WASHINGTON — Republicans will have a narrow majority in the House next year with Democrats flipping one final seat in California, leaving GOP leaders with even less margin for error as they try to advance President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda.
Democrat Adam Gray has defeated GOP Rep. John Duarte in a rematch in California’s 13th District in the Central Valley following weeks of ballot counting, NBC News projects, meaning Republicans won 220 House seats in the 2024 elections to Democrats’ 215. The GOP can lose just two votes on legislation in the House in the next Congress if Democrats all vote in opposition, giving them little wiggle room for absences, internal fighting and vacancies.
Duarte told the Turlock Journal that he had called Gray to concede on Tuesday evening.
Thanks to Gray’s victory, Democrats netted one seat in the House elections, flipping nine Republican-held seats, mainly in blue states, as Republicans flipped eight Democratic-held seats.
The 13th District is one of three Democratic pickups in California alone, with Democrats Derek Tran and George Whitesides defeating GOP Reps. Michelle Steel and Mike Garcia. Democrats also flipped three seats in New York and one in Oregon, and they gained one seat each in Alabama and Louisiana because of new congressional maps in those states.
Republicans, meanwhile, picked up three seats in North Carolina because of the state’s new congressional map. They also defeated two Pennsylvania Democrats, Reps. Susan Wild and Matt Cartwright, as well as Democratic lawmakers in Alaska and Colorado, and they flipped an open seat in Michigan.
Campaigns and outside groups spent hundreds of millions of dollars on House races, with more than $1.1 billion alone spent on ads from September through Election Day, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.
Democratic campaigns and groups outspent their GOP rivals in the fall, dropping $662 million on ads in House races to Republicans’ $485 million.
The slim GOP majority underscores the close fight for the House this year, with operatives in both parties acknowledging that the recent redistricting process narrowed the battlefield by creating fewer competitive races. Just over 40 seats — around 10% of the chamber — were decided by less than 5 percentage points, according to data from the NBC News Decision Desk.
And while Democrats lost the House, the Senate and the White House, they found their down-ballot candidates performed better than Vice President Kamala Harris.
Vulnerable Democratic incumbents in House races outperformed Harris by an average of 2.7 points, according to an initial Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee analysis of county data shared with NBC News. The analysis also found Democratic candidates in competitive districts overperformed Harris in counties with lower levels of education and where the majority of registered voters are people of color.
Johnson’s challenges
Controlling all the levers of power in Washington, Republicans in the new year will have a rare opportunity to pass major policy priorities through budget “reconciliation” — an arcane process that allows the GOP to bypass filibusters and fast-track legislation without any Democratic votes in the Senate.
But because of how fragile their House majority is, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. — who is expected to be re-elected to the top job by his colleagues next month — and Republicans will face hurdles in getting their reconciliation package to the finish line.
Trump and Republicans are eyeing the reconciliation package as a vehicle to renew tax cuts that Trump signed into law in 2017 and that are set to expire next year. Other provisions that could be included are a tax exemption for income earned from tips — what Trump calls “no tax on tips” — and lifting the cap on the state and local tax deduction.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a Trump ally who is on the Appropriations and Judiciary committees, has been urging colleagues to use reconciliation to pass border security legislation as Trump has vowed to launch “the largest deportation program in American history.”
Further complicating Johnson’s math problem is the fact that Trump has chosen two sitting House Republicans for his Cabinet: Elise Stefanik of New York as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and Mike Waltz of Florida as national security adviser.
Republicans are also expected to start the new Congress short one more lawmaker.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., resigned from the House last month after Trump selected him to be the next attorney general; Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration amid allegations of sexual misconduct. Gaetz has said he does not plan to join the next Congress even though he won re-election.
If the Stefanik and Walz resignations happen simultaneously, Johnson could be operating with just a one-seat majority: 217 to 215.
The Florida State Department has already announced the special election schedule to replace Gaetz and Waltz, with primaries in the deep-red seats set for Jan. 28, followed by special elections on April 1.
Once Stefanik resigns from Congress, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul has 10 days to declare a special election in New York, which must occur 70 to 80 days after the proclamation, according to state law.
