California’s Primary Results: What We Know So Far

A number of races from Tuesday’s primary election in California remain too close to call, but the most-watched contest is a done deal.

Representative Adam Schiff, the lead prosecutor in Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, and Steve Garvey, a former Major League Baseball player, will advance to the general election in November for a full term in the U.S. Senate seat that Dianne Feinstein held for more than three decades before she died last year.

As of early this morning, with just under half of the ballots counted, Schiff, a Democrat, had about 33 percent of the vote and Garvey, a Republican, had 32 percent. Representative Katie Porter, an Orange County Democrat, was running a distant third with about 14 percent of the vote, and Representative Barbara Lee, a progressive Democrat from Oakland, was fourth with 7 percent.

The results were effectively the same in the special primary being conducted at the same time to fill the last few weeks of the current Senate term, from Election Day in November until the end of the year. In that contest, which attracted fewer minor candidates, Garvey was running ahead of Schiff, 35 percent to 31 percent, with Porter at 16 percent and Lee at 9 percent.

California’s election system pits all candidates against one another in the same primary, regardless of party, and the top two vote-getters advance. So the general election could have been a contest between Schiff and another Democrat, Porter or Lee. That kind of intraparty battle for a Senate seat has happened twice before in California.

But this time, Garvey’s name recognition as a former star first baseman for the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres helped consolidate Republicans behind his campaign — and so did Schiff’s advertising strategy, as my colleague Shawn Hubler reported.