Democrat Derek Tran unseated second-term Republican Rep. Michelle Steel in California’s 45th congressional district in Orange County on Wednesday, after late ballots allowed him to overcome her initial lead on Election Night.
The Associated Press reported:
Democrat Derek Tran ousted Republican U.S. Rep. Michelle Steel in a Southern California House district Wednesday that was specifically drawn to give Asian Americans a stronger voice on Capitol Hill.
Steel said in a statement that “like all journeys, this one is ending for a new one to begin.” When she captured the seat in 2020, Steel joined Washington state Democrat Marilyn Strickland and California Republican Young Kim as the first Korean-American women elected to Congress.
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The contest is one of the last to be decided this year, with Republicans now holding 220 seats in the House, with Democrats at 214. The Associated Press has not declared a winner in California’s 13th District, where Democrat Adam Gray was leading Republican Rep. John Duarte by a couple of hundred votes.
The race was considered too close to call on November 5. Initially, Steel had more votes, but as batches of late votes came in, Tran overtook Steel — first by dozens of votes, then by several hundred votes, to eke out a narrow victory.
California, controversially, allows mail-in ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked by Election Day and arrive within seven days of Election Day. This means that candidates can come from behind weeks after the election.
Usually, though not always, a Democrat who appears to have lost on Election Day will surge in mail-in ballots and emerge as the victor — as Kamala Harris did in her race for California Attorney General in 2010, a crucial victory.
In addition, the California Globe reported earlier this week that a U.S. Postal Service mailbox in a Republican part of the district had been burglarized. “The entire contents of the box were stolen of mail and ballots,” the Globe reported.
Tran is Vietnamese American, part of a community that tends to vote for Republicans due to its experiences under communism and the way a Democrat-led government abandoned the South Vietnamese Army and the government.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.