chose to run for the vacant Senate seat but lost in the primary to Schiff.
As of Tuesday afternoon, a total of 9,137,249 ballots had been cast in the state, around 38 percent of a total 23,839,702, the vast majority being vote by mail. https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/statewide-elections/2024-general/vbm-statistics.pdf
As of Oct. 21, California counted nearly 22.6 million registered voters—or nearly 84 percent of eligible voters, down slightly from around 88 percent in 2020.
Travis Gillmore contributed to this report.