In her first extended interview since the election, California Representative Nancy Pelosi struck a hopeful tone: “We are on the verge of perhaps winning the House … and we’re optimistic,” she told The New York Times, in a conversation published over the weekend. As slow-counting states continue to tally their ballots, however, Democrats’ chances of retaking the House narrowed considerably. As of Monday morning, Republicans had won 214 of the 218 seats they needed to maintain control of the lower chamber, with 18 races still outstanding.
Democrats are favored to win roughly half of those outstanding races, but the GOP only needs to pick up four. Or really, two, when you consider that the uncalled race in Washington’s 4th District pitted two Republicans against each other, while Democratic Representative Yadira Caraveo has already conceded her still-uncalled race in Colorado.
Three races—in Iowa, Maine and Ohio—remain exceptionally close, with almost all of the votes counted. In Iowa’s 1st District, for instance, incumbent Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks has fewer than 800 votes on her Democratic challenger, Christina Bohannan. Most of the remaining uncalled races are in California, with a couple more in Alaska, Arizona and Oregon. Officials still need to tally tens of thousands of votes in each of those states. But it seems probable that Republicans will win at least a few of these remaining seats, given that several of the districts still up for grabs are already held by the GOP.
Winning the House is Democrats’ only hope of preventing a Republican trifecta under President-elect Donald Trump, who would otherwise be free to pursue his radical agenda with virtually no congressional oversight.
In her interview with the Times, Pelosi rejected the notion that voters had turned against the Democratic party. Democratic congressional candidates did, in many cases, perform better in their districts than vice president Kamala Harris did, Pelosi pointed out, and Democrats succeeded in flipping a number of competitive seats. “Our frontline candidates, by and large, won in places where the Republicans were raging with their vote for the president and the Senate,” Pelosi said. In either case, she added: “We don’t agonize over what happened. We organize about what comes next.”
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