Michelle Steel vs. Derek Tran: O.C. district is closest House race

An Orange County congressional race that has become the closest in the country currently has such a slim margin of victory that it feels more like a small-town city council contest than a race for the House of Representatives.

On Thursday, Republican Rep. Michelle Steel led the race by 58 votes. Her challenger, Democrat Derek Tran, took the lead Friday by 36 votes and widened his lead Monday to 102 votes 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 voter trends.

The earliest votes counted in the 45th Congressional District showed Steel leading by more than 5 percentage points, but that lead vanished as elections officials counted ballots deposited in drop boxes and 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 took 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 candidate to represent the Congressional district that includes Little Saigon.

Tran’s campaign manager, Gowri Buddiga, said Monday that voters need to be patient, but the campaign is “confident that as the remaining vote-by-mail, provisional, and conditional ballots are tallied, Derek Tran will emerge victorious.” Steel’s campaign did not respond to a request for 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 seats, just enough to control the House of Representatives. Whether it will be a whisper-thin majority or a little more comfortable is still 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 was one of the country’s most expensive races, and a key target for Democrats, because although Steel is a Republican, voters there supported President 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 of the district that 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, also 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 in the district. 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, Mitchell said, who “end up voting later than everyone else,” and tend to lean more liberal.

Mitchell said there are more than 4,600 ballots in the 45th District that weren’t counted initially because of clerical issues, including ballots that weren’t signed, or 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 the error and attest to elections officials that the flawed ballot is really theirs.

Volunteers for Steel and Tran 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.

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. Elections officials refund the money if the recount changes the result.

California Republican Party chair Jessica Millan Patterson said last week that the party 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 because of technical errors.

“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 in the Central Valley was decided by 564 votes and wasn’t called by the Associated Press until Dec. 2.