Wednesday, March 13, 2024

How Did The Republicans Take Control Of Congress

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What Is The New Balance Of Power In The House

House Democrats held onto their majority but lost seats to Republican challengers.

More than a dozen incumbent Democrats lost re-election bids, despite earlier projections they could gain up to 15 seats.

Democrats took the chamber after they netted 41 seats in the 2018 midterm elections, their largest single-year pickup since the post-Watergate midterms of 1974. But some of those new Democrats were among the partys losers in 2020.


Incoming Biden Administration And Democratic House Wont Have To Deal With A Republican

Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff wave to supporters during a joint rally on Nov. 15 in Marietta, Ga.

Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock have defeated Georgias two incumbent Republican U.S. senators in the states runoff elections, the Associated Press said Wednesday, in a development that gives their party effective control of the Senate.

Ossoff and Warnock were projected the winners over Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler by the AP following campaigns that drew massive spending and worldwide attention because the runoffs were set to determine the balance of power in Washington. The AP , at about 2 a.m. Eastern, then followed with the call for Ossoff over Perdue on Wednesday afternoon.

President-elect Joe Bidens incoming administration and the Democratic-run House of Representatives now wont face the same checks on their policy priorities that they would have faced with a Republican-controlled Senate, though analysts have said the slim Democratic majority in the chamber could mean more power for moderate senators from either party.


See:With sweep expected in Georgia Senate races, Democrats have high hopes for what Biden can do

It is looking like the Democratic campaign machine was more effective at driving turnout than the Republican one, said Eurasia Group analyst Jon Lieber in a note late Tuesday.

Warnock then made just before 8 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday.

Its Not All Bad News For Democrats


While it was unquestionably a good night for Republicans, Democrats still held onto most of the seats they won in 2018 and will continue to be the majority party in the House. Thats in part because they retained most of the suburban districts they picked up in 2018.

Of the 233 seats that Democrats held coming into the election, 186 of them were in districts that were predominantly or partly suburban in nature, according to density categorizations by Bloombergs CityLab. Thus far, Democrats have lost seven of those seats, but they captured one GOP-held suburban seat around Atlanta. And thanks to redistricting, theyve also won two formerly Republican seats around Greensboro and Raleigh in North Carolina, which reflect the partys strength in more populous areas.

Because of their relative success in the suburbs, Democrats kept many seats in places President Trump won in 2016. Coming into the election, Democrats held 30 seats in districts Trump carried in 2016, and they wouldve lost their majority if theyd lost more than half of them . But theyve won 18 of them so far and picked up one from the GOP . In fact, more than half of Republicans gains have come in seats representing places that Trump won by a pretty sizable margin in 2016. Well have to wait a bit before data can tell us how congressional districts voted in 2020, but for now it seems many Republican gains were made by picking off the lowest-hanging fruit.

Gop Women Made Big Gains


While the majority of the Republican caucus will still be men come 2021, there will be far more Republican women in Congress than there were this year. So far, it looks like at least , surpassing the record of 25 from the 109th Congress. Thats thanks in part to the record number of non-incumbent Republican women 15 whove won House contests. And its also because of how well Republican women did in tight races. The table below shows the Republican women who ran in Democratic-held House districts that were at least potentially competitive, according to FiveThirtyEights forecast. As of this writing, seven of them have won.

GOP women have flipped several Democratic seats

Republican women running for potentially competitive Democratic-held House seats and the status of their race as of 4:30 p.m Eastern on Nov. 11

District
D+22.1

Results are unofficial. Races are counted as projected only if the projection comes from ABC News. Excludes races in which the Republican candidate has either a less than 1 in 100 chance or greater than 99 in 100 chance of winning.

How Did Congress Take Control Of Reconstruction

Republicans Take Control Of Congress, What Happens Next ...


In early 1866, Congressional Republicans, appalled by mass killing of ex-slaves and adoption of restrictive black codes, seized control of Reconstruction from President Johnson. The 14th Amendment also reduced representation in Congress of any southern state that deprived African Americans of the vote.

