When you're talking about people who are still Republican voters in a state like California, it means they're pretty dedicated to their party.

They're just not gonna vote for somebody with an with a D behind their name.

And so I think that that is He's gonna have to sort of figure out how to unlock that, that problem if he's going to advance.

Or to Guy's point, if the atmosphere changes.

If it's more of a 2024 election as opposed to a 2022 election or 2018 election, maybe that's a more friendly territory for him.

Hey everyone from KQED in San Francisco.

This is Political Breakdown.

I'm Marisa Lagos.

And I'm Scott Shafer.

Today on the Breakdown, Election Day has come and gone, but we're still waiting for results.

Today we'll talk about what we know, what we're still waiting to find out, and what it all means for California Democrats and Republicans moving forward.

Joining us for their post-election Hot Takes, Melanie Mason, California Bureau Chief and co-author of Politico's California Playbook and KQED politics, correspondent Guy Marzorati.

Hey y'all.

- Hey, - Hey.

So - Hello.

- Hey, Mel.

So let's start with the state of affairs in this governor's race.

We are taping midday on Thursday.

There will be more results later on just to be radically transparent about that.

But Mel, give us a sense of where we are in that race.

- We're kind of in the same place where we were at the end of Tuesday night, right?

Which is that we've got the, the top two candidates are, you know, Steve Hilton, the Republican, Xavier Becerra, the Democrat.

They kind of throughout election night sort of traded first and second place.

And Hilton has remained in in first place, Becerra and second.

And then we're watching to see what is gonna happen with Tom Steyer, who is stuck around, you know, 19%.

You know, as these new ballots come in, we're waiting to see if the likely very blue, very progressive tilt of the ballots could rearrange the sort of configuration of the top three.

But we need those ballots to be counted before we, before we know, And Guy remind us why it takes so long or seems to take so long to count ballots in California.

Simply put, because a lot of people vote by mail, both in percentage terms.

I mean, we're at a point in the last general election we had over 80% of people voted by mail.

And also just the raw number of ballots.

There are millions of millions of vote by mail ballots.

And I think the simplest way to think about it is when you're talking about vote by mail, all the security checks, the verification happens on the backend.

If you remember when we used to go in a polling place and vote, they check your name on the list, that's that part.

And then you're casting your ballot, it's reversed for vote by mail, you're sending it in.

And only then are all those signature checks and reviews happening.

And so it does slow up the process.

And in large measure the priority of both the governor Gavin Newsom and the legislature has been increased access and less priority on speeding up the count.

Right?

The election workers we talked to and and registrar say, if we had more people, if we had more space, if we had more machines, we could do this more quickly.

They would need money for that.

- And just to be clear, we always talk about California's top election official being the Secretary of State, but all that counting, all that work you're describing happens at the local level, right?

- It does.

And there's great variance as we've learned throughout the years county by county on the efficiency and the process of vote counting.

And there's some, you know, wrinkles in here.

Marisa and I reported a story this week on kind of diving into the vote counting process in California and why we're left with this lag.

It really, the lag to me really is right now it's not about, yes, ballots can arrive up to a week after election day.

It's really in these closely contested races where you're going from Tuesday night, as Melanie said, not really learning anything.

Wednesday in some cases, not learning anything Thursday, there's some counties we won't hear from until Friday.

It's this lag that's happening right now.

And as Marisa and I found for some registrars, they've basically said, we wanna update en mass.

We don't wanna be kind of putting out trickling updates.

We wanna give a big update.

The result of that is you can often see these swings that some people feel like is not a great way to be updating.

And I think overall it's opened the door for some bad faith actors, namely President Donald Trump to, to come in and say, well this is evidence of cheating.

You saw him, you know, post last night.

Something to that effect saying the Democrats are at it again, you saw Ron DeSantis say something similar.

And Newsom for his part, I think has understood that this is in some way a vulnerability that this is takes on national criticism, but hasn't really done anything to change it.

He's said, - Right, he hasn't punched count faster, but he hasn't put a bunch of money into registrars.

And I think like talking to David Becker, who we're actually gonna have on the show next week, who's an election security expert, there's also choices these registrars are making about not updating until Thursday or Friday after the election.

Apparently in Florida there's a law that says you have to send updates every like 45 minutes, even if there's nothing new in there.

