Muhamad Yehia
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. House majority hung in the balance Wednesday, teetering between Republican control that would usher in a new era of unified GOP governance in Washington or a flip to Democrats as a last line of resistance to a Trump second-term White House agenda.
A few individual seats, or even a single one, will determine the outcome. Final tallies will take a while, likely pushing the decision into next week — or beyond.
After Republicans swept into the majority in the U.S. Senate by picking up seats in West Virginia, Ohio and Montana, House Speaker Mike Johnson predicted his chamber would fall in line next.
“Republicans are poised to have unified government in the White House, Senate and House,” Johnson said Wednesday.
President-elect Donald Trump, who won the Electoral College and the popular vote against Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, has consolidated growing power around his MAGA movement, backing newcomers to Washington and setting the stage for his own return to the White House
Johnson said Republicans in Congress are preparing an “ambitious” 100-day agenda with Trump, who he has said is “thinking big” about his legacy.
Tax cuts, securing the southern border and taking a ”blowtorch” to federal regulations are at the top of the agenda if the GOP sweeps the White House and Congress. Trump himself has promised mass deportations and retribution against his perceived enemies. And Republicans want to push federal agencies out of Washington and to restaff the government workforce with the help of outside think tanks, Johnson has said, to bring the federal government “to heel
But Johnson, after just a year on the job, has had difficulty governing the House, and the new Congress would be no different. Hard-liners led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rep. Matt Gaetz and others have often confronted and upended their own GOP leadership in what has been one of the most chaotic sessions in modern times
If Johnson’s slim four-seat majority were to shrink any further, governing could come to a standstill.
Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said the House “remains very much in play.”
With Democrats having defeated two House Republicans in Jeffries’ home state of New York, he said the path to the majority now runs through pickup opportunities in Arizona, Oregon, Iowa and California that are still too early to call.
“We must count every vote,” Jeffries said.
The House contests remained a tit-for-tat fight to the finish, with no dominant pathway to the majority for either party. Rarely, if ever have the two chambers of Congress flipped in opposite directions.
Each side is gaining and losing a few seats, including through the redistricting process, which is the routine redrawing of House seat boundary lines. The process reset seats in North Carolina, Louisiana and Alabama.
Much of the outcome hinges on the West, particularly in California, where a handful of House seats are being fiercely contested, and mail-in ballots arriving a week after the election will still be counted. Hard-fought races around the “blue dot” in Omaha, Nebraska and in far-flung Alaska are among those being watched.