Eduardo Garcia leads in 56th Assembly District race
Incumbent Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia, D-Coachella, easily advanced to a November runoff election Tuesday, and he will likely face Republican veteran Jeff Gonzalez.
As of 6:40 a.m. Wednesday Garcia had 11,701 votes representing 56.95% support, while Gonzalez took 5,773 votes or 28.10%.
All ballots have not yet been counted. The Riverside County Registrar of Voters website posted a message Wednesday morning saying, “Approximately 102,000 Vote-by-Mail, 14,000 Provisional and 7,000 damaged ballots that require duplication still must be processed. Work on those begins Wednesday morning. Ballots that are postmarked on or before Election Day and received no later than Friday also remain to be counted. The next updated results will be posted at 6:00pm on Friday.”
Garcia, a Coachella native, was elected in 2014 in a district that has maintained a Democratic presence in the Assembly for much of the last decade. The district, which covers the eastern Coachella Valley and all of Imperial County, failed to produce a Republican challenger in 2016.
Prior to being elected to the Assembly, Garcia served as Coachella’s mayor. He’s since championed farmworkers’ rights and environmental issues, particularly related to the Salton Sea, where the receding shoreline has created a host of respiratory illnesses for surrounding residents.
Opposing Garcia Tuesday were Jonathan Reiss, a Bermuda Dunes resident and owner of multimedia corporation Kajon Media, and Gonzalez, a veteran and head of the Marine Corps Crisis Response Center.
Reiss says that over-regulation and overspending are plaguing the state, while Gonzalez seeks to repeal the state’s cap-and-trade system and gas tax increase, which his campaign site says Garcia voted for in line with “Sacramento special interests.”
Both Reiss and Gonzalez oppose sanctuary state policies, which Garcia has regularly supported, most notably with his co-authoring of SB 54, which prohibits law enforcement agencies — with the exclusion of ICE — from using resources to investigate or arrest people for immigration enforcement purposes.