And so I think that's an interesting conversation moving forward that like Democrats might need to have.

But in defense of pollsters, Melanie, the outcome so far in this governor's race is actually pretty close to what we were seeing, I think in a lot of the public polls towards the end of this race, even in some of the internal polls that were leaking.

So is there a world in which Tom Steyer, the progressive democratic billionaire, could actually pull out a second place finish?

- I think it's gonna be very tough.

I think it's gonna be very tough.

The what I think the Steyer camp is really clinging to hope now is like how big is the pool of uncounted ballots?

And actually that that pretty big feeds also into right and growing by by, you know, the, the minute it actually feeds into another sort of conspiracy theory that I've started to see online that I think is important also to address, which is that people have noticed that the number of the estimated number of counted ballots has actually decreased.

It's gone from like 57% to 55 and people are like, what is going on?

That's because those an estimates is particularly those, those that we saw on Tuesday night were exactly that.

They were guesses about what the universe was of, of ballots.

But as people started mailing in their ballots, that and, and as they start arriving, oh, okay, it turns out that there's more and more people that actually did cast a ballot.

I think one of the things that's so interesting is I think that this election is starting to, to surprise people with how many folks cast a ballot, especially since we've all been calling this kind of a dud governor's race.

It turns out it was, you know, engaging enough to get people to vote.

And, - And Mel, are there any generalizations you can make about the nature of the votes that are left out?

Because, you know, many years ago, the first batch were always more conservative, older Republican, that's no longer true.

But do we have any sense, given that how many people were holding onto their ballots until the very end this time what the mix could be or is likely to be?

- Yeah, I think the assumption is, is that the mix is gonna skew more democratic.

I mean, that is something we've seen in the last couple of cycles of the, is that like the progressive voters are, are usually kind of the very latest to, to return their ballots.

But I think that that's even more so in this cycle because even your, even your normie dems, even your like very like high propensity regular voters who probably would've put their ballots in earlier and you know, once that mail, mail-in process or mail-in period started, they held onto it because they weren't quite sure who they wanted to vote for.

And so we knew as the sort of ballots were coming in over the course of the last month, huh, it we're, they weren't seeing the same number of Democratic ballots early on.

So I think that there is an assumption that it's gonna be very blue.

And I think the question that Steyer is hoping is, is it going to be very progressive since he was trying to tap into that lane?

Are the voters that he is trying to appeal to those younger voters who, you know, maybe aren't turning their ballots until the very last minute, are those gonna be the ones that that bail him out?

But remember there's, there's also probably gonna be Xavier Becerra voters also in the mix.

And Steve Hilton has maintained, you know, a fairly steady pace in the ballots that have been counted so far.

Yeah.

So that's gonna be the stuff, the challenge Steyer faces.

- Well, while we're dispelling myths here, Steve Hilton is in first place, Guy.

This is a Republican who ran with President Trump's endorsement.

He also ran with like kind of slate of candidates that he teamed up with for other constitutional offices, including Superintendent Sonja Shaw, who's a kind of anti-trans school board activist from Chino Valley School District.

Gloria Romero, a former state senator who was a Democrat and now is a Republican.

I guess first talk about for maybe our, our national audience, like there's really no chance of Hilton running unless something, or winning, unless something extraordinary happened though.

But do you think that his candidacy, assuming he makes it forward, the combination of these other candidates gives any sort of bump to maybe, you know, congressional race Republicans running down ballot?

Or is this gonna have any effect essentially?

- I mean, I think there you get into a debate that would be fascinating.

If you give Democrats truth serum, would they want two Democrats for governor in the general election?

Because you'd have to weigh like, yes, if, if Hilton is not there, is there some depressing effect on Republicans versus everything that would come from having two Democrats, the spending - The very expensive, messy, yeah, the uncertainty family fight - On which way things would go from a policy perspective, the slate, you know, you mentioned Hilton building a slate, that's, it's cute, but that doesn't really mean anything like, you know, and in a lot of cases these are just candidates that have been supported by the Republican party.

I look at it as like, you know, the insurance commissioner race, where right now you have two Democrats in there.

That's, I mean, to me that's a question of Republicans not really getting a signal on who they're supposed to support.

