Race For 5th District Tightens Between Foley, Dixon As Votes Pour In

ORANGE COUNTY, CA — Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley said Wednesday she was "cautiously optimistic" she could pick up ground on re-election challenger Assemblywoman Diane Dixon, R-Newport Beach, who was a little short of the 50% threshold to win the seat outright as the vote counting continued from Tuesday's election.

"There's still a lot of votes left to count," Foley told City News Service on Wednesday. "None of the drop-box ballots have been counted yet from election day."

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"I'm cautiously optimistic," she said. "We called 300,000 voters on election day ... and it was mostly people who had not turned in ballots and were taking them to vote centers. The super majority of them were voting for me, so we'll see."

Orange County Registrar of Voters Bob Page said there were an estimated 197,350 ballots left to process. That includes 44,600 vote-by-mail ballots received on or before Tuesday, 60,400 from drop-boxes and 89,600 from vote-by-mail ballots returned to vote centers.

Ballots that have been picked up from the postal service also will continue to roll in until next Tuesday, the final day they can be counted, Page said.

"The early returns are trending more Republican than I might have expected," UC Irvine political science professor Louis DeSipio said. "The national electorate in other states and elsewhere in California have been trending more toward Democrats and away from Republicans."

DeSipio noted that the "Foley-Dixon race is pretty tight."

Foley, a Democrat, was first elected to the nonpartisan board in a 2021 special election in a five-candidate race consisting of three Republicans and two Democrats, and a majority was not required to win.

She was re-elected in 2022, defeating then-state Sen. Patricia Bates, R-Laguna Niguel, 51.3%-48.7%.

After an update Wednesday, Dixon went from 48.96% to 48.54% of the vote, with Foley inching up from 45.08% to 45.45%. A third candidate, Lucy Vellema, a special education instructor, increased from 5.97% to 6.02%.

If no candidate receives a majority, the two top finishers will compete again in the November general election.

"Orange County Republicans very much showed up yesterday," Orange County Republican Party chairman Will O'Neill said. "We won every countywide seat. We won at the Orange County Board of Education, so we have a 5-0 board and the elected superintendent, so it was a really strong night for Republicans. Every candidate endorsed by the party either won outright or will be going into the general election in the top two."

On election day, about 62% cast ballots for Dixon, O'Neill said. But DeSipio said the trend of the past decade is that the vote-by-mail ballots that roll in after election day favor Democrats.

"If I were her, I wouldn't be terribly worried at this point," DeSipio said of Foley. "These results are high points for the more conservative candidates."

Like the Fifth District race between Foley and Dixon, the Fourth District contest was also close, where voters are choosing a successor to termed-out Democrat Doug Chaffee. That race was bound for a runoff between Republican Buena Park Mayor Connor Traut and Democratic Orange County Board of Education Trustee Tim Shaw, with Shaw leading 33.66% to Traut's 30.73%.

Orange County Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento appeared to be on track to win outright with 63% of the vote.

In the 40th Congressional District, it appears Republicans Young Kim and Ken Calvert will square off in November. Calvert was leading Kim 36.2% to 21.6%. Esther Kim-Varet was the leading Democrat at 15.5% with the other top Democratic vote getters Lisa Ramirez at 13.3% and Joe Kerr at 7.9%.

"I'm relatively surprised in the 40th Congressional District," DeSipio told CNS. "I thought the gap would be narrower than what we're seeing now. I think that race will tighten up when we get more ballots counted."

Kim would appear to have "a relative advantage going forward because she can more easily tack to the center," DeSipio said.

Another surprise locally was how strongly Orange Mayor Pro Tem Denis Bilodeau was doing in his bid for the Board of Equalization in District 4. The Republican Bilodeau leads termed-out state Sen. Tom Umberg, D-Santa Ana, 48.7% to 19.7%.

Democrat Cody Petterson trails Umberg with 17.2% followed by Democrat Martin Arias at 12.9% and libertarian Gardner Osborne at 1.5%.

"I spent like 20 bucks and Tom spent $1.6 million," Bilodeau joked.

"I love that Denis Bilodeau is almost at 50%," O'Neill said. "He spent less than $20,000 on his primary and Tom Umberg spent seven figures."