Democrats claimed the final congressional seat in the 2024 election cycle Tuesday as Merced Democrat Adam Gray ousted Republican incumbent Rep. John Duarte in a photo-finish race in California’s Central Valley.

California’s 13th Congressional District was the final outstanding race for the U.S. House of Representatives, and had the closest margin in the country. Gray was ahead by 187 votes when Duarte conceded Tuesday evening.

After trailing in the first three weeks of vote-counting, Gray took the lead on Nov. 26 as mail ballots tilted in his favor.

Gray, 47, said in a prepared statement Tuesday that he was honored to be elected and thanked the volunteers, voters, donors, campaign staff and family members who had helped him win.

“This district is ready for independent and accountable leadership that always puts the Valley’s people ahead of partisan politics,” Gray said.

Gray said he would work to build bipartisan relationships and deliver “clean water, better educational opportunities, stronger infrastructure and more good-paying jobs.”

Duarte conceded Tuesday night, a campaign spokesman said.

“That’s how it goes,” Duarte told the Turlock Journal on Tuesday. “I’m a citizen legislator, and I didn’t plan on being in Congress forever. But whenever I think I can make a difference, I’ll consider public service in different forms, including running for Congress again.”

Republicans will retain a thin majority in the House of Representatives next year. With Gray’s victory, Republicans will hold 220 seats — barely above the 218-seat threshold needed to control the chamber — and Democrats will hold 215.

The GOP will have an even narrower majority for parts of January. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) resigned from the House last month. Rep. Michael Waltz of Florida has been tapped to be President-elect Donald Trump’s national security advisor and is expected to step down, as is Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York if she is confirmed as United Nations ambassador.

The 13th Congressional District was one of a half-dozen seats in California seen as pivotal in the fight for control of Congress, and was one of three in the state that Democrats flipped from Republican control.

In Orange County, Democrat Derek Tran ousted Republican Rep. Michelle Steel, and in northern Los Angeles County, Democrat George Whitesides beat Republican Rep. Mike Garcia. Democrats also held onto a seat being vacated by Rep. Katie Porter (D-Irvine), with state Sen. Dave Min beating Republican Scott Baugh.

Republicans fared better in the Central Valley’s other swing district, where Rep. David Valadao defeated Democrat Rudy Salas by almost 7 points. Salas on Tuesday filed to run for Congress again in 2026.

The GOP also held a seat in Riverside County, where voters reelected longtime Republican Rep. Ken Calvert over Democrat Will Rollins, a former federal prosecutor.

The rural 13th Congressional District stretches from Coalinga to Modesto, encompassing Merced County and parts of Fresno, Madera, San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties.

The district appears blue on paper, with 42% of registered voters affiliated with the Democratic Party, compared with 29% registered as Republicans and 22% registered with no party preference.

But the Central Valley is more purple than the deep-blue districts that surround the Bay Area and Los Angeles, and conservative Democrats in the area often cross party lines to elect Republicans.

The 2024 campaign was a rematch of 2022, when Duarte beat Gray by 564 votes, the second-closest margin in the country.

This year, Duarte campaigned on lowering gas prices and the cost of living. Duarte, whose family owns a large farm in the San Joaquin Valley, pitched himself to voters as a moderate Republican, saying he had bucked his party on abortion and immigration, instead sticking to middle-of-the-road policy proposals.

Gray cast himself as a “radical centrist,” pointing to his decade in the state Assembly as proof that he could work across party lines. In August, he told The Times that he chose to run against Duarte again because he thought the incumbent and Republicans had accomplished little in Congress to help everyday Americans.

Turkey Vultures (Cathartes aura) in southern California are still exposed to anticoagulant rodenticides (ARs) even though legislation was passed to drastically reduce the presence of these poisons across the state.

This is according to the short communication “Turkey Vultures (Cathartes aura) from Southern California are Exposed to Anticoagulant Rodenticides Despite Recent Bans,” recently published in the Journal of Raptor Research.

The harmful nature of these rodenticides is what led to their ban in California. If they persist, this could spell trouble for additional non-target wildlife species, including those with an endangered status like the Burrowing Owl (Athene cunicularia).

Anticoagulant rodenticides cause system failure in animals by interfering with the synthesis of vitamin K-dependent coagulation factors in the liver. This is true for rats as well as raptors. Of the non-target wildlife species that encounter ARs, raptors are disproportionately harmed because toxins accumulate as they move up the food web, reaching their highest levels in top predators.

In southern California there are three especially vulnerable raptor species for which this is of immediate concern: the Burrowing Owl (Athene cunicularia), White-tailed Kite (Elanus leucurus), and the well-known scavenging California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus), the latter of which already faces constant health risk from residual lead shot fragments inside carcasses on the landscape.

