OC Political

UPDATED 2:45 PM With Explanation.

Many may be asking the question as to why we are handicapping this race along with CD 38, since they are not considered to be in play. I simply retort that we will cover every race no matter how one-sided over the next few weeks.

Once again thank you to Meridian Pacific for posting these maps on their website as they are extremely informative in showing exactly what each district covers.

Republicans have 10 point advantage in this seat although DTS voters are likely to lean a bit more conservative in this district.  Republican won every major race in this seat back in both 2010 and 2008.

With the addition of a large chunk of Los Angeles County and all of Chino Hills I expect to see some pretty heavy campaigning from the Ed Royce who does not have the high level of name ID in these portions of his new district.

As stated before, the Incumbent is Congressman Ed Royce a solid Republican who has been a consistently good vote during his tenure. I pick on him a bit because I believe he now owns Red County, but he is actually a really nice person if you ever interact with him in public.

His challengers include D’ Marie Mulattieri a Community Volunteer from Orange. She is listed as running with No Party Preference on the ballot.

The other challenger is Jay Chen a Businessmann/School Boardmember who is not in the Orange County portion of the district. He is listed as a Democrat on the ballot.

Looking at all the factors at play in this district I believe that the 2 candidates advancing to November will be:

Ed Royce & Jay Chen

The factors at play- As noted in the first post I have gotten a couple of e-mails asking me to further explain what factors are at play that made me arrive at my prediction.

Ed Royce is the only Republican on the ballot in what is a conservative seat. He has incumbency, a huge war chest, and a solid campaign team behind him. Knowing Royce he will campaign very hard in the primary as he always does a really good job of working the district.

D’ Marie Mulattieri will get her fair share of votes based on being the no party preference candidate, which makes her effectively the only non-politico in the race. Without a huge financial backing though to get her message out, I just don;t think that she will be able to advance to the top two.

Jay Chen is an elected official who has been on the ballot before thus giving him some name ID and an idea of how to run a campaign. Being the only Democrat is what puts him over the top though, since Democrats have a 10 point advantage over DTS voters in this district.