Election 2018: Tom Umberg pulls ahead of Janet Nguyen in state Senate race

The tight race for California Senate District 34 took a shift Monday, when Democrat Tom Umberg pulled ahead of Republican incumbent, state Sen. Janet Nguyen.

Umberg, a retired U.S. Army colonel and previous assemblyman, was leading for the first time since Election Day with 50.09 percent of the votes to Nguyen’s 49.91 percent, according to data released Monday by voting officials.

Umberg had 126,824 votes and Nguyen had 126,386 votes, reversing a lead held by Nguyen since the Nov. 6 election.

Whether Umberg keeps his lead and wins the contest “could come down to turnout and attitudes voters have toward (President Donald) Trump,” said Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data, Inc.

It’s unclear how many ballots are left to be counted in the district. There are a total of 91,338 ballots left to be tallied in Orange County and an estimated 422,600 left in Los Angeles County.

“What’s interesting is how much it shifted from a safe Nguyen victory to a potential Umberg win,” Mitchell said.

“Later ballots trended more Democratic,” he said. “Younger voters, Latinos, renters; they showed up later with same day registration and provisional ballots,” Mitchell said. “Those take longer to process and that’s why we’re seeing them now.”

If Nguyen loses, “she could be a casualty of national reaction to Trump,” Mitchell added. “She has an ‘R’ next to her name, and that could (make the) difference.”

Another Orange County incumbent trailing in his bid for re-election was Assemblyman Matthew Harper, a Republican from Huntington Beach. Democrat Cottie Petrie-Norris was leading late Monday with 96,238 votes, or 52.5 percent of the ballots counted, to Harper’s 87,082 votes, or 47.5 percent.

If Nguyen and Harper lose, their races would be “collateral damage” of a Democratic wave that swept Orange County congressional districts, Mitchell said.  For the first time since the depression, Orange County is projected to have no Republicans representing the county that once was virtually synonymous with GOP power and influence.

The state Senate 34th District includes Little Saigon and parts or all of Seal Beach, Huntington Beach and other north Orange County communities, as well as a portion of Long Beach.

In Orange County, where the bulk of the district sits, Nguyen was ahead of Umberg with 50.5 percent of the votes. But in Long Beach, Umberg led with 54.52 percent of the vote to Nguyen’s 45.48 percent, according to the latest numbers reported by the Los Angeles Registrar of Voters, which last had an update on Friday.

Both registrars plan to issue vote updates on Tuesday, Nov. 20.

Umberg, 63, an attorney first elected to the California State Assembly in 1990, went up against Nguyen once before. In 2007, he ran for the Orange County Board of Supervisors but came in third place. Nguyen won that race.

Nguyen, 42, is viewed as a moderate Republican. She has served on the Garden Grove City Council, the Orange County Board of Supervisors and more recently the state Senate, where in 2014 she became the first Vietnamese American elected to the office and the country’s first Vietnamese American woman state legislator.