Turkey Vultures possess a suite of characteristics that make them uniquely representative of poison accumulation in their environments. They are more widely distributed than many of their raptor cousins, including the California Condor. They also cruise over large swaths of land encompassing many different habitats and consume a wide variety of prey items. These qualities make them important sentinels in the world of raptor toxicology. The field focused on identifying primary toxicants threatening raptor populations.

To investigate the prevalence of vulture exposure to eight different types of rodenticides, a team of researchers led by Drs. Peter Bloom, Miguel D. Saggese, and Andrea Bonisoli-Alquati trapped 27 Turkey Vultures in southern California near Anaheim between 2016 and 2021. The birds were fitted with wing-tags and their blood was sampled. All birds were subsequently released back into the wild.

Each was tested for first-generation ARs and second-generation ARs, the latter of which is thought to be more toxic than the former due to its higher strength and slower metabolic breakdown. The results showed that 11% of the vultures tested showed evidence of AR exposure. Although 27 birds is a small sample size, these findings suggest that if vultures are being exposed, other raptors probably are too.

“The presence of rodenticides in the blood of a few individuals is just the tip of the iceberg and demonstrates that these compounds are still out there. Even a small percentage of exposed wildlife should be considered a loss,” says Saggese, a faculty member at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Western University of Health Sciences.

The researchers recommend future studies focused on comparative analysis of both liver and blood samples from Turkey Vultures because liver, while difficult to collect, provides a more accurate and timely snapshot of AR exposure. Rehabilitation centers care for many birds that eventually succumb to their afflictions, providing a potential source for ground truthing this methodology.

Furthermore, the team emphasizes the importance of continuing to monitor AR exposure in Californian Turkey Vultures and keeping an eye on the adherence of pest control companies to the active legislature regarding rodenticide use.

When the Great Recession struck California 17 years ago and hundreds of thousands of workers lost their jobs, the state’s unemployment insurance system crashed.

The employer-financed program quickly exhausted its thin reserves, due to a short-sighted political decision six years earlier.

In 2001, the Unemployment Insurance Fund had a $6.5 billion positive balance. But the governor at the time, Democrat Gray Davis, owed big political debts to unions that financed his 1998 campaign. He repaid them by doubling unemployment insurance benefits, contending that the seemingly hefty reserve could cover them without raising payroll taxes on employers.

When recession struck, the insurance fund soon leaked red ink and the state borrowed about $10 billion from the federal government to maintain cash payments. When the state didn’t repay the loan, the feds raised payroll taxes for nearly a decade to retire the loan.

It should have been a lesson for political policymakers about instant gratification and financial responsibility, but it wasn’t.

Shortly after the $10 billion loan was paid off, California was hammered by the COVID-19 pandemic, and upwards of 3 million workers lost their jobs as the state ordered workplace closures.

Once again, the unemployment insurance program had virtually no reserves to cover the sharp increase in claims. Once again it borrowed from the federal government, this time for $20 billion, and once again its failure to repay forced the feds to increase payroll taxes.

In addition to a double dose of financial problems, the Employment Development Department has also experienced managerial failures.

In 2011 Elaine Howle, the state auditor, laid out the department’s shortcomings in a sharply worded report, but when the pandemic hit, they once again became evident. There were massive glitches in responding to legitimate claims for insurance benefits, while the department gave tens of billions of dollars to fraudsters.

Meanwhile employers are still repaying the last loan, and the state’s insurance fund is continuing to run deficits, unable to cover current benefits of nearly $7 billion a year.

With that history in mind, another watchdog agency, the Legislative Analyst’s Office, is urging a complete overhaul of unemployment insurance, declaring the system “is broken.”

Noting that the current state payroll tax cannot fully cover current benefits, much less build reserves, the LAO report projects a “perpetually outstanding federal loan” to keep payments flowing that must be repaid with interest.

The report proposes a four-part tough love approach to a crisis that has been building for more than two decades and cannot solve itself, to wit it advises the state to:

• Increase the taxable wage base from $7,000 per worker to $46,800, tying it to the actual benefits of up to $450 a week. It “would place California among the ten states with taxable wages bases above $40,000 and all other Western states.”
• Adopt two payroll tax rates, one to cover current benefits and another to rebuild reserves. The combined rate of 1.9% would be applied to the $46,800 wage base.
• Base employers’ tax rates on their changes in employment, thus imposing higher costs on employers that reduce their number of workers.
• Refinance the federal loan with a bond backed by payroll taxes and state loans from its internal sources to reduce overall interest costs.

There may be other alternatives, perhaps affecting benefits, but the main thing is that doing nothing will just perpetuate this crisis — even though the politics of the issue are daunting.

It’s been a political stalemate for nearly a quarter-century, pitting unions seeking to protect, or even increase, benefits against employers who don’t want to shoulder increased taxes. Successive governors and legislative leaders have shunned engagement, preferring to kick the can down the road.