California’s slow, mail-heavy counting is reshaping reported vote totals and cutting into Republican numbers as high-profile races remain fluid while ballots keep trickling in.

California’s vote count still looks like a slow-motion train wreck and it’s not just an inconvenience — it’s political pain. The system lets mail ballots arrive and be counted late, and that staggered timing consistently shifts tallies as the days pass. Even people who usually defend the status quo are noticing how messy and tilted the process can appear.

Dmitri gave an overview of where things stand right now.

In the governor’s race, former television host and policy commentator Steve Hilton spent much of the campaign leading in public polling, while in Los Angeles, Spencer Pratt has emerged as a surprisingly viable contender after running a high-profile mayoral campaign that has attracted widespread media attention. As results continue to come in, both races are being closely watched for signs of whether California is about to have a major shift to the right in California.

As votes continue to be counted on Wednesday morning, here is where the candidates stand in their respective races.

As of Wednesday morning, with roughly 60 percent of the vote counted in California’s gubernatorial primary, Republican Steve Hilton has maintained a lead over the Democratic field. Hilton has received about 28 percent of the vote, while former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra trails at roughly 25 percent. Progressive billionaire Tom Steyer is currently in third place with around 20 percent.

Katie Porter has been defeated; she won’t be able to come back from her current position in the vote totals, no matter what. That’s straightforward: the early returns and the math have closed that door for her. Yet the headline that’ll stick for many conservatives is how much the later-counted ballots drained GOP totals across contests.

Republicans have watched the same pattern repeat: robust election night numbers erode as mail-in ballots are added later and late returns skew heavily toward Democratic candidates. Those good old-fashioned mail-in ballot dumps have a real impact on reported totals, and in a state where one party dominates, the timing of counting can determine the narrative. If you care about fair outcomes, the optics and mechanics matter as much as the final tallies.

The concern isn’t hypothetical. When large batches of ballots are processed after polls close, they often come from urban areas and heavy-mail communities that trend Democratic, so early leads for Republicans shrink. That’s true in statewide races and in local contests like Los Angeles, where unconventional candidates can surge early but see margins narrow as the full count arrives. Voters deserve a process where the order of counting doesn’t feel like it changes the result.

https://x.com/Polymarket/status/2062270690032501171

There’s also a practical problem: prolonged counting fuels distrust. When results bounce around for days, people speculate about manipulation whether or not any wrongdoing occurred. For conservative voters who already suspect the system leans left, slow, staggered returns reinforce the idea that outcomes are engineered by procedure instead of decided by voters. Confidence in elections is fragile and this kind of timing makes it worse.

What happens in California can ripple elsewhere because media narratives form around the final numbers, not the early reality. When the press finally declares winners after weeks of counting, many will remember the last-reported totals and not the night-of-election snapshot that showed a different picture. Republicans see that as a structural disadvantage we shouldn’t ignore, and we should push for clearer rules about when and how ballots are counted so results reflect voters, not counting order.

We could be witnessing another political screw job, folks.

That suspicion is why attention is focused on specific tallies and the composition of late-arriving ballots. If you want to understand how a lead evaporates, watch where the later batches come from and who they favor. Courts and voters will debate the fairness of the system, but right now the practical effect is simple: GOP totals are getting cut as counts proceed.