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WASHINGTON: Democrats won two more years of House control on Tuesday (Nov. 10), but with a potentially slim majority, a bittersweet ending to last week’s election that has left them divided and with little room for error to advance your schedule.
The party has now garnered at least 218 seats, according to The Associated Press, and could win a few more when more votes are counted.
While that secures the 435-member House command, surprised Democrats were almost certain that their current 232-seat majority would shrink after an unforeseen surge in Republican voters transformed expected gains of perhaps 15 seats into potentially close losses. to that amount.
“We have the gavel, we have the gavel,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, who seems almost certain to continue in that role. While he lamented the losses of Democrats in districts where Republican votes proved “almost insurmountable,” he told reporters last week: “We have lost some battles but we have 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.
However, although Joe Biden won the presidential election, there was a strong possibility that the Republicans would retain control of the Senate. That would force Democrats to scale back their dreams of expanding health care, infrastructure, and other initiatives, rather than needing commitments to the Republican Party.
READ: The fight for control of the Senate awaits in Georgia after Biden’s victory
Commentary: How Joe Biden Won the 2020 US Presidential Election
As the bad news fell, Representative Cheri Bustos, a Democrat of Illinois, who headed the Democratic campaign committee for the House of Representatives, announced Monday that she would not seek another term to lead that organization. Democrats said privately that he would have lost if he had gone back for the job, which party lawmakers vote for.
Republicans have been encouraged by the House results, which many believe position them for a strong majority race in the 2022 election. They also bolstered their distressingly low number of female representatives from 13 to at least 26, a record. for the Republican Party, according to the Rutgers University Center for American Women and Politics, and they also added new lawmakers from ethnic minorities.
“The Republican coalition is bigger, more diverse and more energetic than ever,” said House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-California, the day after the election.
Democrats entered Election Day with a 232-197 lead in the House, plus one independent seat and five vacancies. With some races still undecided, they may have the smallest majority in the new Congress convened in January since Republicans held just 221 seats two decades ago.
Democrats won the majority after The Associated Press declared three winners Tuesday night: incumbents Kim Schrier in Washington, Tom O’Halleran in Arizona and Jimmy Gomez in California.
A tight majority could give Pelosi headaches, allowing any given group of lawmakers to pressure her on how the bills should be viewed or viewed. But sometimes a narrow margin can help unify a party because its members know they must stick together to achieve anything.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, pauses as she meets with reporters on the impact of the elections on the political landscape in Congress, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Friday, November 6, 2020 (AP Photo / J. Scott Applewhite)
Democrats and progressives collide periodically, and while moderates are more numerous, the ranks of progressives include influential social media stars like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York.
Underscoring that tension, House Democrats ventured during a three-hour conference call last week in which both factions blamed the other for rhetoric and policies that they said proved costly on the campaign trail.
“We have to be honest that this was not a good result,” Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-New Jersey, a moderate freshman, said in an interview. He said terms like “defunding the police” hurt Democrats by making it look like cops oppose them, and said they should not speak “as if we are talking to awakening progressives in neighborhoods where 90 percent of the vote they are for the Democrats ”.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Washington, 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 Republican Party hurt Democrats by repeatedly accusing them of pushing for socialism, Jayapal said such accusations “will be used against us no matter what we say.”
Democrats believed they would win seats, especially in the suburbs, because of a decisive advantage in fundraising, unpopularity and President Donald Trump’s exasperation over the pandemic. Many Republicans and independent polls supported that expectation.
READ: Biden calls Trump’s refusal to admit a ‘shame’
But with some races still to be called, Democrats have not defeated a single Republican leader and failed to capture vacant seats in Texas, Missouri and Indiana that they thought would win.
Instead, they have lost at least seven starters: six freshmen from states including Florida, Oklahoma and South Carolina, plus 30-year veteran Rep. Collin Peterson from rural Minnesota. And while they successfully defended most of the 29 districts Trump carried out in his 2016 victory, they saw stronger-than-expected performances from Republican candidates across the country.
“With President Trump on the ballot, he generated a huge turnout that was almost impossible to beat,” said Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Michigan, a reelected freshman.
“The country has become more polarized and divided,” said Representative Gerald Connolly, D-Virginia. “If you run into strange territory, you always run the risk of failing.”
So far, the only elections for Democrats were three open seats from which Republicans withdrew. Two were in North Carolina, where the court-ordered reassignment made the districts heavily Democratic, and one was outside of Atlanta.
Going into the election, the Democrats envisioned strengthening their moderate wing, as most of the districts they seemed likely to capture were tightly divided between Republican and Democratic voters. But they ended up taking losses in those same kinds of districts, meaning that it was mostly moderates who lost.
“In electoral politics, moderates are beachfront property,” said Jim Kessler, an official with Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. “And if there are floods, they are the ones that disappear.”
Illustrating that, the Blue Dog Coalition of more conservative House Democrats, whose membership has declined in recent years, lost at least six of its roughly two dozen members.
On the other hand, a handful of far-left progressive freshmen will be coming to Congress, including Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Mondaire Jones of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri, who both won seats in overwhelmingly 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 Republican leaders to the right over the years and was a constant source of trouble for the last two Republican speakers, John Boehner from Ohio and Paul Ryan from Wisconsin.
