Republicans won a narrow majority in the US House of Representatives, which gives them the power to halt US President Joe Biden’s agenda.
However, their slim margin marked a letdown for a party that had counted on decisive election results as a springboard for the 2024 presidential race.
More than a week after election day, the party gained the minimum 218 seats needed to control the chamber, when incumbent US Representative Mike Garcia defeated Democrat Christy Smith in California. About six races remain undecided.
Photo: Reuters
Despite concerns about Biden’s handling of the economy and the prospects of a recession, voters delivered a split verdict over who was to blame and how much weight to put on issues such as abortion rights. While giving control of the House to Republicans, the Senate remains in the hands of Democrats.
Slender as the majority is, Republicans can control committees with subpoena authority, allowing the party to fulfill campaign pledges to investigate Biden’s administration and family, as well as social-media companies that conservatives claim are biased against them.
Republicans also have promised to slash government spending, expand fossil fuel production and extend Trump-era tax cuts on the wealthy. However, much of that agenda could wither in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
Photo: AP
For businesses, the return of Republican control of the House takes the possibility of corporate tax increases favored by Democrats off the table, while diminishing the chances of reforms to legal immigration.
However, markets could become turbulent in the middle of next year if Republicans carry through on threats to hold the nation’s debt ceiling hostage to force the president to accept spending cuts.
Biden, on his way back to Washington from the G20 summit in Indonesia, said he would work with House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy.
“I congratulate Leader McCarthy on Republicans winning the House majority, and am ready to work with House Republicans to deliver results for working families,” the president said in a statement.
“Republicans have officially flipped the People’s House! Americans are ready for a new direction, and House Republicans are ready to deliver,” McCarthy wrote on Twitter.
McCarthy has spent the past week brooding over his party’s poor showing in the midterm elections, with some Republicans blaming former US president Donald Trump for losses in key races, not only in Congress, but in statehouses as well.
Yet even as they chided him for promoting candidates that Democrats beat in Republican-favored races, Trump waded right back in to announce his third run for the White House.
The Senate is to remain under Democratic control after John Fetterman flipped a Republican seat in Pennsylvania and incumbents Mark Kelly and Catherine Cortez Masto won re-election in Arizona and Nevada.
The Senate race in Georgia between Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock and Republican incumbent Herschel Walker is to be decided in a Dec. 6 runoff vote.
Biden’s agenda is likely to be largely stalled by the Republican win, but the victory was one of the smallest gained by either party in a midterm election in modern times.
The chair of the right-wing Freedom Caucus, US Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, said that conservatives could use the election results to at least extract promises from McCarthy, including changes in the rules governing how the House is run.
“As a leader in the party, you have a duty to provide a vision that informs voters of what you’re going to do if you win,” Perry said. “I don’t think that vision was adequately provided by multiple folks on the top of our party.”
Since World War II, the party holding the White House has, on average, lost 26 House seats and four Senate seats in midterm elections.
This year’s result spells the end of US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s position as the Democratic Party’s leader in the House, where a new generation of leaders is eager to ascend.
Pelosi hailed her party for having “defied expectations.”
“House Democrats will continue to play a leading role in supporting President Biden’s agenda — with strong leverage over a scant Republican majority,” she said in a statement on Wednesday.
The new Republican House majority was secured in part by victories in Democratic parts of New York State, where US Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the head of the Democratic campaign arm, lost a race for a Hudson Valley seat.
An attempt by Democrats to gerrymander New York seats was rejected in court earlier in the year. Republicans also ousted Democratic incumbents in Florida, Iowa, Virginia and New Jersey to pick up seats.
Republican candidates who echoed Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020, and promised to take steps to ensure Republican wins in the future, were roundly defeated.
The election ends four years of Democratic control in the House, which saw passage of the largest infrastructure and climate change bills in history, a massive COVID-19 stimulus program, an overhaul of the Medicare drug benefit and a historic investment in US semiconductor manufacturing.
Republicans expected voters to punish Democrats with a loss of 60 or more seats as inflation hit 40-year highs and gasoline prices soared. However, only a few Democratic incumbents lost their re-election campaigns.
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