Democratic Rep. Ami Bera
Several races remain uncalled as of Thursday morning. We recently
ran through them here and here is an update for each race where we have new information. You can check who has won each key race at our
uncalled races tracker.
• CA-07: We'll lead off with some good news for Team Blue. On Wednesday, Democratic Rep. Ami Bera took the lead for the first time. An additional 22,839 ballots (more than we believed were still out) were counted and Bera moved from a 530-vote deficit to a 711-vote edge.
There are about 19,000 ballots left in Sacramento County, which contains the entire district. About 58 percent of county voters cast a ballot in this district, so we estimate that there are 11,000 in the 7th District. On Friday more mail ballots are scheduled to be processed. However, the provisionals will take longer to verify and count: County election officials say it will be another week before all the ballots are counted.
Republican Doug Ose would need to win the remaining votes by about 7 points to pull ahead. The problem for Ose is that he's been losing ground since election night, and he'll need the remaining late ballots to be much redder than any of the other batches. Democrats shouldn't pop the Champagne just yet, but it looks like Bera may have prevailed in 2014's most expensive House race.
Head below the fold for a look to find out what races have concluded since Wednesday, and where other uncalled contests stand.
Late Calls:
• CA-26: On Wednesday Ventura County, which makes up the vast majority of this swing district, counted another 20,550 ballots. Democratic Rep. Julia Brownley more than doubled her overall lead, going from a 1,030-vote edge over Republican Jeff Gorell to 2,370. There were about 40,000 uncounted ballots before this update so there are probably roughly 20,000 left. Gorell would need to win them by about 12 points: Given that he's been falling behind since election night, this doesn't look particularly likely. Gorell has not conceded but multiple media outlets have called this for Brownley.
• NY-25: Our long Upstate New York nightmare is over: On Wednesday, Republican Mark Assini conceded to Democratic Rep. Louise Slaughter. The new ballots boosted Slaughter's lead from 582 to 869 votes, still an embarrassingly close finish for a longtime incumbent who was almost universally viewed as safe.
Uncalled Races:
• AK-Gov: Independent Bill Walker continues to lead Republican Gov. Sean Parnell by 4,004 votes, with about 33,400 ballots left to be counted. The next round of counting is scheduled for Friday.
• VT-Gov: Republican Scott Milne, who finished about 2,500 votes behind Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin, says he won't seek a recount, given how "unlikely" it would be to change the results. (He's right.) However, because neither candidate won a plurality, state legislators will choose the next governor in January. The same thing happened in 2010, and Vermont's Democratic-dominated legislature easily awarded the governorship to Shumlin, who, then as now, won a plurality of the votes.
However, Milne is making noises that suggest he might ask lawmakers to break with tradition and pick him anyway, even though the last time the legislature selected anyone other than the plurality winner for governor was 1853. (It did happen more recently in a race for lieutenant governor back in 1970, but there, the leading candidate was dogged by corruption allegations.) He's planning some sort of announcement next week, so we'll see what kind of argument, if any, he tries to make.
• AZ-02: On Wednesday the final ballots (including 208 newly discovered votes) were added to the count, giving Republican Martha McSally a 161-vote lead over Democratic Rep. Ron Barber. A mandatory recount will be ordered, and we won't have a final result until December. McSally has declared victory but Barber is not conceding.
• CA-16: On Wednesday the Fresno County portion of the district counted another 2,589 ballots. Democratic Rep. Jim Costa was depending on Fresno to put him over the top and for now it has: After trailing by 741 ballots, Costa now leads Some Dude Republican Johnny Tacherra by 86 votes. There are reportedly 600 mail-in ballots and 10,000 provisionals left in all of Fresno County: We estimate that about 2,300 of them are in the district.
It could take more than a week for all the ballots to be validated and counted, so it may be a while before we have a resolution. We know that Tacherra-friendly Madera and Merced have 722 and 1,505 ballots left to count respectively. Assuming the remaining votes break the same way the rest of their counties have, Costa should net about 240 more votes. This race should not be anywhere near as close as it is, and Costa's own complacency is largely to blame for this photo finish, but it looks like the congressman is on track to pull off a narrow win anyway.