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Richard Pan speaks about lowering the cost of insulin for Californians at an event in 2023. Pasadena Star-News\/Getty<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\tGet your news from a source that\u2019s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.<\/a><\/p>\n While most California races were called by the morning after Election Day, a handful of key holdouts remain. \u201cThis is normal,\u201d Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber, who was on the ballot herself, emphasized in a press release<\/a>. \u201cI would call on all Californians to be patient.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s a hard ask, at least for Richard Pan, a Democrat who is running third in one of the state\u2019s tightest races: the Sixth Congressional District. <\/p>\n In California\u2019s open primary system, the top two finishers in a given race advance to a general election runoff regardless of party affiliation. The Sixth leans blue, but if Democratic votes are split among a large pool of contenders, Democratic candidates could be iced out.<\/p>\n The Republican now in contention to advance to the general election didn\u2019t even run a campaign.<\/p>\n That\u2019s how things were looking in the Sixth as of mid-afternoon Wednesday. With 48 percent of votes counted, Rep. Kevin Kiley\u2014the Third District Republican incumbent who recently renounced his party to run as an independent in the Sixth\u2014was ahead with more than a quarter of the vote. In second place was Republican Michael Stansfield, whose bid isn\u2019t serious. (He doesn\u2019t even have a campaign website.) Running a close third\u2014just one percentage point behind Stansfield\u2014is Pan<\/a>, the outspoken pediatrician, pro-vaccine warrior, and former state senator I profiled for Mother Jones in April<\/a>.<\/p>\n If this trend holds, Pan, who is perhaps best known for having authored some of the country\u2019s toughest state vaccine laws, would be headed straight back to the clinic.<\/p>\n Stansfield\u2019s success as the only Republican on the ballot highlights the unintended consequences of Prop 50<\/a>, Gov. Gavin Newsom\u2019s redistricting plan that voters approved last November. After the state congressional map was redrawn to help more Democrats win seats, the new Sixth remains blue, but less so than before, as it has absorbed conservative regions carved from other districts.<\/p>\n The close race seems to have surprised Stansfield, a 50 year-old tech worker who received no donations and did essentially no campaigning. He only ran, he told US News<\/a>, to send a message to the religious right about peace in the Middle East. \u201cI wasn\u2019t necessarily going after it to win,\u201d Stansfield said.<\/p>\n And he might not. Many of the remaining votes are from northern Sacramento and the adjoining suburbs, a region that so far has favored Pan. And votes counted later may have a different skew. In California, early ballot returns<\/a> were up among Republican voters for this cycle, and lagged for Democrats relative to previous years.<\/p>\n