Stacey Kors Gottin, who was the, the party candidate and I think is in Hilton's, you know, whatever slate, super, super team he, he has going on, she's in third place.

So to me that's like where Republicans are getting their signals.

If it's not coming from Trump, it can be hard for them to decipher.

We're seeing this in, in the Kevin Kiley congressional district.

Okay, where do we go with our votes?

- Yeah.

And, and Mel, you know, Becerra waged like one of the great comebacks of all time, largely because Swalwell dropped out and you know, they threw everything at him, especially Tom Steyer, and it didn't seem to suppress the vote too much.

But looking ahead, assuming he is in the top two, do you see any like potential roadblocks for him?

Especially if, you know Steyer, you know, was able to sneak in, but even with Hilton, - If it is a Dem on Dem, if Steyer is able to sneak in, then it is gonna just be more headaches.

I think we're gonna see more of the same.

I think, I mean, I agree with you, Scott, that, that the attacks that he saw weren't, wasn't enough to, to, you know, knock Becerra off of his trajectory, but you, you throw limitless resources in a couple more months to keep associating him with Chevron and other, you know, corporate donors.

I mean, maybe that will resonate.

You know, one of the things we should keep in mind is that the electorate in November is gonna look different than the electorate in June.

It's gonna be younger, it is gonna be more diverse, and it is gonna be more progressive.

I mean, that is kind of, you know, the anti-corporate money message, that's the sweet spot.

And so maybe that is a bigger problem for him if he is, has to go up against Steyer into the fall.

You know, I, I agree with Marisa.

I think it is, it is gonna be very, very difficult for Steve Hilton or really any Republican to win statewide.

But Hilton is a, he, he's a good candidate, right?

I mean, he is a, he is very, he's very good.

You know, speaking off the cuff, I mean, he was a Fox news personality.

Like the guy talks for a living and he has a compelling message in the sense that he is tapping into people's frustrations with how the state is running.

And he's sort of saying like, maybe it's time for, for a change.

Do I think in the context of what is likely to be like a super partisan, probably very Democratic friendly national landscape, will he be able to win on that message?

Probably not.

But do I anticipate that there's gonna be some awkward and uncomfortable exchanges perhaps on a debate stage with Xavier Becerra where Becerra has to sort of explain how he views about the trajectory of the state?

Like, yeah, and I think that maybe it's a, maybe it's just like a moral victory for, for Hilton, but it, I I can anticipate some like awkward viral video clips perhaps circulating.

So - One of the other big stories of the night were these congressional races.

This is the first election we have post prop 50.

Those were the maps that were redrawn to essentially give Democrats the potential to pick up five additional seats here in California.

One of those seats is up east of Sacramento, congressional District six guy.

This is held by re Republican representative Kevin Kiley, or, well he, he was in Congress.

All the everything's been scrambled.

He left the Republican party to run in this new district.

I think hoping that, you know, if he got into a runoff with a Democrat, he could kind of use that no party preference thing.

We're now seeing him in the number one spot.

And Michael Stansfield a GOP candidate in the number two spot.

Richard Pan Democrat is trailing by a point.

Do you think it'll hold and what does a Kiley pan matchup look like if Pan can squeeze this out?

- Yeah, I mean, I think to start at the end, Kylie would still be an underdog in that matchup just on, on the characteristics of the district.

It's why he moved away from being a Republican.

I think just looking at, at how this district broke down in the last presidential election, we'll see, I mean I, you know, as more votes come in, if they're trending more Democratic, that would seem to be able to boost Richard Pan.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and predict that Michael Stansfield is not running an intricate vote curing operation.

That would be my outlook.

Maybe the local party is, and you know, I think this was one where we saw felt like on election night, did Kiley kind of draw a straight flush here of, of triangulating this to run as an independent, have enough Democrats split up the vote.

This is a great, if you're a top two hater, this is like the poster child argument for this, where you have a strong Democratic vote split between, you know, very well qualified candidates, Kiley office down in this - District.

- Crazy.

And then Stansfield who did not run a campaign period ends up getting about a fifth of the vote at least.

- Yeah.

Unintended consequences.

Well, let's go down Mel to, of the Central Valley CD 22.

David Valadao, the Republican incumbent there has been giving Democrats heartburn for many years, and now it looks like it's, you know, down to the two Democrats that we would expect for the number two spot.

