The midterm-election results are full of inconvenient truths and, as is often the case, just ambiguous enough to allow for ample spin depending on one’s partisan leaning.
The Republicans are probably taking back the House majority, but it will be by much less of a margin than the GOP hype machine was insinuating before the election. There are pockets of positive surprise in this (New York congressional races, in particular) and pockets of disappointment (if nothing else, the net number will be less than anticipated). I am mostly interested in my own California district, where one of the most progressive members of Congress, Katie Porter, could be traded for one of the most stalwart conservatives running this cycle, Scott Baugh (the two are 900 votes apart with hundreds of thousands of votes uncounted). But both things are true at once — it is a victory for the Right to take a majority in the House, and it is a disappointment to not have it feel like such. As was the case in 2018, though, where the “morning after” results did not feel as robust for the Democrats as they proved to be in the end, I don’t think I am out on a ledge to predict that the House pickups for the GOP in the end will outperform the morning-after reporting.
Comments