California House Race Remains Close as Democrat Candidate Leads by Just Over 300 Votes

California’s race for the 45th Congressional District remains close as Democrat candidate Derek Tran leads Republican incumbent Rep. Michelle Steel (R-CA) by just over 300 votes.

Tran was reported to be leading Steel by 314 votes as of Tuesday, according to the New York Times. Tran’s lead comes as Steel was leading by 58 votes the previous week, and over the weekend Steel saw her lead slip away.

Late last week, Ms. Steel led by 58 votes. Over the weekend, Mr. Tran went ahead by 36 votes. And on Tuesday, he extended his lead to 314 votes. Nearly 310,000 ballots have been cast overall.

The outlet explained that California is “slow at counting” ballots in elections because the “majority of voters” in the state “submit mail-in ballots,” adding that the state also has a “lengthy verification process.”

California is notably slow at counting because the vast majority of voters submit mail-in ballots and the state has a lengthy verification process along with laws that afford various protections to residents.

With thousands of ballots still to be counted in the district, both campaigns are focusing their efforts to “cure ballots, or to fix rejected submissions on which a voter’s signature is missing or does not match the one on file.

 California voters have a deadline of December 1, to be able to fix their ballots, according to the outlet.

Jessica Millian Patterson, who serves as the chairwoman of the California Republican Party, stated that the “race is still far too close to call,” even as Republicans such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have been reported to have accused the Democrats of “stealing a House seat,” according to the outlet.

In a post on X, Greene wrote: “The Democrats are stealing a House seat right out from under us in CA. We barely control the House and will have a 1 seat majority in January when Trump takes office while we fill 3 seats through special elections.”

Unofficial election results for California’s 45th Congressional District show that Tran has received 155,090 votes, or 50.1 percent of the vote, while Steel has received 154,776 votes, or 49.9 percent of the vote.

Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, Senate, and the White House with President-elect Donald Trump’s win over Vice President Kamala Harris, giving the party a trifecta.