Could Democrats Be Iced Out of This California Congressional Race?

While most California races were called by the morning after Election Day, a handful of key holdouts remain. “This is normal,” Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber, who was on the ballot herself, emphasized in a press release. “I would call on all Californians to be patient.”

That’s a hard ask, at least for Richard Pan, a Democrat who is running third in one of the state’s tightest races: the Sixth Congressional District.

In California’s open primary system, the top two finishers in a given race advance to a general election runoff regardless of party affiliation. The Sixth leans blue, but if Democratic votes are split among a large pool of contenders, Democratic candidates could be iced out.

The Republican now in contention to advance to the general election didn’t even run a campaign.

That’s how things were looking in the Sixthas of mid-afternoon Wednesday. With 48 percent of votes counted, Rep. Kevin Kiley—the Third District Republican incumbentwho recently renounced his party to run as an independent in the Sixth—was aheadwith more than a quarter of the vote. In second place was Republican Michael Stansfield, whose bid isn’t serious. (He doesn’t even have a campaign website.) Running a close third—just one percentage point behind Stansfield—is Pan, the outspoken pediatrician, pro-vaccine warrior, and former state senator I profiled for Mother Jones in April.

If this trend holds, Pan, who is perhaps best known for having authored some of the country’s toughest state vaccine laws, would be headed straight back to the clinic.

Stansfield’s success as the only Republican on the ballot highlights the unintended consequences of Prop 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s redistricting plan that voters approved last November. After the state congressional map was redrawn to help more Democrats win seats, the new Sixth remains blue, but less so than before, as it has absorbed conservative regions carved fromother districts.

The close race seems to have surprised Stansfield, a 50 year-old tech worker who received no donations and did essentially no campaigning. He only ran, he told US News, to send a message to the religious right about peace in the Middle East. “I wasn’t necessarily going after it to win,” Stansfield said.

And he might not. Many of the remaining votes are from northern Sacramento and the adjoining suburbs, a region that so far has favored Pan. And votes counted later may have a different skew. In California, early ballot returns were up among Republican voters for this cycle, and lagged for Democrats relative to previous years.

“I think [Pan is] going to eke it out,” Sacrament0-based Democratic strategist Steven Maviglio told the New York Times. “But it’s going to be close.”