2020 election: Democrats will keep the US House — but cracks emerge

Republicans held strong in Texas and even clawed back a few seats in Florida and Minnesota

Speaker Nancy Pelosi will keep her majority in the 2020 elections, as Democrats largely solidified their stronghold in the American suburbs.

But some cracks did emerge on Tuesday for a Democratic party that expected to hold most of the seats they clawed away from Republicans in 2018. Many projections even had them adding 12 to 20 more this cycle.

That did not happen.

By the wee hours of Wednesday morning, Republicans had won back a handful of seats in Florida, Minnesota, and elsewhere that Democrats had considered relatively safe in the preceding weeks.

In the Sunshine State, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s struggles with Latino voters contributed to freshman Democratic Congresswomen Donna Shalala and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell losing close contests to Republican challengers in Florida’s 27th and 26th congressional districts, respectively.

Both districts are over 70 per cent Hispanic.

And in Minnesota, longtime Democratic Congressman Collin Peterson, who has represented the 7th congressional district there since 1991, lost to Republican ex-Lieutenant Governor Michell Fischbach.

But Republicans needed to pick up a net gain of 18 seats to flip the House, which they did not appear by early Wednesday on the verge of accomplishing

“Tonight, House Democrats are poised to further strengthen our majority — the biggest, most diverse, most dynamic, women-led House majority in history,” Ms Pelosi towards the beginning of Election Night.

While the ideology of House Democrats now ranges across a broad expanse — from self-avowed Democratic Socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York to Congressman Henry Cuellar of Texas, a pro-oil member of the Blue Dog caucus — the party remained united in its front against Donald Trump, pushing for more coronavirus relief, and protecting Obamacare while expanding access to other avenues of affordable health coverage.

Freshman firewall?

The historically diverse class of Democratic freshmen from 2018 will see some members go when the 117th Congress is sworn in on 3 January 2021.

But most suburban Democrats who won in 2018 managed to hold onto their seats.

Congressman Sean Casten of Illinois’ 6th district was up by 6 percentage points with nearly two-thirds of the vote counted by 2.30am on Wednesday. Before Mr Casten won the suburban Chicago seat in 2018, it had been in Republican hands since 1973 — nearly five decades.

All four freshman Democratic incumbents in Orange County, California, a former GOP bastion for followers of the Reagan Revolution in Southern California, were on track to keep their seats by Wednesday morning.

Congressman Harley Rouda, whose 48th district seat was rated Leans Democrat by most elections handicappers, was the only one of those members in a close re-election battle.

He and Republican challenger Michelle Steele were within hundreds of votes of each other by early Wednesday morning, but California takes weeks to count and certify late-arriving mail-in ballots that usually favour Democrats.

And in Georgia’s 6th District in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, Congresswoman Lucy McBath won a second term over ex-Republican Congresswoman Karen Handel, a rematch from 2018.

But several other freshman Democratic incumbents from that historic 2018 class didn’t fare so well.

South Carolina Democratic Congressman Joe Cunningham failed to hold onto his 1st district seat that included much of Charleston as well as the Palmetto State’s more rural Lowcountry.

Virginia Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger was trailing Republican Nick Freitas in Virginia’s 7th district — which includes a large swath of the northern suburbs of Richmond — by 50,000 votes early on Wednesday morning. But that race still has thousands of more votes to be counted before it can be called.

A Republican reckoning?

Absent an actual party platform, Republican challengers largely campaigned on two things this cycle: one, their support for Mr Trump, and, two, their opposition to “socialism.”

GOP candidates and outside groups assailed the voting records of vulnerable Democrats such as Ms Spanberger and South Carolina Congressman Joe Cunningham as “too radical” for districts that broke for the president in 2016.

Both Ms Spanberger and Mr Cunningham, the House GOP’s campaign arm pointed out, voted in lockstep with Ms Pelosi more than 90 per cent of the time.

That may have been enough to sway many conservative-leaning voters who either cast ballots for them in 2018 or stayed home.

Ms Spanberger, Mr Cunningham, and several other Democratic incumbents targeted by national Republicans had gone to great lengths over the last two years to buck their party on key votes to show their constituents they are independent voices unbeholden to the crack of the party whip.

Right off the bat in 2019, Ms Spanberger cast a vote against Ms Pelosi for House speaker, keeping a signature campaign promise from her 2018 race.

Mr Cunningham showed a revulsion for Democratic “messaging bills,” Washington-speak for partisan bills passed by House majorities that everyone knows are dead-on-arrival in the legislatively stingy Senate.

He voted against his own party’s $3trn Covid-19 relief package in July because it stood no chance of passing the Senate, never mind being signed into law by Mr Trump. He later joined 25 Republicans and 24 other Democrats in the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus to propose a framework for a compromise package with more realistic odds of garnering cross-party support.

And this past January, Mr Cunningham was one of just eight House Democrats to vote against a war powers resolution ordering the president to desist from launching military attacks against Iran without first receiving the consent of Congress.

At the time, the congressman panned the Iran bill as a “symbolic” measure with no actual teeth.

Republicans hold onto Texas

Perhaps most discouraging for Democrats was their inability to make a large dent in Texas, where they were bullish on their chances to pick up several seats in the Austin, San Antonio and Dallas suburbs, as well as in El Paso along the US-Mexico border.

Democrat Gina Ortiz Jones was losing to Republican Tony Gonzales by roughly 9,000 votes on Wednesday morning in Texas’ 23rd congressional district in El Paso. Most elections handicappers had rated that race either Tilts or Leans Democratic.

And a Tossup races for GOP incumbent Chip Roy appeared to be going in his favour.

The results on Tuesday could signal Democrats still have a ways to go in Texas even though it had shifted to a Tossup state among elections handicappers in the days leading up to the election.