You got progressive Randy Villegas from Tulare County political science professor, he's leading moderate Jasmeet Bains, who is supported by the DCCC, the Democratic Party.

What is your sense of which of those two candidates would give Valadao a tougher time come November?

- I mean, that's a good question because in some ways this is like two opposite theories of the case of what Democrats have to do to appeal to voters that have drifted away from them.

And so, you know, you have Jasmeet Bains who is kind of your classic valley-crat, right?

I mean, she's a Democrat, but she also takes centrist position.

She has pushed back against g Gavin Newsom on some of his, you know, anti-oil industry policies.

You know, really trying to sort of appeal to, to, you know, just not particularly progressive Democrat.

She wants to sort of run down the middle.

Villegas has that, this a very different theory, which is that he thinks that if he runs a more progressive campaign and sort of speaks, I think with more ambition about what the type of policies that he wants to see, things like Medicare for all that, that will excite voters, maybe voters that didn't feel a lot of pull to turn out in the first place.

And you know, this, this district is, is so maddening for Democrats because this should be theirs when, when you're looking at registration, right?

This is a Democratic advantage district, but for years they have had trouble turning out their voters and to give him credit, David Valadao has been, has been very good at sort of maintaining this seat and defying political gravity.

But basically you have these two different candidates who have very different ideas of what it would take to activate these Democratic voters that aren't showing up.

And would, would probably tip the seat into the blue.

- Yeah.

So that's like, we've been talking about this a lot on this show.

Like there is the sort of ideological split in the Democratic party, the theory of the case versus the progressives versus moderates.

Then you have the kind of generational change fights.

And we saw Institutionalists do really well.

Brad Sherman down in LA H 73 easily moved on.

His Democratic opponent is trailing by like 20 points.

Mike Thompson up in Napa, Doris Matsui in Sacramento, all of them at least made the runoffs, although Matsui only got about 31% of the vote.

And she was challenged by a local city councilmember, Mai Vang who got about a quarter of the vote could be in the runoff.

Our producer Izzy Bloom talked to Mai.

Let's hear what she said about that.

- There's a lot of excitement in this region for, for generational change.

I know when I first decided that I was going to, that we were gonna run, there was consultants and political establishment people who have done politics their entire lives that told us to wait our turn told us to be okay with the leadership we have right now.

But if there's anything that I've learned from my years of activism and organizing, it's that comfortable people, especially politicians, do not change unless we demand it.

They do not change unless we fight for it.

- So Guy, I mean that seems to be kind of like an argument that even if she doesn't make the runoff, there was value in mounting these challenges.

- Yeah.

And I gave you the, the poster child of like the anti top two argument in, in the sixth district.

Here's the pro top two argument is in districts like this, where if you're talking about Mai Vang or Eric Jones, they're dead in the water.

If the expectation is they have to knock out the incumbent in the primary, in the primary, if they have to both introduce themselves.

I mean, she's been in politics for, for someone like Jones just new on the scene, even though he has money introducing himself, knocking off that was Mike Thompson incumbents.

Yeah.

In the primary versus, okay, you run your, your primary campaign, you make the top two, now you have a one-on-one for months where you're actually able to make more of a case.

- Yeah.

Well one thing that's clearly decided is that Matt Mahan, Katie Porter and Antonio Villaragosa are not going on to the second round here Guy.

What do you think is, you know, what do you see as being next for them?

- Yeah, I mean, in the case of Mahan, I, I talked to him for a little bit yesterday.

I I think Marisa has articulated this really well throughout the campaign.

Mahan has argued, okay, I just didn't have enough time.

It's impossible to know.

I mean, how how long would it have needed to go?

As Marisa has argued, the issue environment did not line up for him.

The, the a campaign about anti-Trump and affordability and not homelessness and public safety did not work out clearly in his favor.

There's things he can still take away from this.

I think if you watched any of the debates in the forums, he's won the argument on homelessness.

Mm.

All the people running against him were saying, what I do is interim housing with a side of prevention, which is basically what Mahan has done in San Jose.

And I think, look, going forward, someone I respect a lot in, in California politics opened my third eye with this, what about 2030?

You know, if things go left with Becerra, or, or Steyer, Mahan's still gonna be there.

