California knows how to ride a blue wave, with 6 Republicans being washed out… so far. There’s another race in the 21st District which was “called” for the Republican David Valadao on election night but which looks to be the closest race in the country. Davey1107 has done excellent reporting on the California races, including this one on CA-21. Today, batches of votes have come in from 3 of the four counties within the district: Fresno, Kings, and Tulare and they were really good for Democratic challenger T J Cox compared to the overall counts for each county:
Fresno: County: 1371 new ballots Cox 59.4% Valadao 40.6% (county totals Cox 48.4% Valadao 51.6%)
Kern County: no new ballots for 5 days (county totals Cox 59.6% Valadao 40.4%)
Kings County: 1957 new ballots Cox 48.3% Valadao 51.7% (county totals Cox 37.3% Valadao 62.7%)
Tulare County: 272 new ballots Cox 43.4% Valadao 56.6% (county totals 45.7% Valadao 54.3%)
The Tulare County portion of the district is quite small (about 3,000 votes) so if you do a weighted average Cox is running 10.6% ahead of his overall percentages for the 3 counties in this latest batch. If you project that forward based on the number of remaining ballots in each county, you get this:
TJ Cox 55,940 votes David Valadao 55,748 votes or a 192 vote win for the Democrat!
Most of the remaining ballots are provisionals and election day registrations, which are probably strongly Democratic. It will take a few weeks for California to count every vote, but keep your eyes on this race!