Election 2018: Democrat Katie Porter defeats GOP Rep. Mimi Walters in 45th House race; Democrat Gil Cisneros takes lead in 39th

It looks like Orange County will have no Republicans in Congress next year.

On Thursday, the Associated Press projected that Democrat Katie Porter has defeated two-term GOP. Rep. Mimi Walters in the race to represent the county’s inland 45th Congressional District. Also on Thursday, new vote tabulations showed that Democrat Gil Cisneros leapfrogged Republican Young Kim to take a 941-vote lead in the battle for the 39th District, erasing a 3,900-vote advantage that Kim held election night.

Porter’s win underscores just how quickly the county’s top-of-the-ticket politics have shifted toward Democrats. Voters in the 45th, once considered a conservative stronghold, embraced an unabashedly progressive first-time candidate over a homegrown Republican who only recently was viewed as the county’s strongest GOP House incumbent.

“As your representative, I will work to bring accountability back to Washington,” said Porter, a consumer protection attorney who taught law at UC Irvine.

Porter now leads Walters by 6,203 votes – or 2.4 percent – after trailing the congresswoman by 6,233 votes on election night. Porter has won about 58 percent of the ballots counted since then.

Walters’ campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. In recent days she has pressed her supporters to donate to her campaign in order to fund a recount effort.

Democrats now lead in every Orange County congressional race and stand positioned to sweep Republicans from power in all four Orange County GOP-held seats the party targeted this election. The AP has already has called Democratic wins in two of those seats, held by Congressmen Dana Rohrabacher (R-Costa Mesa) and Darrell Issa (R-Vista). The historic shift has shocked the county’s Republican leadership, which as recently as 2017 insisted none of the area’s GOP House seats were in danger of flipping.

Throughout Walters’ re-election bid, the congresswoman and national Republicans repeatedly framed Porter as a “radical” liberal who was “too far left” for the affluent district. Turned out that voters didn’t agree.

Porter ran on progressive policies in a seat where many advised against it. While some other Orange County Democratic House candidates tempered their vision of “Medicare for all” following the June primary and presented themselves as more centrist, Porter propelled herself by insisting that a single-payer model was the best path to universal and affordable health care.

Porter also argued that Walters’ votes for the GOP tax bill and opposition to Obamacare threatened to harm middle-class voters in a seat where pocketbook issues are key. While Walters insisted that locals would see savings from the tax bill, many in the district – including Republicans – said they feared that new caps on mortgage interest write-offs and state-and-local tax deductions would cause them to pay more.

Those changes to the tax code threatened to disproportionately eliminate tax deductions in coastal high-tax states that lean Democratic, such as California, New Jersey, and New York. That decision may have backfired. In California, Democrats have now taken at least five Republican-held House seats this election. In New Jersey, Democrats flipped four congressional seats. Altogether, the left gained more House districts this cycle than any year since 1974, following Orange County native President Richard Nixon’s resignation.

Porter and Democratic activists also sought to inextricably link Walters to President Donald Trump, who polls show is unpopular in the seat. In 2016, when Walters won re-election by 17 percentage points, Trump lost her district by 5 points. In a recent Los Angeles Times survey, only 41 percent of the seat’s residents approved of Trump’s job in the White House. And when Democrats ran TV ads in the final weeks before the election, their chief attack of the congresswoman was that she had voted in line with Trump’s position 99 percent of the time.

Before her defeat Tuesday, Walters was an ascendant member of Republican House leadership. She had been the most successful of a group of South County GOP women to win public office, matriculating from the Laguna Niguel city council to the state assembly to Congress.

This week, as the late vote counts continued to trend in Democrats’ favor, representatives from Walters’ and Kim’s respective campaigns each leveled unfounded allegations of vote fraud.

In a series of fundraising emails, Walters asked prospective donors to give in order to stop Democrats’ attempt to “steal this Republican seat after the fact” and “to make sure vote allies aren’t tampered with” and “to stop them from overturning the will of voters in this district.” Kim’s campaign, meanwhile, contended that if late vote tallies swung in Democrats’ favor, it could be due to “foul play.”

In response, top voting officials in Orange and Los Angeles counties said that no tampering had occurred, assuring the public of the counts’ validity.

Post-election tallies of provisional and late vote-by-mail ballots have tilted in favor of Democrats in many parts of California, helping the party’s candidates catch or overtake Republicans who were ahead on Election Day. Late ballots historically have tended to favor Democratic candidates, because left-leaning voter groups frequently cast their mail ballots closer to the election.

In the 39th District, recent vote counts bode well for Cisneros’ chances of taking the contest: more than 54 percent of the ballots tallied since Election Day have swung in his favor.

On Thursday, there remained 156,241 uncounted ballots in Orange County, 688,000 in Los Angeles County, and 95,500 in San Bernardino County. California counties have until Dec. 7 to submit their final election counts to the California Secretary of State, which must certify those results by Dec. 14.