When will we know the outcome of the California governor primary?

By Ethan Cohen, CNN

(CNN) — As of Wednesday evening, the high-profile primary for California governor remains too early to call.

Three candidates, Republican Steve Hilton and Democrats Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer, remain in the race for two slots in the general election.

Hilton continues to lead the pack following the first set of post-election night results, but Becerra and Steyer improved in nearly every county that reported, narrowing the Republican’s early edge.

California is notorious for a drawn-out vote count, as local election officials work through millions of mail ballots, some of which don’t even arrive until after Election Day. It could be days still before the race is resolved.

At this point, California counties are largely reporting mail ballots that arrive near to or after Election Day — which can be counted if they were postmarked by Tuesday and arrive by June 9 — as well as provisional ballots that were cast on Election Day but require additional verification.

Over the next several weeks, counties will continue to report results, typically at the end of the work day in California, so around 7 to 9 pm ET. However, each county is on its own schedule, so while some, like Los Angeles County, report votes basically every day, others may just update a few times a week.

Counties need to finalize their election results by July 2.

The blue shift

As more votes are counted, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see Democratic candidates improve their standing compared to Republicans. In fact, that’s what typically happens in California elections.

For example, in the 2024 Senate primary, when vote counting paused Wednesday morning the Democratic candidates in the top-two race were winning a combined 57.3% of the vote. But when the results were finalized, that had gone up to 59.5%.

This happens because votes cast on Election Day are almost entirely reported on election night, while the votes counted later are predominately mail ballots. In recent years, Democrats have been much more likely to vote by mail, while Republicans have preferred to vote on Election Day.

And there’s reason to believe that effect could be even more significant this year, as Democratic voters appeared to be returning their ballots at a slower pace than past elections, according to data from Political Data, Inc., a Democratic-aligned data firm, meaning they could make up a larger share of the votes still to count.

While that pattern played out in the results on Wednesday evening, the question in the coming days will be if the shift is big enough to knock Hilton out of the top two.

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