a brawl for american democracy…
Predicting races for Congress is a dangerous business for any pundit after the Donald Trump squeaker over Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016, the Democrat takeover of the House in 2018, and the Democrat loss of seats in 2020 when polls predicted a significant gain instead. Not to mention the Joe Biden-Donald Trump presidential election of 2020 and the non-existent “red wave” expected in Congress in 2022.
House seats are far more susceptible to the whims of the electorate than are Senate seats, and there are a lot of both in play this year, just as in years past. Trump’s troubling, frustrating Tweets hurt more in the Senate than in the House during his time in office. It is the same with the impact of the pandemic, the protests and social upheaval, and the staggering unemployment. Joe Biden is now contending in his era with wars, inflation, immigration, Hunter’s legal woes, age, and various other issues.
President Trump proved, over time, to be far more unpopular among critical segments of the public than he had been in previous elections, especially among college- and non-college-educated whites, people of color, older adults, and a wide variety of other challenges.
The question is: Will Republicans be able to hold the House in 2024, or does someone else have a chance at being called Mr. or Madam Speaker in 2025?
An Unmanageable Margin
The slim vote margin among Republican and Democrat members following the close 2020 mid-term elections means that the U.S. House of Representatives is completely dysfunctional in the 118th Congress. There have been many examples of dysfunction. Too many different factions are competing for their opposing positions, and that is just among Republican members.
Chaos reigns.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who took 16 rounds of voting to win the big chair in January, was unceremoniously dumped from his job on October 3, 2023, at the behest of just a small handful of extreme right-wing members who wanted him out. The rebellion was led by Florida panhandle Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz.
Gaetz and crew wanted McCarthy to pay for working with Joe Biden and the Democrats to temporarily fund the federal government when the ceiling for authorized spending had been reached. These ultra-conservative members opposed approving continuing resolutions to extend federal spending in favor of cutting spending authorizations more than had been previously agreed to by McCarthy and Biden.
Congress has not been able to pass individual spending authorizations as required by the Congressional budget process; thus, there is a frequent and all-too-consistent need to lump spending into continuing resolutions, or CRs, as they are known on the Hill.
With Speaker McCarthy out, the House was paralyzed for three remarkable weeks while the Republican Caucus rejected speaker candidate after speaker candidate. First rejected was Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), followed by Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) and then Jim Jordan (R-OH). It was learned that the Republican leadership was not trusted by the opposing Gaetz team.
Democrats were unanimous in their preference for Congressman Hakeem Jefferies (D-NY), their current Minority Leader, as their choice for Speaker, which did not help the Republicans overcome their factional civil war.
In the end, a relatively unknown and inexperienced member was ultimately elected Speaker by a finally unanimous Republican Conference, reeling under withering public criticism from Republicans, Democrats, and Independents who were calling out the House lawmaking paralysis.
A New Speaker for the Times
Four-term Congressman Mike Johnson (R-LA) was sworn in as Speaker and immediately saw his honeymoon period ended when, like McCarthy, he had to rely on Democrats’ votes to successfully approve Continuing Resolutions to keep the federal government open until early 2024.
During the three-week House drama, in which House business could not be conducted other than the search for a Speaker, the Israeli-Hamas War broke out, and fighting between Russia and Ukraine intensified, both without emergency funding support from Congress.
The culture wars raged on, as did the internal strife between Trump-supporting GOP members and those GOP members from more moderate districts who did not believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen from the 45th president of the United States by the 46th president of the United States.
2024 is, predictably, a mess, too.
Budgets still need to be passed, and wars need to be contained. The list of challenges, like rampant immigration and evolving climate change, is not getting resolved and is not likely to get resolved when members of both parties will undoubtedly be focused on re-election and control of the House of Representatives in January 2025.
The Thomas Watch
Thomas is watching two groups of people in the U.S. House. What happens to them and what they ultimately do has enormous consequences for American democracy.
The first group we are watching are those election deniers who are, to put it politely, obstructing productive lawmaking or engaging in anti-democratic activities, in our opinion.
thomas invites you to see our rankings on:
the democracy stars & failures by state
The second group we are watching are members in highly competitive seats that may or may not determine who manages the U.S. House of Representatives in 2025. They are in order of interest:
Arizona 1st
California 3rd, 13th, 22nd, 27th, 40th, 41st, 45th, 47th, 49th
Colorado 8th
Florida 27th, 28th
Hawaii 2nd
Illinois 13th, 17th
Kansas 3rd
Michigan 3rd, 7th, 8th
Minnesota 2nd
Nebraska 2nd
New Mexico 2nd, 3rd
New York 1st, 3rd, 4th, 17th, 19th, 22nd
North Carolina 1st, 13th
Ohio 1st, 9th, 11th, 13th
Oklahoma 5th
Oregon 5th
Pennsylvania 1st, 7th, 8th, 17th
Washington 3rd
That’s 41 seats in the U.S. House that we currently judge to be a Race or a very close Nudging race to watch. In the meantime, we do know that 53 members of the House have announced their retirements or plan to run for another office. Twenty-seven are Democrats, and twenty-six are Republicans. Twelve have resigned, died, or been expelled in 2023 alone during the current election and before the 2024 general election in November.
Keep an eye out here. We will keep you posted.