What The Midterms Mean For President Obama And 2016

Only one in three voters in exit polls said the country was on the right track, and one in five said the government in Washington could never be trusted to do whats right. Two-thirds said the economic system is unfair.

The Republican swing fit a historical pattern: The last three two-term presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush all served their last two years with the opposing party controlling both houses of Congress.


And the party controlling the White House has lost seats in the House in the midterm election every time but twice since World War II.

In the Senate, Democrat Mark Pryor of Arkansas was ousted by Rep. Tom Cotton, and Mark Udall of Colorado was bounced by Rep. Cory Gardner. Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan lost her seat to Thom Tillis.

Democrat Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire held off a furious challenge by ex-Sen. Scott Brown.

Republicans Joni Ernst in Iowa, Steve Daines in Montana, Mike Rounds in South Dakota and Shelley Moore Capito in West Virginia all captured seats held by retiring Democrats.


Four Flips For Democrats One For Republicans

Going into the election, the Democrats held 47 seats in the U.S. Senate while the Republicans held 53.

The Democrats have succeeded in flipping four seats: in Colorado, where former Governor John Hickenlooper easily ousted incumbent Cory Gardner, in Arizona, where former astronaut Mark Kelly defeated incumbent Martha McSally, and in Georgia, where Raphael Warnock defeated incumbent Kelly Loeffler and Jon Ossoff defeated incumbent David Perdue.

The Republicans have wrested back one previously Democratic seat in , where one-term incumbent Doug Jones was emphatically denied a second term by Tommy Tuberville, a former college head football coach, most recently at the University of Cincinnati.

Outgoing freshman Sens. Jones and Gardner were both considered vulnerable, as each was elected with less than 50% of the vote in 2018.


Republican Thom Tilliss victory over Cal Cunningham in North Carolinaby less than 2 percentage points according to the North Carolina Secretary of States latest tallyis one of several close Senate races that were not called until after election night. In addition to the seats from Georgia, close races also include the victories of incumbent senators Gary Peters and Susan Collins , which were not called until Nov. 4.

Trump Lost Everything For The Republicans

In four years, Trump has led the Republican Party from unified control of Washington to the wilderness.

About the author: David A. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic.


If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed and we will deserve it, Senator Lindsey Graham .

The South Carolinians prediction didnt age well at first. Come January 2017, the Republican Party was in the catbird seat. With Trumps upset win over the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, it controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. Trump would immediately be able to appoint a Supreme Court justice, too, giving GOP appointees an edge on the high court. Trump seemed to have cleared out the last vestiges of the Democrats New Deal coalition and built a new party that might withstand demographic changes expected to favor liberals. Graham, meanwhile, had a change of heart and became one of Trumps noisiest cheerleaders and closest allies.

Read: Its over

David A. Graham: Trump is the loser

Nonetheless, Trump insisted on making the Georgia Senate runoffs about him too. The effect was disastrous. Democrats, especially Black voters, turned out in astonishing numbers; suburban voters continued to reject Trump; and Republican turnout fell short, perhaps in part because the president had spent weeks telling his supporters that the states elections were rigged.

Read: Georgia sends a preacher to Washington

Republicans Can Win The Next Elections Through Gerrymandering Alone

Even if voting patterns remain the same, Republicans could still win more seats in Congress through redistricting

In Washington, the real insiders know that the true outrages are whats perfectly legal and that its simply a gaffe when someone accidentally blurts out something honest.

And so it barely made a ripple last week when a Texas congressman said aloud whats supposed to be kept to a backroom whisper: Republicans intend to retake the US House of Representatives in 2022 through gerrymandering.

We have redistricting coming up and the Republicans control most of that process in most of the states around the country, Representative Ronny Jackson told a conference of religious conservatives. That alone should get us the majority back.

Hes right. Republicans wont have to win more votes next year to claim the US House.

In fact, everyone could vote the exact same way for Congress next year as they did in 2020 when Democratic candidates nationwide won more than 4.7m votes than Republicans and narrowly held the chamber but under the new maps that will be in place, the Republican party would take control.

