The doctor is win: Rep. Ami Bera survives congressional battle with Sheriff Scott Jones

Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones has conceded defeat in his bid to take the Seventh Congressional District from two-time incumbent Ami Bera, leaving the congressman to head back to Washington, D.C., into what he calls “uncharted territory.”

Bera had a 2,000-vote lead over Jones the morning after the election, with well over 100,000 mail-in and provisional ballots left to be counted. But that advantage steadily rose with every new vote tally released by the California Secretary of State. The Associated Press ultimately called the race last Friday, after the latest numbers released showed Bera up by more than 6,000 votes.

Jones placed a call to the congressman to concede the same afternoon. An hour later, Jones issued a statement praising his staff and volunteers and stressing he was proud of the positive tone his campaign tried to embrace. “I have no regrets,” the statement read.

Meanwhile, Bera has been watching President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments almost as closely as his district’s vote tallies. On Monday, Bera told SN&R that he’ll be returning to a Capitol Hill veiled in political confusion and uncertainty.

“Right now it’s about finding out how much of [Trump’s] rhetoric from the campaign trail is actually going to try to be implemented,” Bera said. “If we see that his administration attempts to do things that divide us as a people along racial and ethnic lines, we’re absolutely going to fight that.”

In terms of President Barack Obama’s call for Americans to be open-minded about Trump, Bera emphasized that recent cabinet appointments by the president-elect are causing immediate concern.

“Someone like Sen. [Jeff] Sessions has said some very incendiary things in the past,” Bera noted of Trump’s pick for attorney general. “So it’s a question of what is the administration really going to do?”

Bera also looked to issues where Democrats might find common ground with the new administration. “If he sincerely wants to lower health care costs and the price of prescription drugs, we can look at that,” Bera said, “but he can’t just do that in a way that is going to leave millions of people suddenly without health insurance.”