The Republican House majority after 2022 will be identical to the Democratic majority after the 2020 elections — 222 to 213. But it’s fair to say the GOP’s 2022 victory was even narrower than that of the Democrats in 2020. Jacob Rubashkin of Inside Elections points out that Democrats were roughly 7,000 votes away (spread across five congressional districts) from holding the House: “The five closest races won by Republicans were Colorado’s 3rd (554 votes), California’s 13th (584 votes), Michigan’s 10th (1,600 votes), New York’s 17th (1,787 votes), and Iowa’s 3rd (2,145 votes).” By the same metric, Republicans were 35,000 votes away from taking the House in 2020.
Republicans won the national popular vote by nearly three percentage points, but they have a slimmer-than-expected majority for a few reasons. Republicans handed Democrats a handful of easy wins by nominating bad candidates, such as Joe Kent in Washington State. Republicans also ran up the score in red districts and improved their margins among African-American and Hispanic voters, but those gains didn’t translate into more seats.