If Republicans aggressively maximize every advantage and crash through any of the usual guardrails and they have given every indication that they will theres little Democrats can do. And after a 2019 US supreme court decision declared partisan gerrymandering a non-justiciable political issue, the federal courts will be powerless as well.

Opinion:house Republicans Have Two Critical Advantages In 2022

Democrats hold the balance of power in Washington, D.C., but their margin is wafer-thin: Joe Biden is president, and the party controls both houses of Congress only very narrowly. Theyve already enacted $1.9 trillion of economic stimulus. Theyre with Republicans over the size of a bipartisan infrastructure bill. And theyre keen to pass a new voting rights law, although moderate Sen. Joe Manchin III might scuttle the effort.

Still, their time in the majority might be limited. We live in an era of bitter, closely divided elections. And in 2022, Republicans have two advantages that might soon give them the edge in the House.

The Republicans first advantage: The other party holds the White House. If Biden follows the path of other recent presidents, hell spend political capital, navigate crises and lose supporters in the process.

Barack Obama summarized this dynamic two years into his presidency: In the rush of activity, sometimes we lose track of the ways that we connected with folks that got us here in the first place. This is true of nearly every recent president. Ronald Reagan lost supporters as the 1981-82 recession tore through the economy. Obama alienated swing voters and energized tea party activists as he tried to advance the Affordable Care Act in Congress. And Bill Clinton lost voters when he attempted to pass a health-care reform bill of his own.

The GOPs second advantage: It draws the lines.

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Analysis Shows Gop Can Take Control Of Congress By Gerrymandering Just 4 States

Sanders Says He Wont Let Centrists Shrink $3.5T Bill: I Already Negotiated

Republicans might be able to take control of Congress in next years midterm races without needing to win over a single additional voter.

As Democratic senators scramble to piece together a compromised version of the For the People Act, an electoral reform and voting rights bill, a new study finds that the GOP could gerrymander its way to victory in the 2022 midterms.

An analysis of Census data from a Democratic-aligned data firm called TargetSmart, first reported by Mother Jones, found that Republicans could pick up between six to 13 seats in the House of Representatives through redistricting electoral maps in just four southern states alone Georgia, Florida, North Carolina and Texas. If Republicans take five seats in the 2022 midterms, it would result in the GOP winning a majority of seats in the House, as Democrats currently have a five-seat lead in that legislative chamber.

Put another way, the GOP could win the midterm elections if voters behave the same way that they did in congressional elections in 2020, simply if Republican-run state legislatures are able to redraw maps in their own favor.

Babe Didrikson Zaharias Wins Final Lpga Tournament Of Her Career

What was not included? Details on how these bills would be executed and what they would cost.

“It probably did not matter that it was vague on costs, and that was even an advantage,” Teske says. “The goals were big picture, and ones that many voters could understand, without getting intoand bogged down bythe details of budget costs, specific programs that might go away, etc.”

Divided Government In The United States

Republicans take control of U.S. Senate, retain House ...

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In the United States, divided government describes a situation in which one party controls the executive branch while another party controls one or both houses of the legislative branch.

Divided government is seen by different groups as a benefit or as an undesirable product of the model of governance used in the U.S. political system. Under said model, known as the separation of powers, the is divided into different branches. Each branch has separate and independent powers and areas of responsibility so that the powers of one branch are not in conflict with the powers associated with the others. However, the degree to which the president of the United States has control of often determines their political strength – such as the ability to pass sponsored legislation, ratify treaties, and have members and judges approved.

Early in the 19th century, divided government was rare, but since the 1970s it has become increasingly common.

When Obama Had Total Control Of Congress

The Reverend

Lies are easy to get away with if they are repeated often enough and given voice by many different people. Repeat a lie often enough and that lie often becomes conventional wisdom. Repeating a lie doesn’t change the lie into the truth, it changes the people hearing the repeated lie. They begin to accept the lie as truth. One huge example: ‘Iraq has WMD.’

Lies make it impossible for people to communicate with each other……lies make it impossible to, as the Villagers often talk about it, have a real “conversation.”

One particular lie, often stated by right-of-center advocates, is the statement….”if Barack Obama wanted to increase taxes on the rich, stop the wars, pass a budget…blah, blah…..he could have chosen to do so because he had “total control” of the House and Senate for two full years.”

