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With elections results still pending, Democrats holding their own in House despite Trump's sweeping win

Dave Goldiner, New York Daily News on

Published in Political News

As grim election results continue to roll in, Democrats are staring down the barrel of a likely Republican sweep of the White House and both houses of Congress.

But boosted by a strong rebound in New York, Democrats held their own in the House of Representatives with a surprisingly resilient performance that bucked the tide of President-elect Trump’s sweeping gains across red, purple and even deep blue states.

Only a handful of incumbent Democratic lawmakers were ousted in Trump’s big win over Democrat Kamala Harris, far fewer than the dozens of seats that parties usually win when the top of their ticket delivers a win on the scale of Trump’s.

Democrats even bounced back to flip three Republican-held seats in New York state and held out hope for more gains as late-arriving mail ballots continued to be counted in GOP districts in Arizona and especially California.

Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries boasted that Democrats would win a minimum of 212 seats, the same tally they held going into the race, and perhaps a handful more.

“We’ve been able to withstand that presidential wave that broke against us,” Jeffries said.

It takes 218 seats to win a majority, so the math still favored the GOP winning control by a narrow margin. But the House results suggest Democratic doom and gloom might be overblown, and could provide the foundation for a comeback in future election cycles.

Here’s six things to know about the race for the House.

It’s still not called for Republicans

As of Sunday, Republicans were closing in on control of the House but they weren’t there yet.

GOP candidates were declared winners in 213 seats and were leading by seemingly healthy margins in several more. Democrats held 202 seats.

Jeffries insisted that Democrats still had a realistic path to control the House outright, although analysts said that seemed like a long shot.

“Given how rough Harris did, the House Democrats have held up really well,” said J. Miles Coleman, a University of Virginia political analyst.

“Democratic House candidates outpaced their GOP opponents in nearly every competitive race on the map this cycle,” added Jacob Rubashkin, an analyst with Inside Elections.

‘All eyes on California’

Several seats remained uncalled in California, including five held by Republican incumbents who held leads of various sizes over Democratic challengers.

All of the races have tens of thousands of ballots left to be counted, leaving open the possibility that Democrats could mount seemingly unlikely comebacks in some of them.

“All eyes are on California,” a Democratic strategist said.

California elections are conducted by mail-in vote and ballots are counted as election officials receive them.

In past elections, Democrats made up significant ground in counts of ballots received after Election Day, often overturning significant GOP leads. But that trend has varied widely across the state and from one election cycle to another.

Bottom line: You’d rather be ahead than behind, so advantage Republicans.

N.Y. Democrats bounce back big-time

The biggest single win for Team Blue came in New York, where Democratic challengers toppled three Republican incumbents in upstate and suburban seats even as Trump dramatically improved his showing in the Empire State.

 

The winners include Rep.-elects Laura Gillen on Long Island, Josh Riley in a sprawling Catskills-based district and John Mannion in the Syracuse area.

Rep. Tom Suozzi also held the Long Island seat he won in a special election called after disgraced ex-Rep. George Santos was expelled from Congress. Rep. Pat Ryan held his Hudson Valley swing district by a comfortable margin.

The wins amount to a measure of vindication for New York Democrats, who suffered a brutal beatdown in the 2022 midterms when several Republicans flipped several seats.

No MAGA landslide

With a historically paltry number of congressional seats changing hands, Republicans biggest gain came in Pennsylvania, where GOP candidates unseated two Democratic incumbents in working-class districts.

The other gain for Republicans came in North Carolina, where the GOP picked up three seats as expected after they won a court battle that gave them a green light to gerrymander the state’s previously evenly split delegation.

Courts effectively handed Democrats one seat in Louisiana and another in Alabama when districts were ordered redrawn to give Black voters a fair chance to elect candidates.

It all amounted to pretty slim pickings for challengers.

Analysts note that successive rounds of gerrymandering by Republicans and even in a couple of Democratic states have left far fewer truly competitive districts on either side of the partisan aisle.

That protects Republican incumbents, but also makes it tougher for the GOP to unseat Democrats en masse when the GOP has the political wind at its back.

The new Trump district Democrats

As many as two dozen Democrats will wind up representing congressional districts that Trump won. That crossover political turf was previously mostly scattered in rural corners of the country like northern Maine or Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.

But in the incoming Congress, there are far more of them in suburbs like New Jersey, Long Island and Westchester County that Democrats have long believed were trending in their political direction.

Democrats will hope to rebuild their shrunken margins in those districts. But it’s unlikely to be a smooth process as lawmakers in once-safe seats grapple with a new political reality.

Meanwhile, only two Republicans, one in suburban Bucks County, Pennsylvania and another in Omaha, Nebraska represent districts that Harris carried. That’s a clear sign of the virtual extinction of the moderate Republican in the age of Trump.

An early warning for GOP?

One question that will likely remain unanswered even after the final House results are tallies is: What does it all mean?

While shell-shocked liberals lick their wounds and point fingers over Trump’s win, some political analysts say voters may have reelected Democratic House incumbents to act as a hand brake on the most extreme portions of the MAGA agenda.

Many analysts predict Democrats will face a much brighter political environment in the coming 2026 midterms, when Republicans may have to explain their own shortcomings.

“It’s very possible that Trump simply has a unique appeal that the GOP as a whole cannot replicate,” said David Nir, publisher of The Downballot.

_____


©2024 New York Daily News. Visit nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

 

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