I see a pretty easy reelection for him in 2028.

I can't think of anyone in the city.

I mean, maybe Betty Duong, I don't know if she'd give up or seat to challenge him.

I don't see anyone else who can make a run against him.

So he'll get reelected and then kind of remain as a, a thorn to whoever's in the governor's office.

I - Feel like he's the only one of the ones who lost, who really has a brighter future as a result of having run nothing.

He gave nothing up but else.

Well, yeah, but he did well.

- Yeah, but the other thing too though is that the tech connections.

- Right?

So I wanna talk about that and how Mel react because you asked him about this real huge flood of tech money that he got largely from, as he points out individual CEOs and others within the tech community.

And you know, in a year when we're seeing a lot of backlash to tech and to wealth.

So here's what, when you asked if it helped or hurt him, what he said.

- So it really is a double-edged sword.

I'm proud of being from San Jose and representing the largest city in Silicon Valley.

I'm proud of leading a city government that is very innovative and incorporates new tools and new approaches.

That doesn't mean that we're not committed to holding big tech accountable for making people's lives better and not putting us at risk or harming the environment.

We're all about regulating tech in smart ways, but I think that got a little bit lost in the media coverage.

- I mean, Mel, what do you think as a Democrat especially, is there a world that someone like Mahan can really argue, oh, I'll take these guys money and then turn around and regulate them.

Or do you think that that was kind of an albatross in this race for him?

- Well, look, democratic politicians make that argument all the time when they take, you know, you know, any, any industry's money is like, you know, I'll take your money and then, and then and then regulate.

So sure may he can make that argument too.

I think that, that there would have to be some sort of proof point either in, you know, less so in in San Jose or something that would, would show what he means by that.

I, I think look, tech has become kind of a boogeyman among voters and I think we've seen that in how when tech played really hard in their races, they had a bad night.

And so I do think that the association, and look, Mahan had, you know, a pretty weak showing that was without any of the attacks against him.

He never rose to the level of opponents needing to tee off on him.

And if they wanted to, they could have, because of these donations, I mean, I've talked to people who said that they saw polling about what would be sort of the devastating attacks on him and just pointing out these, you know, certain donors linking them to MAGA.

It's just, it's brutal when you're trying to appeal to temp to Democratic voters.

And the truth is, it's like, look, I think he thinks he has a lot of crossover appeal, and I'm sure that he does.

I'm sure Republicans were nodding along when he was talking on the debate stage.

But when you're talking about people who are still Republican voters in a state like California, it means they're pretty dedicated to their party.

They're just not gonna vote for somebody with an, with a D behind their name.

And so I think that that is you, he's gonna have to sort of figure out how to unlock that, that problem if he's going to advance or to Guy's point, if the atmosphere changes, if it's more of a 2024 election as opposed to a 2022 election or 2018 election, maybe that's a more friendly territory for him.

- And can I just say that's Melanie is spot on.

There's an argument that it's only gonna get harder to win an election as someone with ties to Silicon Valley.

If we see this kind of AI fuel job loss, people like Mahan and honestly Gavin Newsom are gonna need to be able to tell a story.

They were, they're in the delivery room when all this stuff is coming on.

They're gonna need to be able to tell a story about how either to regulate it or adapt to it or deal with it in the years to come.

- Yeah, it's also the concentration of wealth is also a big issue.

Let's move down to LA and the mayor's race there is still a bit unsettled, although it looks like Karen Bass, the incumbent, very embattled incumbent Mel is going to make it on to the next to the final two in November.

You know, there was all this talk about Spencer Pratt, this Republican who's gonna break everything down there.

He's in second, but he could still be overtaken right by Nithya Raman who's kind of on his heels right now.

- Right?

That's exactly right.

I mean, and, and and the same dynamics we were talking about in the governor's race.

I think it's even think of that on sort of steroids in, in Los Angeles in particular.

So if you are looking at the breakdown right now, Pratt is closer to Karen Bass than Raman is close to him.

Hmm.

But again, the assumption is, is that the ballots are gonna be coming, are going to be more skewed Democratic.

I mean, we saw this in 2022 and the primary when Karen Bass was running against Rick Caruso, she ended election night being down five points ended up, you know, being ahead of by seven.