Sometimes the “two full years” is omitted from the statement……but the lie is spread nevertheless, by the “total control of Congress” phrase.

Let’s clear that all up, shall we?

Starting January 2009, at the beginning of the 111th Congress, in the month that Barack Obama was inaugurated president, the House of Representatives was made up of 257 Democrats and 178 Republicans. There is no question that Democrats had total control in the House from 2009-2011.

But legislation does not become law without the Senate.

“Total control”, then, of the Senate requires 60 Democratic or Republican Senators.

*Chronology link

Senate Democrats And The Filibuster

Once again, Democrats fall short of the filibuster-proof 60-vote Senate majority by a whopping 10 votes.

The last time Democrats won a majority in the Senate was in 2008, when they rode Obamas coattails to victory. They had 59 votes in the Senate, far more than Democrats do now.

Obama was able to pull over a few Republican Senate votes in 2009 to pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act after the 2008 financial crisis. But on many other legislative priorities, McConnells Republican minority threw up a 60-vote barrier to passing most Democratic legislation.

McConnell admitted two years into the Obama era that he had to do everything he could to ensure the Obama presidency was one term. The former president wrote in his new memoir that the filibuster would prove to be the most chronic political headache of my presidency.

With President Obama, no matter how much outreach he tried to do with Congressional Republicans, there seemed to be absolutely no interest and no acceptance with what he was trying to do, Schiliro said. If congressional Republicans take that approach this time, it will be very difficult to get anything done.

That would break the Senate, Manchin told the . If you basically do away with the filibuster altogether for legislation, you wont have the Senate. Youre a glorified House. And I will not do that.

Democrats Lost A Long Hold On Congress

Democrats, meanwhile, characterized the plan as calling for radical changes and solutions that would make America worse off.

“They highlighted some of the more extreme elements and tried to show the damage it could cause to policies and institutions that had been in place for decades,” Teske says. “Some mocked it as the ‘Contract on America’not ‘with’as with a ‘hit job’ on the American people.”

And while Republicans won big at the ballot box that year, Teske says it was going to be a tough year for Democrats anyway, considering Clinton’s unpopularity, a weak economy and the history of midterms favoring the party not held by the president.

“But, the contract did show a coherent opposition plan that probably helped re-capture many of these seats,” he notes. “At the same time, pendulums do swing in American politics and after 60 years of pretty dominant Democratic control of both houses of Congress, there was probably going to be a change. But, it is probably fair to say that Gingrichs contract was in the right place, at the right time, for the Republican party.”

Which Congressional Action Was An Attempt By Radical Republicans To Advance Their Plan For Reconstruction

1867 Military Reconstruction ActThe 1867 Military Reconstruction Act, which encompassed the vision of Radical Republicans, set a new direction for Reconstruction in the South. Republicans saw this law, and three supplementary laws passed by Congress that year, called the Reconstruction Acts, as a way to deal with the disorder in the South.

READ: What is a lemming look like?

Current Leadership Of Key Offices

Eleven years of Democratic trifectas    Seventeen years of Republican trifectasScroll left and right on the table below to view more years.

Year
Who Runs the States
Report Background Main Page Part One: State Partisanship Partisanship Results Infographic Part Two: State Quality of Life Index Part Three: Overlaying Results
Part 1 Executive Summary State Partisanship Analysis Partisan Control of Governorships Partisan Control of State Legislatures Partisan Control of State Senates Partisan Control of State Houses State Government Trifectas Overall Partisan Control: Bright, Medium and Soft States Changes of Partisan Domination over 22 years Year-to-Year Changes in State Partisan Control Trifectas and Presidential Election Patterns Appendix A Appendix B
Part 2 Executive Summary State Quality of Life Index About the Index Overall Rankings Dramatic Changes from 1st Half to 2nd Half Individual Indicators
Part 3 Comparing Partisanship and the State Quality of Life Index Rankings Description of the data Trends and correlations Key Values for Fifty-State Regressions
State Reports

Republicans Set To Rebound Big In 2022 Midterms Unless

We are just 600 short days away from the 2022 midterm elections, which means it is the perfect time to handicap the Republicans chances to win back the House, Senate and prepare a serious challenge to President Biden

Patrick Joseph ToomeyBlack women look to build upon gains in coming electionsWatch live: GOP senators present new infrastructure proposalSasse rebuked by Nebraska Republican Party over impeachment vote already have Democrats scrambling to flip those seats in much easier electoral terrain.

