Rep. David Valadao’s Victory Gives Republicans 220th House Seat

On Monday night, Newsmax projected that Rep. David Valadao (R-CA) had won reelection in California’s 22nd Congressional District.

Valadao — who has been in office since 2021 — and previously held the same seat from 2013 to 2019 — defeated Democrat challenger Rudy Salas by just 3,358 votes, a margin of 3.6 points. According to Newsmax, the Republican incumbent received 51.68% of the vote, while Salas received 48.32%.

Valadao’s race took almost two weeks to be decided, largely because of California’s laws allowing mass mail-in voting and ballot harvesting.

The California Republican’s victory has secured the 220th House seat for the GOP, while Democrats currently hold 211 seats.

Republicans have already won the 218 seats needed for a majority in the chamber, though they are still hoping for a few more victories as there are four races left that are too close to call.

Among the four remaining races, Republicans are leading in two of them — including Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), whose race is headed for a state-mandated recount.

According to reporting from the Associated Press, “In Colorado, a mandatory recount is triggered when the margin of votes between the top two candidates is at or below 0.5% of the leading candidate’s vote total.”

As of November 18, Boebert led by a margin of roughly 0.34% — or just 554 votes. Despite the mandated recount, the Republican congresswoman sent out a tweet celebrating her victory soon after the last vote tally was released.

Adam Frisch, Boebert’s Democrat challenger, has since conceded the race — saying that, while he supports the mandatory recount, he believes it would be unrealistic to think that it would flip enough votes to change the results of the election.

The second race that is leaning toward the GOP is in California’s newly redrawn 15th Congressional District, where Republican candidate John Duarte has a razor-thin lead over Democrat opponent Adam Gray. According to the AP, Duarte has received 50.3% of the vote, while Gray has received 49.7%. Duarte currently leads by just 865 votes.

The remaining two races that have not yet been called are “stuck in ranked-choice voting limbo in Alaska and Maine,” writes Newsmax.

If both Boebert and Duarte win, the GOP will have at least a 222-213 majority when they retake the House in January.

Valadao was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump in 2021 after Trump left the White House, and is one of only two of those pro-impeachment Republicans remaining in the House.

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