California Democrats suffered a setback in the race for the state’s 40th Congressional District after nearly a week of counting ballots.
Republican candidates secured the top spots and advanced to the general election, effectively shutting Democrats out of contention for the seat they hoped to pick up.
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According to Decision Desk HQ results, Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) led the field with 35.68% of the vote.
Rep. Young Kim (R-Calif.) finished second with 21.12%, positioning the two Republicans for a head-to-head matchup in November.
The unusual contest emerged after mid-decade redistricting placed Calvert and Kim within the same congressional district, forcing two incumbent Republicans onto the same ballot.
The redrawn map has remained controversial, with Republicans arguing that California’s district lines already heavily favor Democrats and that additional redistricting further entrenched those advantages.
Despite those concerns, the outcome in the 40th District ensured that a Republican will hold the seat regardless of the general election result.
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This means Democrats have been denied an opportunity to flip the district and give the GOP an unexpected advantage in a state where Republicans have often struggled to compete statewide.
The two Republicans are running after “mid-decade redistricting further gerrymandered California’s district lines, which already provided a gross advantage to Congressional Democrats far beyond the party’s proportion of the vote in the state,” Breitbart News reported last month.
Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX) previously endorsed Calvert.
“It comes down to two things. One is that Ken Calvert is a huge defender and supporter of the president,” Gill said.
“And number two, he’s got a fantastic record on immigration, which I think is the most important issue that we have in front of us today,” he added.
Gill also noted Kim cosponsored a resolution to censure President Donald Trump in 2021, and was an “original cosponsor of the Dignidad Act, a mass amnesty bill — notably with a non-English title — pushed by pro-migration Republicans,” Breitbart noted further.
🚨 PROJECTION 🚨
Incumbent representatives Ken Calvert (R) and Young Kim (R) advance to general election runoff in California’s 40th Congressional District, defeating Esther Kim-Varet (D), Lisa Ramirez (D), and Joe Kerr (D) among others.
This will be an R vs R runoff. pic.twitter.com/aGU91wHVeR
— Real Texan Politics ✝️🇺🇸 (@RealTXPolitics) June 7, 2026
In a social media post on Sunday, Eric Daugherty of Florida’s Voice News wrote that Democrats had been “locked out” of California’s 40th Congressional District, “Meaning zero resources must now be spent on defending the seat this November.
“House control could run through California. Federal ‘election month’ should be BANNED by SCOTUS by the midterms so they can’t cheat!” he noted further.
Last week, Trump accused “Dumocrats” of stealing statewide elections in California.
As vote counting continues slowly across Los Angeles County and much of California, reporters on Thursday found numerous empty workstations at the county’s 144,000-square-foot ballot processing center, despite a massive backlog of ballots still awaiting review.
The scene raised questions about the pace of ballot processing as election officials work through hundreds of thousands of outstanding votes more than a week after Election Day.
County officials released figures late last week; they had processed only 77,521 additional ballots since the June 2 election.
Yet officials estimated that approximately 713,180 ballots remained outstanding and still needed to be counted, the California Post reported after investigating the facility.
However, during The Post’s visit, large portions of the facility’s work stations were empty, while boxes of ballots could be seen everywhere.
“In one area, where ballots that cannot be automatically read by scanners are reviewed by election workers, roughly 25 bins of ballots appeared ready for processing while no employees were seated at nearby desks,” the outlet reported.
“In another section where workers open envelopes and prepare ballots for counting, The Post observed about 75 employees working, despite the area being capable of accommodating more than twice that number,” it said.
Many Republican lawmakers and others on social media have been raising concerns about the vote-counting process in California and how long it takes.
This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.
