An Orange County congressional race, one of the closest in the country, is coming down to so few votes that it feels more like a small-town city council contest than a race for the House of Representatives.
The 45th District race was the closest in the country for several days. On Friday, Republican Rep. Michelle Steel led the race by 58 votes. Her challenger, Democrat Derek Tran, took the lead Saturday by 36 votes, widening his lead to 102 votes Monday and to 314 on Tuesday as ballots continue to be counted.
“People who have been watching closely and feel like the race is on a knife’s edge are anxious to see this one get called,” said Paul Mitchell, whose firm Political Data Inc. tracks voting trends.
The earliest votes counted in the 45th District showed Steel leading by more than 5 percentage points, but that lead vanished as elections officials counted ballots deposited in drop boxes or sent by mail. California law requires that ballots be counted as long as they are postmarked by election day and arrive at the registrar’s office within a week of the election.
The shift from comfortably red on election night to uncomfortably purple two weeks later has been held up by right-wing agitators as evidence of voter fraud. Elon Musk reshared a post on X alleging that Tran had moved into the lead 11 days after the election because California was “corrupt as hell,” while Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said that Democrats are “stealing a House seat right out from under us.”
Experts say there’s nothing amiss in the district beyond California’s typically poky counting speeds and what’s known as the “red mirage” or the “blue shift.” The phenomenon occurs in districts where in-person voting on election day is skewed toward Republicans, while mail ballots counted later trend toward Democrats.
Tran, a first-time candidate, is hoping to be the first Vietnamese American to represent the congressional district, which includes Little Saigon.
Tran’s campaign manager, Gowri Buddiga, called for patience on Monday, saying the Democrat’s campaign is “confident that as the remaining vote-by-mail, provisional, and conditional ballots are tallied, Derek Tran will emerge victorious.” Steel’s campaign declined to comment.
The Tran campaign thanked county elections workers who “continue to do their essential work in the face of lies, hostility and bomb threats.”
Republicans have won 218 House seats, just enough to control the chamber. Whether it will be a whisper-thin advantage or a little more comfortable majority remains up in the air: Five seats have yet to be called, two of them in California.
Election workers verify signatures on ballots at the Orange County Registrar of Voters.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
The 45th District, which includes a slice of Los Angeles County, was one of the country’s most expensive races. Steel was a key target for Democrats, because although she is a Republican, voters there supported Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. Former President Clinton visited Orange County to campaign for Tran, a sign of how much the Democratic Party prioritized the race.
Steel and Tran both focused heavily on outreach to Asian American voters, who make up a plurality in the district, which runs through 17 cities including Garden Grove, Westminster, Fountain Valley, Buena Park and Cerritos.
Born to South Korean parents and raised in Japan, Steel broke barriers in 2020 when she became one of three Korean American women elected to the House. She leaned heavily on anti-communist messaging to reach out to older voters who fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon.
Tran, who was born in the U.S. to Vietnamese refugee parents, focused heavily on Vietnamese Americans, hoping that his family’s story would help win over voters who were once loyal to the Republican Party.
Mitchell said his analysis of the 45th District shows that there are about 13,000 ballots left to be counted. He said ballots cast before election day had a 5.1% advantage for Democrats, in-person voting on election day had a Republican advantage of 15%, and votes counted after election day skewed blue by 18.5%.
That pattern is driven by young voters, he said, who “end up voting later than everyone else,” and tend to lean more liberal.
Mitchell said more than 4,600 ballots in the 45th District weren’t counted initially due to technicalities, including ballots that weren’t signed, or were signed with a signature that didn’t match the voter information on file.
Voters whose ballots were not initially counted have been notified by county elections officials, along with instructions on how to make their ballots count. So far, Mitchell said, 1,170 of those votes have been counted through a process known as “curing,” in which voters can correct such issues and attest to elections officials that the flawed ballot is really theirs.
Volunteers and political groups have mounted labor-intensive campaigns to find those voters and get them to turn in their forms. Voters cannot change their votes during the curing process, and have until Dec. 1 to fix any technical issues.
“We know this race is going to be determined by a couple thousand votes,” said Bulmaro “Boomer” Vicente, policy and political director at Chispa OC, a nonprofit advocacy group for young Orange County Latinos that is working to cure ballots in the district.
Chispa is working with the labor union Unite Here Local 11 and the progressive group OC Action. All three organizations received funding from Battleground California, a super PAC funded by a coalition of progressive groups that has spent $200,000 this month on ballot-curing operations in the 45th Congressional District as well as in the closely watched 13th Congressional District in the Central Valley.
“One of the most challenging things is actually finding a voter,” Vicente said. “It’s been hard to get folks to respond to the phones. We’re just going out to neighborhoods and we’re knocking on doors and really trying to find the voter on the list.”
Chispa also spent more than $250,000 through a newly created super PAC on advertisements and canvassing to support Tran. The group hadn’t spent in a congressional race before, Vicente said, but after the debate between Biden and former President Trump in July, “the reality was setting in that Trump might win, and we felt that in order for us to really have a check on the administration, we needed to win the House.”
California does not have automatic recounts. Any voter or campaign can request a recount within five days of the election being certified, but must foot the costs, which could be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for a congressional race. Election officials refund the money if the recount changes the result.
California Republican Party Chair Jessica Millan Patterson said last week that the party had recruited and trained thousands of volunteers to monitor the state’s ballot counting process and work on reaching out to voters whose ballots were flagged due to technical issues.
“I know how frustrating it can be to wait on results during this long process,” she said in a public video. “But please know that the California Republican Party and our partners are committed to ensuring that our elections are fair and your vote is safe and secure. We won’t rest until the last legal ballot is counted.”
She added: “We knew this was coming, as we’ve seen it before.”
Two years ago, it took nearly a month for the dust to settle in California’s congressional races. The race between Democrat Adam Gray and now-Rep. John Duarte, a Republican, in the Central Valley was decided by 564 votes and wasn’t called by the Associated Press until Dec. 2.
The two are again locked in a close contest in the ongoing 13th District tally, which became the closest in the country Tuesday night after Merced County reported tabulations that narrowed Duarte’s lead over Gray to 227 votes.
