State Sen. Tom McClintock's campaign on Friday surged to nearly a 1,800-vote lead in the tight congressional battle against Democrat Charlie Brown, perhaps sealing victory in the foothill district.
"We're not claiming victory, but we just think it's mathematically impossible for (Brown) to win," said Bill George, spokesman for McClintock.
George said the thousands of Placer County votes tallied Friday stretched McClintock's lead from barely 300 votes to 1,793, with only about 4,500 more votes to count in the nine-county district.
Brown spokesman Todd Stenhouse said Brown would not concede, noting that thousands more votes remain to be counted, most of which are provisional ballots that "have been breaking very, very strongly for Charlie."
"We remain committed to the same goals that we've been committed to all along and that is that every vote is counted in this historic election," Stenhouse said.
County election workers throughout the district have been verifying and counting late-arriving absentee ballot and provisional ballots since the Nov. 4 election.
McClintock has never trailed as the daily tallies have been added to the total, although the margin has waxed and waned.
Regardless of the final tally after all absentees and provisionals are accounted for, each county in the district will have to manually count 10 percent of the ballots because initial counts were so close.
Under state law, if the initial count after all precincts are counted has a race within a half of a percentage point, all jurisdictions in the district must perform a hand count of a portion of ballots to insure the accuracy of voting machines.
The race to replace retiring Rep. John Doolittle pitted a Democratic veteran against a Republican non-veteran who accused his rival of not supporting U.S. troops.
Brown, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who narrowly lost to Doolittle two years ago, ran on a theme of "patriotism before partisanship." He championed veterans issues by donating 5 percent of campaign contributions to local veterans organizations.
Brown, a decorated combat veteran who flew rescue helicopters in the Vietnam War, touted his family's military resume, including his wife's service as an Air Force nurse and his son's Air Force tours in Iraq. But he was critical of the Iraq war.
McClintock, a state senator from Thousand Oaks, vowed to protect the district's legacy as a conservative Republican seat. He campaigned for oil drilling and against gay marriage while assailing Brown for opposing the troop surge in Iraq, supporting anti-war protests and "engaging in some of the most radical activities in our region."
Brown mocked McClintock as a do-nothing, "obstructionist" career politician running for a job 400 miles from his termed-out Senate seat.
While Brown supported Congress' $700 billion economic package to rescue the nation's capital markets, McClintock called it anti-free market and a waste of tax dollars.
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