California’s 11 undecided races could hold key to House control – San Francisco Chronicle

Republicans remain favored to narrowly win a House majority. But in the nation’s most populous state, the millions of ballots yet to be counted give Democrats a 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.

Of the 218 seats needed for a majority, Republicans have won 211, while Democrats have won 204, according to The New York Times elections tracker. Based on the ballots that have been counted so far, Republicans lead in 221 districts versus Democrats in 214 as of Saturday night.

If “current trends” in the post-Election Day count continued, Republicans would triumph with a 219-216 majority, according to a Saturda morning story in the New York Times.

“But recent trends may not continue” for “one main reason,” the Times’ chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, writes: California.

About 60% of the expected vote has been tallied in California, according to the New York Times election tracker. Many of the later counts are mail-in ballots, said Jessica Levinson, a law 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.

Saturday night, Wasserman tweeted that five House races are the most uncertain. Three of them are in California – districts 13, 22 and 41, all with a Republican currently in the lead — and Democrats would likely need all of them in order to have a chance of retaining a House majority.

Levinson concurred that those three were the ones to watch in California.

In CA-13, Republican farmer John Duarte is running against Adam Gray, a Democrat who represents Merced in the California 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, with 61% of the votes counted, Duarte led Gray by just 84 votes, according to The New York Times elections tracker.

In CA-22, Democrats have long targeted Republican Rep. David Valadao, R- Hanford (Kings County) in a Central Valley district 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 who 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 state Legislature. Plus, the newly drawn district supported President Biden by 13 points in 2020. Valadao was leading by 5 percentage points as of Saturday night.

Democrats hoped that newly redrawn districts would help them oust longtime Republican Rep. Ken Calvert of Corona in CA-41. Backed by former California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, Democrats rallied around former federal prosecutor Will Rollins.

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 1.5 percentage points as of Saturday night.

In another closely watched race, 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 5-point 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 owns 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, R-Santa 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 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 also bested her in a special 2019 election to fill the remainder of Democrat Katie Hill’s term after Hill resigned. Garcia led by 111 percentage points as of Saturday night.

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’s Political Report rated the race as a “toss-up” a week before Election Day. Porter had a 3 percentage point lead on Saturday night.

Claire Hao and Joe Garofoli are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: claire_hao@sfchronicle.com jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli @clairehao_