Kern County, coronavirus, slim margins: Why this California House race doesn’t have results
Elections officials still have tens of thousands of ballots to count in the race between Democratic Rep. TJ Cox and former Republican Rep. David Valadao.
Valadao is currently up in the ballot count, but it’s far from over.
It’s one of 15 House races that the Associated Press has not yet called, and the amount of ballots left in one county, a coronavirus complication in another county and last election’s razor-thin margin seem to guarantee that those waiting for definitive results will have to settle in.
Valadao is ahead by about 4,000 votes, according to a count updated Wednesday afternoon. But race watchers say that Cox, D-Fresno, still has a path to victory, because the majority of ballots left to count are in Kern County, which has trended toward Cox by 20 points in the 37,000 votes counted in that race so far.
“The more I dive into the county data, the more I think #CA21 Rep. T.J. Cox (D) can catch up when more Kern Co. ballots are added, potentially saving Dems a House seat,” Dave Wasserman, the House race editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, tweeted on Tuesday.
There are still about 123,000 ballots left to count in Kern County, though not all of those ballots will be in the Cox-Valadao race. Most of the votes for House seats in Kern so far have been in the election of Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield.
Laura Cantu, acting division chief for Kern County Elections Division, said about 97,000 of those are vote-by-mail ballots they hope to have counted by the end of the weekend. The remainder are provisional ballots, which are likely to take longer.
Cox vs. Valadao close in 2018
The current situation is a flashback to 2018, the first time Cox and Valadao competed for the House seat. Cox was looking to unseat Valadao at the time, and AP called the race the night of the election for Valadao. Weeks later, Cox’s numbers kept ticking up and AP eventually retracted the call and then called the race for Cox on Nov. 28, 2018. Final numbers showed Cox won by 862 votes.
Kern represents the most outstanding votes in this race, but other counties with ballots relevant to the race still have some counting to do, as well. Fresno County has about 5,000 more to count, Tulare County has about 6,000 left and Kings County has about 1,600 left.
Fresno counts have Valadao slightly up over Cox, while Tulare has Cox barely up over Valadao as of Wednesday.
Kings County and COVID-19
Despite having the least amount of votes left to count, Kings County alone could delay the results of the race by another 10 days or longer. Officials announced Friday that they had paused vote counting until Nov. 21 because someone on staff tested positive for COVID-19.
This House seat represents the entirety of Kings County, which means all of those outstanding ballots are relevant to the Cox and Valadao race. The other three counties all have other House races in addition to this one, so not all of those ballots are relevant to this race.
Valadao is currently up by 24 points over Cox in Kings. So if the other three counties finish and there’s still a thin margin between Cox and Valadao before the Kings County counting continues, it’s bad news for Cox.
Cox’s campaign has to hope that Kern County votes will continue to deliver them a wide-enough margin to overtake Valadao’s lead and put him comfortably over — enough to hold onto a win after Kings County starts counting votes again.
Both campaigns declined to issue a new statement on the count Wednesday, pointing to previous statements. Both indicated in those statements that voters should be patient and encouraged confidence in local election officials.
This story was originally published November 11, 2020 at 3:46 PM with the headline "Kern County, coronavirus, slim margins: Why this California House race doesn’t have results."
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