In another blow to California Republicans reeling from defeats in the Nov. 6 election, Democrat Katie Porter has ousted GOP Rep. Mimi Walters in an upscale Orange County district that was a longtime conservative bastion.

At the same time, an updated vote count Thursday by the Orange County registrar found Democratic House candidate Gil Cisneros has pulled 941 votes ahead of Republican Young Kim in an adjacent congressional district.

The Associated Press projected Porter’s unseating of Walters in the 45th Congressional District contest after Orange County’s tally found that the two-term incumbent had dropped 6,203 votes behind her challenger.

It is the fifth House seat in California that Republicans lost in last week’s election. Democrats will control at least 44 of the state’s 53 seats in the House. It’s a new low point for a state GOP sorely damaged over the last two decades by the kind of hard-line immigration politics championed by President Trump.

Porter, a UC Irvine law professor, joins a broad field of incoming House Democrats, many of them women, who capitalized on Trump’s unpopularity in suburbs with big populations of college-educated voters.

The district includes Mission Viejo, Tustin, Irvine, Rancho Santa Margarita and Laguna Hills.

A single mother of three, Porter, 44, is a protege of liberal Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. She campaigned as a consumer attorney who had taken on big banks and would stand up to leaders of both parties.

She and her Democratic allies pounded Walters for backing Trump in her House votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act and pass a tax overhaul that raised income taxes for many of the district’s residents.

Walters, 56, tried to win credit for tax cuts that were also in the Trump plan, but her alliance with the president was too heavy a burden to overcome.

A former stockbroker, Walters served on the Laguna Niguel City Council and in the state Legislature before winning her House seat in 2014. She and her husband own a business that provided medical staffers to California prisons. She lives outside the district in Laguna Beach.

In a year when female voters turned strongly against Trump and his fellow Republicans in Congress, Walters touted her bill establishing rights for sexual assault survivors in federal criminal cases.

Also bounced from Congress last week were Republican Reps. Dana Rohrabacher of Costa Mesa, Steve Knight of Palmdale and Jeff Denham of Turlock in the San Joaquin Valley. Democrat Mike Levin won the seat of retiring GOP Rep. Darrell Issa of Vista.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-me-pol-katie-porter-mimi-walters-20181115-story.html