The GOP Will Have One of the Narrowest House Majorities Seen in US History

The final race to be called in the 2024 House of Representatives elections has been called for a Democratic candidate, meaning Republicans’ margin of control in that chamber of Congress will be among the most narrow in U.S. history.

Former state legislator Adam Gray (D) narrowly defeated incumbent Rep. John Duarte (R) in the race for a district in California’s Central Valley region. According to reporting from The Associated Press, Gray won by fewer than 200 votes out of the hundreds of thousands that were cast. Duarte is not contesting the outcome and has conceded the race to his Democratic opponent.

The close result between Gray and Duarte perhaps exemplifies how close things will be in the House itself when lawmakers are sworn into office in early January.

With Gray’s win, Democrats will have 215 seats in the House, a gain of two seats from their previous margin. Republicans were able to capture 220 seats, a two-seat loss.

The slim five-seat margin means that, if every lawmaker is present in the chamber for each vote, Republicans can only afford to lose two of their own conference members in order for a bill to pass.

But for the first few months of the 119th Congress, the margin will be even smaller for Republicans. That’s because two of the GOP’s conference members have been nominated to serve in the Trump administration, with a third member, former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida), already resigning after having been nominated by president-elect Donald Trump to become the next Attorney General. (Gaetz has withdrawn his nomination and will not return to Congress.)

With those three seats vacant when Congress reconvenes, the Republican House majority will be 217-215 over Democrats — meaning Republicans can’t afford even a single defection in House votes during that time, as ties in that chamber cannot be broken and do not result in passage of a measure. It will be among the narrowest majorities any party has held in the House in U.S. history.

Notably, the majority held by Republicans was made possible in part by gerrymandering across the U.S. In North Carolina, for example, 10 of the state’s 14 House members will be Republicans, despite the fact that the state voted nearly 50-50 in the presidential race and in other statewide contests.

The slim majority held by Republicans in both the House and the Senate will likely disrupt some of the legislative items the incoming Trump administration aims to pass. While Trump can issue executive orders on some matters, much of his agenda depends on approval from Congress — including his plan to extend his massive tax breaks from 2017 that primarily benefited the most wealthy Americans.

The gains by Democrats in the House (and the extreme tightness of nearly every single partisan vote in the chamber) provide more evidence that the wins by Republicans in this year’s election were not a mandate for the party, nor for Trump specifically.

In Trump’s case, the president-elect won by the smallest popular vote margin in the past 40 years, and had the 11th narrowest Electoral College win in U.S. history. Despite the narrow win over Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, Trump is still insisting that he has a mandate to govern and to implement his far right agenda.

Some political experts deny the idea that presidential mandates are a legitimate concept altogether. Indeed, Julia Azari, a political science professor at Marquette University, wrote last month that claims of mandates are oftentimes “employed by politicians in weak positions, in response to polarized politics and flagging legitimacy.”