Done processing: Republicans take control of Congress
In several races that were still too close to call a week out, Republicans were projected to keep majority control of the U.S. House of Representatives and did this Wednesday.
As of Wed., Nov. 13, House Democrats had 207 seats and House Republicans maintained 217 seats. A party needs 218 seats to determine which one wins control of the House for the next four years of Trump’s term. Most estimates were leaning in favor of Republicans by Wednesday afternoon.
“If I have the opportunity to continue to lead House Democrats in either the majority or the minority, it certainly would be an opportunity that would continue to be a great honor,” Dem House Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the first Black person to hold that position, had said about his future as the top Dem in the country.
Jeffries clinched his re-election in New York’s 8th Congressional District with no real opposition. He scored 74.61% of the votes while his Republican opponent, John J. Delaney, got 22.05%, according to the New York City Board of Elections (BOE) unofficial Election Night results.
With Jeffries’s victory secured, all eyes turned to a cluster of House races in various states, including in California, Alaska, Maine, Ohio, Arizona, Oregon, and Iowa. Republicans were defending their narrowest House majority in decades, and Democrats only needed to flip four seats to take back control of the chamber.
“Those races are both too early to call in terms of the number of ballots that are still out there — we’re talking about, in some cases, more than 100,000 ballots that have yet to be counted because of the manner in which elections are run in California — and that’s just the reality,” Jeffries said in an NY1 interview. “It’s going to take a week or two. Or others in Southern California [where] we’re still waiting on additional ballots to come in.”
Jeffries said he was especially proud of the effort fellow New York Democrats put into flipping three House seats, two of which had been lost to Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections. Those races include the 22nd Congressional District up in Syracuse, where John Mannion beat incumbent Brandon Williams; the 19th Congressional District in the Hudson Valley, where Josh Riley beat out Mark Molinaro; and out in Long Island’s 4th congressional district, where Laura Gillen won over Anthony D’Esposito.
Regardless of the state wins, Jeffries said that it cannot be ignored that President-elect Donald Trump did better than “almost any other Republican presidential candidate in modern political history” in New York State.
“It was very interesting because in the context of the House of Representatives, we’ve been able to withstand that presidential wave that broke against us,” he said. “By way of example, there were only 194 Democrats in the House of Representatives in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in November of 2016. Both sides believe that whatever happens with the majority in the next Congress, Democrats will be no shorter than 212 to 214 votes, and we still have a clear pathway to taking back the majority.”
Republicans had already usurped control of the U.S Senate, with 53 seats to Democrats’ 47. They needed 50 in total.
In the interim, Jeffries vowed to push back against MAGA extremism whenever necessary, and defend Social Security, Medicare, reproductive health care, the Affordable Care Act, and climate progress.
He also concluded that electeds have to focus on the issues that Americans, especially Black and Brown people, have said they care about throughout this election: inflation and affordability, the broken immigration system, securing the border, and the economy. “I think that people have been feeling economically distressed for decades; certainly in many communities of color. And we’ve got to do a better job of transforming that economic reality,” said Jeffries. “In this particular context, I think the economic anxieties exacerbated by the inflationary pressure that people have been under — gas, groceries in particular, which are everyday expenses and, certainly, rent or the cost of housing — things that consume the day-to-day existence of everyday Americans, and they should … We’ve got to do a better job of addressing those anxieties and coming up with plans to deliver real results.”
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