Razor-thin margin widens in tight city of Merced race. See who’s ahead now

The latest batch of election results released Friday by the Registrar of Voters show Fue Xiong leaping further ahead of incumbent Delray Shelton in the race for Merced City Council District 6.

As of Wednesday, Xiong was ahead of Shelton by one vote: 856 to 855. But Xiong grew his lead to 23 votes Friday evening, outpacing Shelton 971 to 948.

District 6, which is remains one of Merced County’s most closely-watched local races, covers much of the city north of Yosemite Avenue.

Shelton, who first took office in 2018, is a lieutenant in the Merced County Sheriff’s Office assigned to administrative services. Xiong is an engineer for the state Department of Toxic Substances Control.

As of Friday evening, the Merced County Registrar’s Office had 32.050 votes counted out of 124,665 registered voters. showing voter turnout at about 25.7%.

In terms of other tight local races, Esmeralda Soria and Mark Pazin continue to wait to see which one will eventually win their Nov. 8 election contest to represent the 27th Assembly District.

Soria, a Democrat who currently serves on the Fresno City Council, and Republican Pazin, the former sheriff of Merced County, are separated by just over one percentage point in the combined vote tallies from Fresno, Madera and Merced counties.

As of late Friday afternoon, figures from Merced County and from the California Secretary of State’s Office reported that Soria had 27,793 votes, or 50.6%, to Pazin’s 27,168 votes or 49.4%.

That’s a margin of just 625 votes out of almost 55,000 counted so far. But the vote totals will continue to fluctuate in the coming days as vote-by-mail ballots continue to be received and processed by elections officials in the three counties.

At the end of Election Night reporting late Tuesday, for example, Soria’s lead over Pazin was 287 votes, but by Friday afternoon was down to 219, before climbing to 625 as more returns came in Friday afternoon.

The Soria-Pazin race is one of several for the Assembly that are considered by state election officials to be “close contests” because the candidates are separated by less than two percentage points.

Another very tight race is in the North Valley, in the race for the 13th Congressional District. Farmer and businessman John Duarte, R-Hughson, clings to a 267-vote lead over Democrat Adam Gray of Merced, a longtime member of the state Assembly. Duarte has 38,252 votes, or 50.2%, in the state’s Friday afternoon update, compared to Gray’s 37,985 votes or 49.8%.

The Duarte-Gray race is one of the most hotly contested Congressional races in the country, with Democrats hoping to maintain a slight majority in the House of Representatives while Republicans sought to seize control of the body.