SACRAMENTO, AND LOS ANGELES — Barack Obama's victory spread to California, as Democrats were poised to widen their majority in the state Legislature, while Republicans battled to hang on to long-held congressional seats.
California voters Tuesday decided 53 congressional races, all 80 Assembly seats and half of the 40 seats in the state Senate.
Most of those seats were gerrymandered to favor one party, but Democrats, flush with money and buoyed by registration gains, hoped to pick up two congressional seats and expand their majorities in the state Senate and Assembly.
"Clearly, it is not a very good night to be a Republican," said Republican consultant Ray McNally, whose firm managed Republican Dean Andal's flagging attempt to reclaim a Northern California congressional seat won two years ago by Jerry McNerney.
Democrats already hold 34 of the state's 53 congressional seats. But they were emboldened this year as Republicans struggled with a highly unpopular president, an economy in crisis, an unpopular war and a lack of campaign money.
Democrats had said they were targeting two seats held by Republicans: a vacated seat in suburban Sacramento and another held by Rep. Brian Bilbray of Carlsbad in northern San Diego County. Bilbray was beating back a challenge by first-time candidate Nick Leibham, an attorney.
Democrats focused money and effort on the suburban Sacramento seat long held by Rep. John Doolittle, who is stepping down amid federal investigations.
The Republican standard-bearer in the race is state Sen. Tom McClintock, a conservative stalwart who lives in the Sacramento area but long represented a district 400 miles to the south that includes parts of Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.
Democrat Charlie Brown was locked in a tight race after painting McClintock as a career politician unfamiliar with the plight of everyday Californians.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent $783,000 on television ads mocking McClintock, using Photoshopped pictures of him hitchhiking. McClintock, never a prodigious fundraiser, was not airing television ads in the closing days of the campaign, instead favoring robo-calls.
Republicans were scarcely on the offensive.
Andal, a former GOP assemblyman from Stockton, sought to unseat McNerney (D-Pleasanton) and reclaim a Northern California seat that until two years ago was held by a Republican, Richard Pombo.
