California: Better for Republicans

According to Nancy Pelosi, the road to her becoming again Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives runs through California. Her goal is to win the seats that Hillary Clinton carried in the 2016 elections. These include seats that were in the old conservative bastion of Orange County.

After the recent primary in California, that may be a little more difficult than originally thought by the Democrats. The reason: Republicans actually received more votes than Democrats in 4 of 5 of these seats.

CA 25: Congressman Steve Knight is on the Democrats target list. Clinton won this district 50 to 43 percent. In the jungle primary where all candidates run no matter their party, Knight received 52.8 % of all ballots cast to 47.2% for all Democrats combined.

CA 39: Congressman Ed Royce is retiring from this seat where the Hispanic population is rising fast and the Asian population even faster. Young Kim (a Republican) came in first. In second place Gil Cisneros (the Democrat) sets up the November election. The total Republican vote cast was 46,407 versus a total for Democrats of 37,873. Young Kim can win this seat if she runs a good campaign. (Clinton won this district by 8 percentage points.)

CA 45: Congresswoman Mimi Walters is also on the Democrats target list. Clinton carried this district by 5 percentage points. The Republican vote total here in the primary was 54,623 versus 45,673 for the Democrats.

CA 48: Congressman Dana Rohrabacher is being heavily targeted by the Democrats (Clinton won the district by 48% to 46%). Once again Republicans outpolled Democrats. This time the margin was 58,080 to 50,266.

CA 49: This is the only one of the five districts discussed where Democrats outpolled Republicans but not by much. Darrell Issa is retiring. The totals were close: the Democrats received 56,488 to 54,136 for the Republicans.

What does the above show? It shows that Republicans must run solid races in each of these districts but they can win even after the Democrats spent millions of dollars to weaken incumbents and hurt conservative challengers in open seats.

The Democrats can take back the House and win some of these seats if we don't go all out to help conservative candidates.