Republicans inched closer late Tuesday to reaching a paper-thin House majority, flipping a seat in Colorado and fending off a competitive Democratic challenger in California, according to The Associated Press.
With a dozen races still to be called, the G.O.P. held 216 seats to Democrats’ 207 in the 435-seat House of Representatives. Two more seats would give the Republicans a bare majority and a governing trifecta come January: control of the Senate, House and White House.
However, most forecasts of the remaining races show enough Democratic wins to keep the final G.O.P. House tally from reaching a more commanding edge.
On Tuesday, Representative Yadira Caraveo, a first-term Colorado Democrat, lost to her Republican challenger, Gabe Evans, a state lawmaker with ties to the far right, The A.P. said. In California, a Republican who voted to impeach Donald J. Trump over the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, Representative David Valadao, was re-elected in a Democratic-leaning district.
In Washington State, another Republican who supported Mr. Trump’s impeachment over Jan. 6, Representative Dan Newhouse, retained his seat, beating a Republican challenger.
Democrats also raised their count on Tuesday. Representative Mike Levin, Democrat of California, who represents an oceanside district north of San Diego, won re-election, according to The A.P. And Democrats flipped a seat in the suburbs of Los Angeles, where George Whitesides, a former NASA chief of staff, narrowly defeated Representative Mike Garcia, a onetime Navy fighter pilot.
Without an ample margin in the House, Republicans may fall victim to the kind of internal squabbles that disrupted their efforts to govern after the 2022 midterm elections and led to a protracted power struggle over the speakership.
And because the margin in the House appears destined to be tight, Mr. Trump cannot pull more representatives into his administration without imperiling the Republicans’ fragile standing in the chamber. Representative Marc Molinaro, Republican of New York, told reporters on Wednesday that Mr. Trump had joked to House lawmakers, “I’d appoint 15 of you, but I can’t, because then you’d be in the minority.”
Some Western states are slow to count ballots, and California — one of a handful nationwide where every registered, active voter is mailed a ballot — is particularly sluggish. There, election workers have spent days reaching voters who improperly filled out their mail-in ballots and asking them to verify their signatures, a process called curing.
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic former House speaker, has been holding out hope that Democrats might still win the House. But a CNN reporter said in a post on X on Tuesday that when he asked her how she was doing, she said “terrible.” Later in the day, however, a Pelosi spokesman, Ian Krager, said in a post on X that she was “much better now” after holding calls with volunteers who were curing ballots.
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