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 GOP’s wins have certainly already been significant this election cycle. Former President Donald Trump has snagged his return to the White House, and the GOP is set to control the Senate next year as well. The battle for the House has only intensified, but more congressional races, including in Orange County, have been called for Republicans in recent days, sparking confidence among the party.
“This might be the biggest conservative shift in this country since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980,” said Dan Schnur, who teaches political messaging at USC and UC Berkeley.
There are already signs Orange County may be playing a part in that rightward trajectory.
Former baseball player Steve Garvey was walloped by Rep. Adam Schiff in the race for U.S. Senate, a contest that was called almost immediately after polls closed on Tuesday. But as of Friday in Orange County, Garvey led Schiff by nearly 40,000 votes.
Rep. Young Kim’s reelection bid for California’s 40th congressional district, pegged a relatively competitive seat ahead of Election Day, has already been called in her favor.
Rep. Michelle Steel, R-Anaheim, is still ahead of Democratic challenger Derek Tran in California’s 45th congressional district, the latest returns showed.
On a more local level, Huntington Beach’s slate of conservative candidates appears to be set to take over the City Council.
Randall Avila, the executive director of the Orange County Republican Party, is excited by the early results thus far — but he’s not surprised.
“We stuck to crime, we stuck to inflation, we stuck to immigration,” Avila said. “We didn’t get sidetracked on a lot of the issues that Democrats were focused on that exit polls show did not resonate with voters at the end of the day. I think Orange County voters know we’re in California, so issues like abortion have already been decided in our state.”
National exit polling suggests 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 battleground states, a significant amount of voters chose to enshrine abortion rights measures while also marking their ballots for Trump.
Republicans also made inroads with registering voters ahead of Election Day.
Democrats accounted for 36.83% of registered voters in Orange County two weeks out from Election Day, according to the secretary of state’s report, while Republicans made up 33.99% and no party preference 22.99%.
Sure, that still gave the advantage to Democrats. But if you look at numbers from October 2022, Republicans added more than 30,000 voters to their rolls while Democrats only brought in an additional 3,000.
Trump, who did not win in Orange County in his two other bids for the presidency, crept out to an early lead as results were being tallied. But by Friday evening, Vice President Kamala Harris was out with an extremely narrow lead of about 3,300 votes.
That might partially explain why Trump has never come out on top in a general election in Orange County before. 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 in 2018, in which Democrats flipped four congressional seats in Orange County and made gains in state and local elections, was a major wake-up call, said Avila. So was 2019, when Democrats took a voter registration lead in the county.
“The first thing we did within a month of losing was to get out into the field personally going door-to-door to no party preference voters that were formerly Republican, and asking them ‘Why did you leave the party?’ And taking that information, we started to think of how we can make a comeback,” he said.
Just how much all that work has paid off this election remains to be seen.
In two other closely watched Orange County congressional races, Democrats held onto slight leads by Friday night.
While he had been trailing earlier in the week, state Sen. Dave Min, D-Irvine, scooted out ahead of former Assemblymember Scott Baugh, a Republican, in the open 47th congressional district Friday night. And Rep. Mike Levin, D-San Juan Capistrano, is still hanging onto a narrow lead over Republican Matt Gunderson, with 51.1% of the vote.
Ada Briceño, chair of the Democratic Party of Orange County, said it’s still too early to really analyze election results.
“I want to be fair to the voters and the election workers who have put in an enormous amount of hours and not make any predictions,” Briceño said.
But the numbers so far “represent a move to the right, but it’s going to be a while before we know how far a move is taking place,” said Schnur.
“It’s absolutely impossible to be patient when votes are being counted in the days and weeks after Election Day, but there’s no other option,” he added. “We’ll know who holds these seats sometime between now and the end of the year. There’s not much to do until then but wait.”
As of Friday, the registrar of voters estimated it had more than 323,000 ballots to process throughout Orange County.