TJ Cox defeated three-term Republican Rep. David Valadao on Wednesday, giving Democrats a gain of seven House seats in California and 40 nationwide ‐ the party’s strongest midterm showing since the Watergate era in the mid-1970s.
Cox clinched his victory more than three weeks after election day, when updated results from Fresno and Kings counties pushed his lead over Valadao to 529 votes. The contest was the country’s last remaining undecided congressional contest.
Cox, 55, trailed the GOP lawmaker by nearly 4,400 votes on election night but steadily gained ground as mail-in and other ballots tipped his way.
And that follows the obvious funny stuff that went with the sudden surge of 'found' ballots that got Republican congressional candidate Young Kim displaced from her congressional victory to Democratic Party machine pol Gil Cisneros. Both Kim and Valadao were terrific Republicans who had big leads on election night, and both cases, had the elections actually called for them until ... all these found ballots got found and the counting went on and on and on until the Democrat won.
Even outgoing House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan, the nambiest-pambiest of all Republicans, pretty well admitted there was a problem. According to Carla Marinucci of Politico:
"We were only down 26 seats the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every California race,’’ Ryan said Thursday. "This election system they have ‐ I can’t begin to understand what ’ballot harvesting’ is."
Seriously, isn't it all just the wildest of coincidences? The GOP was ahead in several congressional races in California and then all these votes nobody knew about showed up. And even more coincidental, all the voting went one way - to the Democrats. A powerful op-ed by California Republican National Committee leader Shawn Steel, pretty well lays out what happened, why the Democrats could scarf up all but a few of California's congressional seats even though they came in districts that were always traditionally Republican, leaving California with almost zero Republican representation whatever in what has become a Stalinist one-party state monopoly with no competition and a very revolutionary leftwing agenda. He sums it up in the SEO as: 'No one needs voter fraud when all the rules are changed' and points out that creepy practices such as "ballot harvesting" (where Democratic operatives gather mail-in ballots and oh so helpfully turn them in), which is illegal in most states, and California's bad Department of Motor Vehicle registrations, loaded with errors, had a lot to do with it. He also points to youth 'pre-registration' voting sign-ups, even though kids get registered whether they like it or not at the DMV, felons getting their crimes downgraded to misdemeanors so as to get to vote from jail, illegal immigrants voting - studies show it was a lot of them, and involuntary mail ballots (I get those and I most certainly didn't ask for them) means that lots of paper ballots laying around from people who may not want to vote or don't live here, sitting in mailboxes - that somehow get filled in and turned in.
It really is a corrupted process, and not surprisingly, Democrats are the sole beneficiaries while the state's many traditional Republicans are shut out and get nothing.