A California Democrat eked out a win in the final outstanding House election race, setting up an even narrower Republican edge in the coming Congress and signaling potential headaches for the ruling GOP.
Democrat Adam Gray won the rural, heavily Latino CA-13 district by a less than 200-vote margin, ousting Republican Rep. John Duarte to flip the GOP-held swing seat in a rematch of their 2022 battle.
The photo-finish victory means Republicans have won 220 House seats this election cycle, with Democrats holding 215 seats, an increase of one seat for Team Blue despite President-elect Trump’s sweeping win in the White House contest.
House Democrats held their own in 2024 by flipping three seats in deep blue New York and three in California, all seats the party had lost in the 2022 midterms, along with a single pickup in Oregon.
Republicans countered by flipping two Democratic-held districts in working-class northeast Pennsylvania and single seats in Colorado and Alaska to hold the House and clinch a governing trifecta.
The GOP margin is set to be even narrower in practice with the party expected to hold just a 217-215 margin after Trump’s inauguration.
That’s because Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York) and Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Florida) are expected to step down if and when they are confirmed to posts in Trump’s cabinet. Ex-Rep. Matt Gaetz already resigned his Florida seat upon his nomination for attorney general, which quickly imploded.
The two-seat margin means House Speaker Mike Johnson will have almost no wiggle room as he seeks to enact a wide-ranging set of Republican priorities.
Bills require a majority vote, so the defection of even a single Republican lawmaker in the fractious GOP caucus would be enough to torpedo any of Johnson’s legislative moves, assuming Democrats vote in lockstep against them.
The deeply split chamber could be a huge headache as Republicans hope to pass a sweeping party-line package on energy, immigration and defense in the first month of the second Trump administration.
They also want to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts among other big-ticket priorities.
In the current Congress, Republicans struggled to pass even the bare minimum of legislation and regularly needed to turn to Democrats to pass spending bills required to keep the government from shutting down.
Democrats also rescued Johnson when he faced a challenge by far right-wing Republicans to his speakership.
It’s not known if Democrats, led by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, will be as accommodating now that Trump will be president and would presumably shoulder the political fallout.
The first test could come this month as the two sides seek to reach agreement on a stopgap spending measure to keep the government open for the first few months of the new year.
Republicans say they hope their party will be far more unified following Trump’s win.
But the party remains deeply divided on many issues, for example between fiscal hawks who oppose expanding the budget deficit and populists whose top priority is slashing taxes at any cost.
The narrow margin could give unprecedented leverage to relatively small groups of GOP lawmakers. One of those groups is the suburban New York-area Republicans who are pushing for the elimination of the so-called SALT cap, which limits the amount of state and local taxes that can be deducted on federal tax returns.