I mean, that kind of swing is the type of thing that you see with this, these late blue ballots.

The thing that's complicating this for, for Raman is that those blue ballots can now go to two different places, right?

I mean they, some of them are going to be Bass voters in addition to Raman voters.

So, you know, I think that people are, are, are absolutely anticipating that she's going to gain on Pratt.

I think the question is, is will she have enough of a, you know, getting the proportion she needs of the continuing vote drops to actually overtake him?

I'm not so sure, but meanwhile, I mean like prepare yourselves for the like very chill online discourse around crap to like really be nuanced and subtle and not jump to conclusions at all.

You know, it doesn't matter how many times we will, we can say we knew that this pattern happens, this pattern has happened in the past.

It's just like I scroll online and it's just, it, it breaks my journalist's heart.

It's like, as many times as we can try to tell people in advance and prepare them, they're just like out the window and like pure malarkey.

- Yeah.

Hold on to your crystals.

One thing I've been cur really curious about Melanie is like the salience of the fire issue citywide, like, you know, LA Wayed More Than Me.

What is like once you get out of the Palisades, I actually saw a great, the, the channels Vote Hub on Twitter, they're posting maps and all these returns are early, but they had a precinct map of two precincts in the Palisades, one that was heavily damaged by the fire, one that wasn't.

And Pratt was running like 30 points better in the fire damaged precinct.

Like, how do you, do you, do you feel like this is, there's resonance throughout the city on that?

- Because I also wonder like if people actually know Pratt in Palisades, do they like him?

Do they hate him?

You know, he's a pretty like controversial guy.

Even before this run, - The fires were horrible and the fires when you were like, when we were living through it, it was just like this like miserable, scary week where we, I think felt all very vulnerable.

And then the truth is, is that for most of us that live in the city, we were able to move on and obviously the people who lost their homes in Altadena or in Palisades, like this is a devastating loss, but like for for the rest of us who are, you know, like living our own lives and also have you realized, you know, do you remember that a lot of other things happened in the last year?

Like I do think it's receded from people's consciousness and I think that that's exactly why Pratt, yes, he's gotten involved because of the fires.

He said that that was the precipitating event, but you hear him talk almost as much if not more about homelessness, about public drug use because that is something that I do think that you see kind of more spread out around the city.

And so I do think that that's how he's trying to widen his geographic appeal.

Yeah, but I, I saw that, that map too Guy, and I thought it was terrific because it really also to me demonstrated the like, racial stratification of how these votes are coming in.

And I think that we are seeing that Pratt's voters tend to be predominantly white, predominantly on the west side, which is wealthier, but LA is a big diverse city.

And so part of me wonders when we were talking so much about the Pratt discourse and the run up to this like, you know, were we, were we not paying attention to where Latino voters minds were or Black voters minds were or, or others because it was just like very loud people online - Getting short on time.

But you know, the conventional wisdom is that LA is such an overwhelmingly democratic city that Pratt would've had a very hard time winning that said, he's such an outside the box kind of a character who knows?

Who do you think would be a tougher opponent for Karen Bass?

- Oh, I think Nithya Ramen would be a tougher opponent because I think there's so many, look, she's very popular as an incumbent.

And so if you are a Democratic voter and you're unhappy with Karen Bass, it is much, much easier to vote for Nithya Ramen, even though she has her own kind of pros and cons as a candidate versus Spencer Pratt.

I mean, I think that Spencer Pratt, that really requires a lot of Democrats to make a leap, especially when what the, the Karen Bass strategy, if she runs against him, is to just link him to Donald Trump as much as she can.

And I think, again, in a super polarized, super nationalized November election, that's gonna be really hard for him.

- All right, Mel's got the last word here that, that gave us pause the other night when we were thinking about it.

Melanie Mason, of Politico Guy Marzorati of KQED.

Thanks you both, to you both so much.

Thanks - So much.

- That's gonna be a wrap.

Thank you for Thursday, June 4th.

Political Breakdown is a production of KQED.

- Our engineer today is Christopher Beale.

Our producer is Izzy Bloom.

I'm Scott Shafer.

Our video team includes Alex Tran, Jim McKee, Hazel Tesoro, Matt Morales, Gilare Zada, and Vivian Morales.

I'm Marisa Lagos.

We'll see you next time.