On Wednesday, Democrat TJ Cox declared victory over GOP Rep. David Valadao in California’s 21st Congressional District after the final ballots out of Fresno and Kings Counties took his lead from 436 votes on Monday evening to 529 votes now.
Valadao, who held a lead until Monday, has yet to concede, but his prospects are looking incredibly grim. As we wrote on Monday, the Republican was hoping that the remaining ballots out of conservative Kings County would lift him back into the lead. That already looked unlikely to happen, but his math got even worse when the final Kings County ballots were counted on Wednesday, and Cox ended up netting 70 votes from the pile.
The Fresno Bee writes that there are about 3,000 ballots left to be counted countywide in Cox-friendly Kern County (about 45 percent of the county is in this seat). There are a slightly fewer than 8,000 ballots remaining in conservative Tulare County, but since just about 5 percent of the county is in the 21st, very few of them are likely to be for Valadao.
