History in the mailing? Southern California congressional race featuring Korean-American Young Kim comes down to mail-in ballots

EDITOR'S NOTE, November 19: The race for California's 39th Congressional District seat ended with Democrat Gil Cisneros declared the winner after more than a week of mail-in ballot counts, netting 113,075 votes, or 50.8 per cent. Republican candidate Young Kim, with 109,580 votes, or 49.2 per cent, announced on social media on Saturday that she had conceded.

California’s 39th Congressional District was one of the tightest races of the 2018 midterm elections, and even with the votes tallied, the outcome remains far from clear.

But figures compiled by the Associated Press suggest that the Republican candidate, former state assemblywoman Young Kim, has 51.3 per cent of the vote – a narrow lead that, should it hold, would set her up to become the first Korean-American woman to be elected to the US Congress.

In a midterms election cycle that has resulted in wins by an unprecedented number of women – especially women of colour – this could be another first.

Kim won 76,956 votes, just 3,879 more than the Democratic candidate, Gil Cisneros, who won 73,077 votes, or 48.7 per cent. These numbers, however, do not take into account an undetermined number of provisional and mail-in ballots that could arrive as late as Friday.

District 39, which represents parts of Los Angeles, Orange, and San Bernardino counties, became a race to watch after its Republican incumbent, Ed Royce, who has represented it since 1994, announced earlier this year that he would be stepping down.

Though Royce has typically won his re-elections by comfortable margins, the once reliably Republican district is changing. In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate, took the district by 8 percentage points over Republican Donald Trump.