Republicans just one win away from taking the House

Democrats’ slim hopes to retain the House majority were just about extinguished Monday, with five races called for Republicans on Monday night.

As of late Monday evening, just 14 House seats remain uncalled, with 217 seats projected for Republicans and 204 for Democrats so far. Democrats would have to capture all of them to retain the chamber — a near-impossible task.

Republicans registered a series of big wins Monday night that all but guaranteed their House majority, even if it is increasingly looking like it will be a very slim win. In Arizona's 1st District, GOP Rep. David Schweikert narrowly defeated Democrat Jevin Hodge, while Republican Juan Ciscomani, a longtime aide to Gov. Doug Ducey, beat out Democrat Kirsten Engel in the open 6th District.

Races were also called for Republicans in California, with Rep. Michelle Steel and Rep. Ken Calvert both winning in their Southern California districts. Republican Brandon Williams also won an open seat in a swing district in the Syracuse area of upstate New York.

Many of the last uncalled races are in California, which has historically taken longer than most other states to count votes. Republicans lead in three of them: Rep. David Valadao, Rep. Mike Garcia and Kevin Kiley are all ahead.

Republicans also have a small lead in Colorado's 3rd District, with Rep. Lauren Boebert ahead by slightly more than 1,000 votes.

Winning one more seat will allow Republicans to regain control of a chamber they had ceded in the 2018 midterms after eight years in the majority. It is a reality that Democratic Party leaders, including President Joe Biden, have acknowledged.

“I think we're going to get very close in the House,” Biden told reporters earlier in the day at the G-20 summit in Indonesia on Monday. “I think it's going to be very close, but I don't think we're going to make it.”

That Democrats have not been mathematically eliminated from having a path to a majority this late after the election is a surprising turnaround from pre-election predictions. Confident Republicans had predicted a “red wave” even on the morning of the election, and their theoretical House majority — should they prevail in the final tally — will likely be a narrow one of no more than a handful of seats.

There are significant leadership questions for three of the four congressional caucuses, with only Senate Democrats — under Majority Leader Chuck Schumer — having seemingly landed on their party leader. On the House side, the right flank of the Republican Party is openly questioning ways to muddy or entirely block Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s path to the speaker’s gavel should the GOP lock up the chamber. And there are questions around the future of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her octogenarian deputies in Democratic leadership.

The triumvirate was expected to step aside after this year’s midterms, although Democrats’ better-than-expected election may have changed that calculus. Pelosi pointedly did not make any commitments about her political future on appearances on various Sunday shows this weekend, telling CNN’s Dana Bash that “my members are asking me to consider” remaining in party leadership.

And in the Senate, a small but vocal cadre of Republicans have been pushing for a delay to their leadership elections, an implicit rebuke of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, after being relegated to the minority for at least another term.

The publicly stated reasoning for many of those Republicans is the looming Senate runoff between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker in Georgia. Although that Dec. 6 election won’t decide the majority in the Senate, it still could have major consequences for control of the chamber.

One significant difference from this year’s runoffs and the ones in January of 2021 — when Warnock defeated then-Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Democrat Jon Ossoff defeated then-Sen. David Perdue to win Democrats a Senate majority — is the timing. After the pair of runoff losses, Republicans in the state changed the law to shorten the timeframe. Instead of a nine-week campaign, this year’s runoff is in early December — a short, four-week sprint.

One consequence of the condensed runoff campaign is a significantly shorter early voting period — including apparently no Saturday early voting in this election, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Sunday. Voters will also have much less time to request and return mail-in ballots.

Looming over the fast-approaching runoff is former President Donald Trump, who is widely expected to announce a 2024 presidential run on Tuesday evening at his Florida estate. That announcement, planned and scheduled in advance of last week’s midterms, has stoked concern among some in the GOP that the former president’s 2024 campaign might reactivate the same electorate that cost Republicans two Senate seats in 2021.

Monday evening also brought to an end the biggest uncalled race outside of Georgia: The Arizona governor's race, where Democrat Katie Hobbs narrowly beat out Republican Kari Lake.

Hobbs — the state’s outgoing secretary of state — squeezed past Lake, a former TV anchor and Trump acolyte. Her victory was projected by most media outlets late Monday, after the final significant vote tally from Maricopa County, the state's largest county, was released. Lake was not able to make up enough ground to beat Hobbs in those final tallies, making Hobbs the first Democratic governor in over a decade.

The race between the two women was an incredibly contentious one. Lake was arguably the loudest pro-Trump statewide candidate running for office anywhere in the country this cycle, proudly repeating Trump's lies about a "stolen" 2020 election that Hobbs, in part, oversaw in Arizona as secretary of state.

"For the Arizonans who did not vote for me, I will work just as hard for you — because even in this moment of division, I believe there is so much more that connects us," Hobbs said in a statement shortly after her win.

There was significant fears before the election that Republican candidates like Lake, who parroted false claims of a rigged election system, would not concede their own losses. But largely, even those who clung to the mythology of a stolen election in 2020 quietly conceded their own contests this year.

Lake did not immediately release a public concession to Hobbs late Monday, tweeting instead: "Arizonans know BS when they see it."

Besides Arizona, Alaska’s Senate, gubernatorial, and at-large House races remain uncalled. That’s due in part to both the remoteness of the state — which requires more time for ballots to reach election officials — and the state’s new ranked choice voting system. There, GOP Gov. Mike Dunleavy appears poised to win another term, while Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola, who won a special election over the summer, seems well-positioned to win a full term once the ranked choice tabulation is complete.

And while Republicans are set to hold Alaska’s Senate seat, it is not yet clear who will represent the last frontier in the chamber. Trump-backed challenger Kelly Tshibaka narrowly leads incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski, but the race will likely come down to the significant number of voters who didn’t vote for either woman in the first round — a group of ballots that is anticipated to favor Murkowski.