Is a ‘red wave’ sweeping Orange County? Why Republicans Are Already Holding the 2024 Election – Orange County Register

The red wave that swept the country this election cycle may very well be headed to Orange County.

For those unfamiliar, a “red wave” refers to significant gains made by the Republican Party.

And the Republican Party’s victories have certainly already been significant in this election cycle. Former President Donald Trump has caught his return to the White Houseand the Republican Party is willing to control the Senate next year too. He battle for the house It’s only intensified, but more congressional elections have been called in recent days, including in Orange County, for Republicans, sparking confidence among the party.

“This could be the biggest conservative shift in this country since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980,” said Dan Schnur, a professor of political messaging at USC and UC Berkeley.

There are already signs that Orange County could be playing a role in that rightward trajectory.

Former baseball player Steve Garvey was defeated by Representative Adam Schiff in the race for the United States Senate. a race that was called almost immediately after the polls closed on Tuesday. But as of Friday in Orange County, Garvey led Schiff by nearly 40,000 votes.

Rep. Young Kim’s re-election bid for California’s 40th Congressional District set a relatively competitive seat ahead of Election Day. has already been called in your favor.

Rep. Michelle Steel, R-Anaheim, is still ahead of Democratic challenger Derek Tran in California’s 45th Congressional District, the latest results showed.

At a more local level, Huntington Beach Conservative Candidate List Appears who will assume control of the City Council.

Randall Avila, executive director of the Orange County Republican Party, is excited about the early results so far, but he’s not surprised.

“We are attached to crime, we are attached to inflation, we are attached to immigration,” Ávila said. “We didn’t stray from many of the issues that Democrats were focused on and that exit polls show didn’t resonate with voters at the end of the day. “I think Orange County voters know we are in California, so issues like abortion have already been decided in our state.”

National exit polls suggest that the economy was a major point of frustration for voters while abortion did not emerge as the decisive issue that Democrats had anticipated. In fact, in some conflict states, a significant number of voters elected to enshrine abortion rights measures while also marking their votes for Trump.

Republicans also made progress in voter registration before Election Day.

Democrats represented 36.83% of registered voters in Orange County two weeks before Election Day. according to the report of the secretary of statewhile Republicans represented 33.99% and without party preference 22.99%.

Of course, that still gave the Democrats an advantage. But if we look at the figures for October 2022, Republicans added more than 30,000 voters to their lists, while the Democrats only contributed an additional 3,000.

Trump, who did not win Orange County in his other two presidential bids, took an early lead as results were counted. But on Friday night, Vice President Kamala Harris was left out by an extremely narrow lead of about 3,300 votes.

That could partly explain why Trump had never before emerged victorious in a general election in Orange County. In 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took the county, and in 2020, it was President Joe Biden, ending a Democratic presidential drought in the county that dated back to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936.

The blue wave of 2018, in which Democrats won four congressional seats in Orange County and made gains in state and local elections, was an important wake-up call, Avila said. This was 2019, when Democrats took the lead in voter registration in the county.

“The first thing we did a month after losing was go out into the field personally, going door to door to voters without a party preference who were previously Republicans, and asking them ‘Why did you leave the party?’ And taking that information, we started thinking about how we can get back,” he said.

It remains to be seen to what extent all that work has paid off in this election.

In two other closely watched Orange County congressional races, Democrats held a slim lead Friday night.

While he had been trailing earlier in the week, state Sen. Dave Min, D-Irvine, pulled ahead of former Assemblyman Scott Baugh, a Republican, in the open 47th Congressional District on Friday night. And Rep. Mike Levin, D-San Juan Capistrano, still holds a narrow lead over Republican Matt Gunderson, with 51.1% of the vote.

Ada Briceño, chairwoman of the Orange County Democratic Party, said it’s still too early to really analyze the election results.

“I want to be fair to voters and election workers who have put in enormous amounts of hours and don’t make predictions,” Briceño said.

But the numbers so far “represent a movement to the right, but it will be some time before we know to what extent that movement is occurring,” Schnur said.

“It is absolutely impossible to be patient when votes are counted in the days and weeks after Election Day, but there is no other option,” he added. “We will know who fills these seats sometime between now and the end of the year. “There’s not much to do until then except wait.”

As of Friday, the registrar of voters estimated it had more than 323,000 ballots to process across Orange County.