Last month’s election was bruising for Democrats in most of the country, but there was a silver lining for party members with some key races for seats in the House.
In California, Democrats won several crucial battleground House races and flipped three Republican-held seats, which helped them shrink the GOP’s slim majority in the House.
Rep.-elect Adam Gray (D-CA) defeated Rep. John Duarte (R-CA) in the final House race projected by the Associated Press, with the outlet projecting Gray as the winner by less than 200 votes early Wednesday morning. The victory capped off a trio of key wins that saw Democrats successfully oust Reps. Michelle Steel (R-CA) and Mike Garcia (R-CA), in addition to Duarte.
Republicans were able to hold seats held by Reps. David Valadao (R-CA) and Ken Calvert (R-CA), but Democrats also held on to battleground seats in their control. Rep. Mike Levin (D-CA) won reelection to his seat, while Rep.-elect David Min (D-CA) won the race to succeed outgoing Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA).
The Democratic victories came despite California shifting toward Trump this election, and they bucked a national trend that saw Trump increase his support across the country compared with four years ago.
Key flips in blue states, where Republicans won or held key House districts in 2022, helped Democrats thwart Republican attempts to increase their House majority. In Oregon, New York, and most notably California, Republicans performed worse in House contests than the rest of the country.
In Duarte’s district, voters picked President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election but voted for Republicans in the 2022 Senate and gubernatorial elections. The state’s 13th Congressional District is primarily Hispanic/Latino, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, at roughly 66% of the population, while 21% is white and 6.6% is Asian. The razor-thin race showed the tightness of the district in how it votes in elections.
Steel lost her southern California seat in a district where there is a significant Vietnamese population, something Rep.-elect Derek Tran (D-CA) was able to lean into with his own Vietnamese heritage.
“As the first Vietnamese American ever elected to represent the Vietnamese diaspora of Little Saigon, he’s ready to fight for living wages, protect a woman’s right to an abortion, and preserve the American Dream. The DCCC is proud of our role in helping elect Derek to Congress, and I look forward to working alongside him,” Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairwoman Suzan DelBene (D-WA) said in a statement about Tran’s victory.
The most vulnerable of the California Republicans going into the election was Garcia, who defeated Democrat Christy Smith three consecutive times but lost his race last month to Rep.-elect George Whitesides (D-CA).
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His 27th Congressional District voted for Biden in 2020 and split between Republican and Democratic candidates in the 2022 gubernatorial and Senate races, and was rated as having a partisan voting index of Democratic +4, according to the Cook Political Report.
The district, which is in the northern part of Los Angeles County, voted for the Democrat, sending Garcia out of the House despite the entire county at large shifting 11% toward Trump in the presidential race compared to the 2020 election.