Michelle Steel vs. Derek Tran: The OC district is very close in the House race

Orange County’s closest congressional race in the country right now has such a narrow margin of victory that it feels more like a city council race than a House race.

On Thursday, Republican Representative Michelle Steel led the race by 58 votes. His challenger, Democrat Derek Tran, led Friday by 36 votes and extended his lead Monday to 102 votes as ballots were counted.

“People who were watching and felt like the race was on a knife’s edge are eager to see it called,” said Paul Mitchell, whose company Political Data, Inc. which tracks voter trends.

Early votes counted in the 45th Congressional District showed Steel leading by more than 5 percentage points, but that lead disappeared as election officials counted ballots placed in boxes and sent by mail. California law requires that ballots be counted as long as they are marked after election day and arrive at the registrar’s office within one week of the election.

The change from comfortably red on election night to uncomfortably purple two weeks later has been championed by right-wing protesters as evidence of voter fraud. Elon Musk retweeted a post on X alleging that Tran won 11 days after the election because California was “corrupt as hell,” while Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said Democrats were “stealing the House seat from under us.”

Experts say there is nothing wrong with the region beyond California’s speed of calculation often called “red rage” or “blue shift.” This trend occurs in states where in-person voting on Election Day is skewed toward Republicans, while mail-in ballots are tallied later toward Democrats.

Tran, a first-time candidate, hopes to become the first Vietnamese American to represent the Congressional district that includes Little Saigon.

Tran’s campaign manager, Gowri Buddiga, said on Monday that voters need to be patient, but the campaign “is confident that as the mail votes are counted, provisionally and conditionally, Derek Tran will emerge victorious.” Steele’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Tran’s campaign thanked county election workers who “continue to do their important work despite lies, hostility and bomb threats.”

Republicans won 218 seats, just enough to control the House of Representatives. Whether it will be whisper-quiet or a bit of luxury is up in the air: Five seats will be unnamed, two of them in California.

The 45th district was one of the most expensive races in the country, and the main objective of the Democrats, because even though Steel is a Republican, its voters support President Biden in 2020. Former President Clinton visited Orange County to campaign for Tran, a sign of how much the Democratic Party has prioritized the race.

Steel and Tran are both focused on reaching Asian American voters, who make up the majority of the 17-city district that includes 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. He relied heavily on an anti-communist message to reach older voters who fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon.

Tran, who was born in the US to Vietnamese refugee parents, has also focused on Vietnamese Americans, hoping that his family’s story will 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 votes left to be counted in this district. He said that ballots cast before election day had a 5.1% advantage for Democrats, in-person voting on election day had a 15% advantage for Republicans, and votes counted after election day were thrown out 18.5%.

That pattern is driven by younger voters, Mitchell said, “who end up voting later than everyone else,” and tend to lean more.

Mitchell said there are more than 4,600 ballots in the 45th District that were not initially counted due to clerical issues, including ballots that were not signed, or signed with a signature that did not match the voter information on file.

Voters whose votes were not initially counted were notified by county election officials, along with instructions on how to get their votes counted. So far, Mitchell said, 1,170 of those ballots have been counted through a process known as “correction,” where voters can correct the error and prove to election officials that the erroneous ballot was indeed theirs.

Steel and Tran volunteers conducted labor-intensive campaigns to find those voters and get them to turn in their forms. Voters cannot change their votes during the healing process, and have until Dec. 1 to fix any technical problems.

California does not have automatic reporting. Any voter or campaign can request a recount within five days of election confirmation, but you must pay the cost, which can be hundreds of thousands of dollars in a Congressional race. Election officials refund the money if the recount changes the result.

California Republican Party Chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson said last week the party has hired and trained thousands of volunteers to monitor the state’s vote counting process and work to reach voters whose ballots were marked due to technical errors.

“I know how frustrating it can be to wait for results from this long process,” he said in a public video. “But please know that the California Republican Party and our partners are committed to making sure our elections are fair and your vote is safe and secure. We will not rest until the final official vote is counted.”

He added: “We knew this was coming, as we have seen it before.”

Two years ago, it took about 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 eliminated by 564 votes and was not named by the Associated Press until Dec. 2.