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WASHINGTON (AP) – Democrats won two more years of House control on Tuesday, but with a potentially slim majority, a bittersweet final in last week’s election that left them divided and with little margin for error to advance their agenda.
The party has now won at least 218 seats, according to the Associated Press, and could win a few more if more votes are counted. While this secures command of the 435-member chamber, blind Democrats were almost certain to see their current majority of 232 seats shrink after an unexpected wave of Republican voters turned the expected gains of perhaps 15 seats into losses potentially approaching this amount.
“We have the hammer, we have the hammer,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Who looks almost certain to continue in this role. As she bemoaned the Democrats’ losses in districts where GOP votes proved “almost insurmountable,” she told reporters last week: “We lost a few battles but we won the war.”
By retaining the House, Democrats will control the House for four consecutive years for only the second time since 1995, when Republicans ended 40 years of Democratic rule.
Yet if Joe Biden won the presidential election, there was a good chance that the Republicans would retain control of the Senate. This would force Democrats to curtail their dreams of sweeping away health care, infrastructure and other initiatives, requiring compromises with the GOP instead.
As the bad news fell, Rep. Cheri Bustos, D-Ill., Who headed the House Democrats’ campaign committee, announced on Monday that she would not seek another term as head of the organization. Democrats have said privately that she would have lost had she re-applied for the post, which party lawmakers are voting for.
Republicans were heartened by the results in the House, which many say place them in a strong majority race in the 2022 election. According to Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics, their extremely low numbers of female representatives rose from 13 to at least 26, a record for the GOP, and also added new lawmakers from ethnic minorities.
“The Republican coalition is bigger, more diverse, more energetic than ever,” Minority Parliamentary Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-California, said the day after the election.
The Democrats entered Election Day with a 232-197 House advantage, plus an independent and five open seats. With some races still undecided, it was possible that in the new Congress that meets in January, they would win the smaller majority since Republicans had only 221 seats two decades ago.
Democrats won a majority after The Associated Press declared three winners on Tuesday night: incumbents Kim Schrier in Washington, Tom O’Halleran in Arizona and Jimmy Gomez in California.
A tight majority could cause Pelosi a headache, allowing any determined group of lawmakers to pressure her on bills to consider or look like. But sometimes a thin margin can help unify a party because its members know they have to stay together to accomplish anything.
Moderate Democrats and Progressives clash periodically, and while moderates outnumber the ranks of Progressives include influential social media stars like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, DN.Y.
Highlighting this tension, House Democrats evacuated in a three-hour conference call last week in which the two factions blamed each other for rhetoric and policies they said proved costly in the countryside.
“We have to be honest this was not a good result,” Rep. Tom Malinowski, DN.J., a moderate freshman, said in an interview. He said terms such as “defunding the police” hurt Democrats by making it look like they oppose law enforcement, and said they shouldn’t speak “as if we were speaking. to wake up progressives in neighborhoods where 90% of the vote is for Democrats ”.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., A progressive leader, said in an interview that Democrats need to discuss “how we talk about some of these issues that are critical to different parts of our base.” But with moderates complaining that the GOP has hurt Democrats by repeatedly accusing them of pushing socialism, Jayapal said such accusations “will be used against us no matter what we say.
Democrats believed they would take seats, especially in the suburbs, due to a decisive fundraising advantage, unpopularity and President Donald Trump’s exasperation with the pandemic. Many Republicans and independent polls supported this expectation.
But with some races yet to be called, the Democrats didn’t defeat a single GOP incumbent and failed to win open seats in Texas, Missouri and Indiana they thought they would win.
Instead, they lost at least seven incumbents: six freshmen from states such as Florida, Oklahoma and South Carolina, plus 30-year veteran Rep. Collin Peterson from rural Minnesota. And while they have successfully defended most of their 29 districts that Trump won in his 2016 victory, they have seen stronger-than-expected performances from GOP candidates across the country.
“With President Trump on the ballot, it just resulted in a huge turnout that was almost impossible to overcome,” said Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., Re-elected freshman.
“The country has become more polarized and dividedSaid Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va. “If you run in foreign territory, you are always at risk of failing.”
So far, the Democrats’ only pickups have been three open seats from which Republicans have withdrawn. Two were in North Carolina, where the court-ordered remap made the districts strongly democratic, and one was outside of Atlanta.
As the election neared, Democrats were considering strengthening their moderate wing, as most of the districts they seemed likely to capture were tightly divided between GOP voters and Democrats. But they ended up suffering losses in those same types of neighborhoods, which meant that it was mostly the moderates who lost.
“In electoral politics, the moderates are property by the sea,” said Jim Kessler, an official with Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. “And if there are floods, they are the ones who are washed away.”
To illustrate, the Blue Dog Coalition of the most conservative House Democrats, whose membership has declined in recent years, has lost at least six of its roughly two dozen members.
On the other hand, a handful of far-left progressive freshmen will come to Congress, including Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Mondaire Jones from New York and Cori Bush from Missouri, who each won seats in extremely blue districts. .
On the Republican side, the conservative House Freedom Caucus hoped to grow from its roughly 30 members.
The group has tried to push GOP leaders to the right over the years and have been a constant source of trouble for the last two Republican speakers, John Boehner of Ohio and Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.
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