Hey all! I’m going to try posting my OC election updates onto Medium, adding rankings to races based on where they stand, and see how this goes write up goes.

To my surprise late last night, the OC Registrar of Voters updated the vote counts despite having publicly posted that they will only update on weekdays @ 5PM. Anyway, let’s take a look at how these races changed, but first, uncounted ballot numbers:

Total estimated number of ballots to count (after Election Day): 439,547 Total estimated number of ballots counted (after Election Day): 110,112 Total Estimated Left to Count: 329,435

It looks like the ROV is working at a decent clip here now, having counted over 110K of the 439K votes that have come back in after, but we still have 77% of those initial uncounted ballots left to count. This massive amount of uncounted votes can still change results in a lot of races, but I’d note that these votes tend to lean democratic for a variety of reasons in California. On with the races!

**ANALYSIS**

CA-39

Obviously a good update for Cisneros, as he has now crossed what I believe to be the threshold for him to hit 50% of the vote when Los Angeles and San Bernardino county results are incorporated. I had previously said that in my estimation, Cisneros has to grab around 46.6% of the vote in Orange County. The better Cisneros does here, the more likely he is to defeat Young Kim. I think this race is now Tilt Cisneros, and Kim had better hope a good chunk of the remaining votes come from Yorba Linda or that she overperformed in LA or SB portions of this district. I think the former is more likely than the latter, but neither is very likely. Tilt D

CA-45

Both candidates made some significant gains in their raw vote numbers, but the race is functionally unchanged with Porter netting only 11 votes. In prior updates, I’d noted that this district is one of three districts in Orange County that is completely contained here, with one of those districts being uncompetitive (CA-46) and the other being CA-48. What this means is that it’s likely the largest allocation of uncounted votes countywide will likely fall into this race, which is good news for the Porter campaign. Bad news for the Porter campaign is that she is entirely relying on votes coming in from Irvine to keep her afloat. This is working out in her favor currently, as she is raking in 62% of the vote there where Clinton only achieved 59% there in 2016, but if there is a turnout dropoff here, all of the Porter campaign’s eggs are in the Irvine Basket. The only other cities Porter leads in appear to be problematic, as they include Tustin and Laguna Woods. (Take a look at my Google Sheet of city numbers for this district!)

Laguna Woods has a very small voter population (around 9K), and Tustin is not showing great turnout numbers, with counted votes showing only 24% turnout. By contrast, every other city in this district is showing turnout in the high 50s (Irvine has 45). There are still a lot of votes to count, and I am estimating countywide turnout to be 70% (it was 80% in 2016). Still, more votes need to come in from Tustin, or Irvine has to catch up to these other cities in terms of turnout. Time will tell how this shakes out, but I tend to believe the remaining votes push Porter into the lead. Lean D

CA-48

The AP and various other news sources called this race yesterday, and I can see why. Rouda is doing extremely well, and making huge gains with every update. I would not be surprised if Rouda ends up with a 20–25K margin in this race. Going into the election I thought this one was going to be a race that could go into a recount, as public polling was insanely close. D Win

Gangbusters update for Rouda, and numbers are moving in the right direction for Cisneros and Porter, though they are in very different situations regarding what votes they need to actually start being in the lead. I hope to post another update on Monday around 5PM, see you then!