 | ||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||
| Turnout | 56.42%  | |||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ||||||||||||||||
  Feinstein: 50–60% 60–70% de León: 50–60% 60–70% 70–80% | ||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||
.jpg)
| Elections in California |
|---|
 |
The 2018 United States Senate election in California took place on November 6, 2018, to elect a member of the United States Senate to represent California, concurrently with other elections to the United States Senate, elections to the United States House of Representatives, and various state and local elections.
Under California's non-partisan blanket primary law, all candidates appear on the same ballot, regardless of party. In the primary, voters may vote for any candidate, regardless of their party affiliation. In the California system, the top two finishers — regardless of party — advance to the general election in November, even if a candidate receives a majority of the votes cast in the primary election. Washington and Louisiana have similar "jungle primary" style processes for U.S. Senate elections, as does Mississippi for U.S. Senate special elections.
The candidate filing deadline was March 8, 2018, and the primary election was held on June 5, 2018.[1]
Democratic incumbent Dianne Feinstein won re-election in 2012 with 63% of the vote, taking the record for the most popular votes in any U.S. Senate election in history, with 7.86 million votes.[2] Feinstein, at the time, was the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. She turned 85 years old in 2018, leading some to speculate that she would retire in January 2019,[3][4] as her long-time colleague Barbara Boxer did in January 2017. However, Feinstein ran for reelection to her fifth full term, winning 44.2% of the vote in the top-two primary; she faced Democratic challenger Kevin de León in the general election, who won 12.1% of the primary vote.[5] For the second time since direct elections to the Senate began after the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, no Republican appeared on the general election ballot for the U.S. Senate in California. The highest Republican finisher in the primary won only 8.3 percent of the vote, and the 10 Republicans only won 31.2 percent of the vote among them.
In the general election, Feinstein defeated de León by an eight-point margin, 54% to 46%. This was Feinstein's closest election since 1994, as well as her last run for elected office, as she died in office in September 2023.[6]
- ^ "United States Senate election in California, 2018 - Ballotpedia". Retrieved December 23, 2017.
- ^ Charles Mahtesian (November 26, 2012). "Feinstein's record: 7.3 million votes". Politico. Politico. Retrieved December 16, 2012.
- ^ "Essential Politics: State Senate committee moves to assist immigrants, what California's members of Congress are saying about Trump's executive order". Los Angeles Times. ISSN 0458-3035. Retrieved July 20, 2017.
- ^ Mehta, Seema (January 17, 2017). "What will Feinstein do? California Democrats await senator's re-election decision to plot their own futures". Los Angeles Times. ISSN 0458-3035. Retrieved July 20, 2017.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
officialprimarywas invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ LeBlanc, Clare; Foran, Paul (September 29, 2023). "Dianne Feinstein, longest-serving female US senator in history, dies at 90 | CNN Politics". CNN. Retrieved November 7, 2023.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)