Republicans Make Early Inroads in Their Fight to Keep the House Majority

by · NY Times

Republicans Make Early Inroads in Their Fight to Keep the House Majority

Democrats picked up two seats in New York and defended others in Michigan and New Mexico, but Republican gains have narrowed their path, setting up a potential G.O.P. trifecta.

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“Republicans are poised to have unified government,” Speaker Mike Johnson predicted on Wednesday.
Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

By Catie Edmondson

Republicans were making early gains on Wednesday in their drive to maintain control of the House, holding a handful of critical seats that Democrats had sought to flip even as the G.O.P. lost a pair of districts in New York.

Political strategists and polling in both parties have indicated for weeks that the fight for the House majority would be exceedingly tight, and it appeared as of Wednesday afternoon that control of the chamber would be too close to call for some time.

But optimism was waning among Democrats that they could flip the House and create a beachhead of resistance to a Republican-controlled Senate and White House held by Donald J. Trump. Instead, Republicans were confidently predicting they were headed toward a governing trifecta in Washington that would give them a free hand to enact Mr. Trump’s policy agenda.

Democrats flipped two major seats in New York, defeating Representatives Marc Molinaro in the Hudson Valley and Brandon Williams in Syracuse. They held two key seats — one in Michigan, and another in New Mexico — that Republicans had hoped to pick off. And they were hopeful they could prevail in contests in Arizona and California, where votes were still being counted.

But the party appeared to collapse in Pennsylvania, in an early indication of the difficulty that even battle-tested incumbents were facing trying to outrun Vice President Kamala Harris in a state where Mr. Trump emerged triumphant. Republicans were set to oust Representative Matt Cartwright, who has held his Scranton-based seat since 2013 and has long defied political gravity in his conservative-leaning district. They were also set to flip the Lehigh Valley district that Representative Susan Wild won in 2018. Both Democrats conceded defeat on Wednesday, even before the final results were known.

And Democrats failed to make inroads in a number of critical districts that the party needed to win to wrest back control of the House, as voters nationwide registered their unhappiness with the Biden-Harris administration, setting up Mr. Trump to become the first Republican to win the national popular vote since 2004.

Republicans held on to four seats that Democrats had targeted, in New York, New Jersey, Wisconsin and Iowa. And they flipped a crucial seat in Central Michigan, the Lansing-based district formerly held by Representative Elissa Slotkin, the Democrat who ran for Senate.

“This historic election has proven that a majority of Americans are eager for secure borders, lower costs, peace through strength and a return to common sense,” Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement on Wednesday. “As more results come in, it is clear that, as we have predicted all along, Republicans are poised to have unified government in the White House, Senate and House.”

Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, publicly held out hope that his party could still prevail.

“The House remains very much in play,” he said in a statement. “The path to take back the majority now runs through too-close-to-call pickup opportunities in Arizona, Oregon and Iowa — along with several Democratic-leaning districts in Southern California and the Central Valley.”

It could be days before the fate of those California races will be known.

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