Democrat Rita Hart has given up on her efforts to get the House of Representatives to overturn the certified results of an election in which Hart lost to Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks by six votes out of nearly 394,000 ballots cast.
House speaker Nancy Pelosi faced pushback within her own caucus in recent days over Hart’s gambit. Although Democrats successfully overturned a House race in 1985, the odds of that happening in 2021 were always very low.
The backlash Democrats would have faced in 2022 would likely far outweigh the benefits of picking up one seat now, and the only way Democrats could have avoided a ferocious backlash would have been if they had shown Hart actually had won by a clear and convincing margin of votes. They couldn’t prove that, and Hart’s case was doomed.