Yesterday evening, California counties reported updated vote counts, which pushed the contest in the Central Valley-based 13th District to a nearly 50-50 split. Before the update, Republican Rep. John Duarte led Democrat Adam Gray by a touch over 1 point, 50.6% to 49.4%. But Gray's home base of Merced County added a little more than 11,000 votes to its tally that went for Gray 56% to 44%, while Stanislaus County added around 9,500 votes that broke about 54% to 46% for Gray. As a result, Duarte now leads by about 0.1 points, 50.06% to 49.94%.

The question naturally is how many votes are left, and my colleague Nathaniel estimated last night that roughly 6,500 remain, based on state and county reports regarding unprocessed ballots. In pure math terms, Duarte probably needs to garner at least 49% of those to retain the thinnest of leads, so he doesn't quite need a majority of what's left to win. But the good news for Gray is that about half of the outstanding votes are from Merced, where he holds a slight edge. Either way, this one is going to be so close that the trailing candidate will probably want a recount once the vote is certified. (California doesn't have automatic recounts; instead, any voter may file a recount request for a specified candidate.)

As more ballots have been counted in California, the AP has finally made a projection for the Proposition 32 election: It has failed, 51% to 49%. Had it passed, this ballot measure would have raised the minimum wage in California to $18 per hour, the highest in the nation.

Minimum wage increases are usually popular at the ballot box: This is the first time that a statewide ballot measure to raise the minimum wage has failed in any state since 1996. (From 1998 to 2022, they went 24-for-24.) Voters may have felt that the increase was unnecessary, since California's minimum wage is already $16 per hour (and $20 per hour for fast food workers).

More ballots were counted in Alaska last night, and the ballot measure asking Alaskans whether they want to repeal their top-four primary and ranked-choice general election is now trailing, 50.03% to 49.97%. If that holds, it would be a big deal for election reformers, as they would at least keep a toehold in the Last Frontier after their efforts to expand this system to several other states failed at the ballot box this year.

Meanwhile, in the state's U.S. House race, Republican Nick Begich now has 48.5% of first-place votes and Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola has 46.3%. Based on 538's analysis of the Cast Vote Record, which contains data on second-, third- and fourth-place votes as well, Begich would beat Peltola about 52% to 48% in ranked-choice voting based on the data we have today. We won't need to wait long to find out what happens in reality: Those ranked-choice tabulations will officially be run tomorrow around 5 p.m. local time (9 p.m. Eastern).

Pennsylvania's tight race for U.S. Senate has become tighter as outstanding ballots, including provisional ballots, have been tallied by counties around the state. Per ABC News's reports on the count, Republican Dave McCormick now leads Democratic Sen. Bob Casey Jr. by 0.24 percentage points, 48.81% to 48.57% — with a raw vote margin of about 17,000 votes. It's unclear exactly how many uncounted votes are still outstanding, with different estimates ranging from 17,000 (according to the Decision Desk earlier today) to 24,000 last night (according to NBC News).

Also affecting the count will be a ruling from the state Supreme Court favorable to McCormick that ordered counties to not count mail-in ballots that lack a correct handwritten date on the return envelope. As Democrats have a greater propensity to vote by mail, there's a good chance that ballots that aren't properly dated are at least somewhat more Democratic-leaning. The court's order came in response to the actions of Democratic-majority election boards in Philadelphia, Montgomery and Bucks Counties, which decided to tally ballots that didn't have this information despite earlier court rulings against doing so. Not surprisingly, McCormick's 2022 campaign for U.S. Senate fought for such ballots to be tallied in his razor-thin defeat in the GOP primary against Mehmet Oz, whereas McCormick's 2024 campaign has fought against their inclusion.

Regardless, Casey will have to win an extremely high percentage of any remaining votes to narrow the margin to a point where the state's impending recount might have some chance of giving him a lead. His current deficit (0.24 points) is four times larger than the largest margin reversed by a recount in the past two decades (0.06 points), according to an analysis by FairVote.