As I noted in The Hill last month, Republicans are on the hook to defend 20 of their seats in 2022, while Team Blue has just 14 seats to hold, all in states won by Joe Biden in 2020. Since March is a perfect month for sports analogies, a good defense provides for a strong offense when the status quo is Democrats retaining control of the upper chamber. While there is clearly a power in incumbency, FiveThirtyEight suggests that senate vacancies are actually more of a mixed bag. In election cycles since 1974, the party with the most Senate retirements has actually gained seats just as often as it has lost them. For every year like 2008, when more Republicans than Democrats retired and Republicans lost seats accordingly, theres a year like 2012, when a whopping seven Democrats retired yet the party picked up two Senate seats.

How these various Rs play out in the next few months will determine if the Rs are successful in 2022.

How Republicans Could Rig The Battle For Control Of Congress

The Atlantic

Democrats face a daunting future of severe Republican gerrymandering that could flip control of the House in 2022 and suppress diverse younger generations political influence for years to come, according to a new study released today. Those findings underscore the stakes in Democrats efforts to pass national legislation combatting such electoral manipulation.

The four big states to watch are Texas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina, where the GOP enjoys complete control over the redistricting process, says Michael Li, a senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice and the author of the new report on how congressional redistricting could unfold following the 2020 census. Those four states, which are seat-rich and where Republicans control the process, could decide who controls the next Congress, he told me.

Over the longer term, Republican states could impose gerrymanders that prevent the nations growing nonwhite population from building political power commensurate with its numberseven though voters of color accounted for about four in five newly eligible voters in the past decade, the study found.

When Senate Democrats like Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and Feinstein oppose getting rid of the filibuster, Pfeiffer added, they are deciding to make it more likely that their time in the majority is ever so brief.

The Midterms Introduced Extreme Divisive Politics

GOP keeps control of Senate, Dems in position to take ...

As for the contract’s lasting impact? Most of its ideas and proposals did not pass Congress, or were vetoed by Clinton, and, according to Teske, the ones that did pass were not radical departures and instead relatively minor in scope. But it did put Republicans back in power in Congress, which they’ve largely held onto in the years since.

“The Gingrich approach of extreme right ideas, combined with a scorched-earth personal level of politics in attacking opponentslater seen in Clintons investigations and impeachmenthas also had a major impact on American politics” he says. “It helped bring a much more ‘win at all costs’ mentality, and a divisiveness that persists today.”

Opinion:the House Looks Like A Gop Lock In 2022 But The Senate Will Be Much Harder

Redistricting will take place in almost every congressional district in the next 18 months. The party of first-term presidents usually loses seats in midterms following their inauguration President Barack Obamas Democrats lost 63 seats in 2010 and President Donald Trumps Republicans lost 40 in 2018 but the redistricting process throws a wrench into the gears of prediction models.

President George W. Bush saw his party add nine seats in the House in 2002. Many think this was a consequence of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America nearly 14 months earlier, but the GOP, through Republican-led state legislatures, controlled most of the redistricting in the two years before the vote, and thus gerrymandering provided a political benefit. Republicans will also have a firm grip on redistricting ahead of the 2022 midterms.

The Brennan Center has that the GOP will enjoy complete control of drawing new boundaries for 181 congressional districts, compared with a maximum of 74 for Democrats, though the final numbers could fluctuate once the pandemic-delayed census is completed. Gerrymandering for political advantage has its critics, but both parties engage in it whenever they get the opportunity. In 2022, Republicans just have much better prospects. Democrats will draw districts in Illinois and Massachusetts to protect Democrats, while in Republican-controlled states such as Florida, Ohio and Texas, the GOP will bring the redistricting hammer down on Democrats.

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