The contests have little in common, other than the fact that they are either very close or in districts that have been slow to count ballots.
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Control of the House of Representatives will be decided by the outcomes of around 20 races.
Control of the House of Representatives will be decided in the coming days or maybe weeks — sorry — by the outcomes of around 20 races. More than half of them are in California, and the rest are in a smattering of other states, including Arizona, Colorado and Oregon.
These contests have little in common, other than the fact that they are either very close or in districts that have been slow to count ballots. Some, like California’s 22nd Congressional District, were always expected to go down to the wire; in others, like Colorado’s Third District, a Republican incumbent who was widely believed to be safe has run into unexpectedly fierce competition. A few races might not even be that close, but there are too many uncounted ballots to know yet.
Understand the Outcomes of the 2022 Midterm Elections
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What we know. It seemed as if the conditions were ripe for a red wave in the 2022 midterms, but in the end Republicans generated no more than a red ripple, leading to an improbable, still-undecided election. Here’s what the results tell us so far:
Biden beat the odds. President Biden had the best midterms of any president in 20 years, avoiding the losses his predecessors endured and maintaining the Democrats’ narrow hold on the Senate, which provides him with a critical guardrail against Republicans should they win the House.
G.O.P. faces a reckoning. A thin Republican majority in the House appears likely, but a poor midterms showing has the party wrestling with what went wrong: Was it bad candidates, bad messaging or the electoral anchor that appeared to be dragging the G.O.P. down, Donald J. Trump?
Trump under fire. Mr. Trump has faced unusual public attacks from within the G.O.P. after a string of losses by his handpicked candidates. There are also signs of an effort to inch the party away from the former president ahead of his expected announcement of a third White House bid.
Abortion mattered. In the first major election since the fall of Roe v. Wade, abortion rights broke through, as Democrats seized on the issue to hold off a red wave. In all five states where abortion-related questions were on the ballot, voters chose to protect access or reject further limits on it.
Voters rejected election deniers. Every 2020 election denier who sought to become the top election official in a critical battleground state lost at the polls this year. Voters roundly rejected extreme partisans who promised to restrict voting and overhaul the electoral process.
Ticket-splitters made a comeback. While ticket-splitting has declined substantially in recent elections, some voters seemed more inclined to support candidates of different parties this year, emphasizing candidate quality over partisan identity.
Based on what has been counted so far, where the remaining ballots come from and how they were cast — by mail or in person, for instance — Republicans have a wider path to a majority, with more room for error, than Democrats do. But a path for Democrats does still exist.
Here is a look at what remains on the board. These are not all of the races in which The Associated Press has yet to determine a winner, but they are the ones where the outcome is least certain and where a House majority is most likely to be won or lost.
Races that were always going to be close
Incumbents in trouble
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Representative David Valadao is no stranger to close elections: He lost his seat in 2018 and regained it in 2020, by less than a percentage point each time. Now the race, in California’s 22nd District, is a cliffhanger for the third cycle in a row. Mr. Valadao is ahead of State Assemblyman Rudy Salas, a Democrat, by five percentage points, but only about half the votes are counted, and there is a lot of Democratic territory left to report.
Mr. Valadao, one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Donald J. Trump and one of only two to survive his primary, is the son of a farmer; Mr. Salas is the son of a farmworker. Economic issues, especially related to farming, dominated the campaign in this Central Valley district that relies on agriculture, but abortion was also an issue: Mr. Valadao is a co-sponsor of a bill that would define life as beginning at fertilization, and Mr. Salas sought to use that against him.
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California’s 27th District is home to the third race between Representative Mike Garcia, a Republican, and Christy Smith, a Democrat. Mr. Garcia won the first two — a special election and general election in 2020 — and he has a good chance of doing so again, with only two-thirds of ballots counted but a lead of nearly 15,000 votes. But because of the number of outstanding ballots, The Associated Press has not called the race, and it is still mathematically possible for Ms. Smith to catch up.
The district, in Los Angeles County, elected a Democrat in 2018 — Katie Hill, who resigned after being accused of having a sexual relationship with a staff member — and President Biden won it handily. But Mr. Garcia, a former Navy fighter pilot, has proved a strong candidate against Ms. Smith, a former Education Department policy analyst and former state assemblywoman. National Democrats pulled back from the race in October, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House Majority PAC canceling more than $2 million in ad reservations there.
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Representative Michelle Steel, who was part of a wave of Republican women elected to the House in 2020, had a roughly 12,000-vote lead over her Democratic opponent, Jay Chen, in California’s 45th District as of Monday afternoon. But about 30 percent of the vote was still outstanding, and that portion is likely to narrow the margin significantly.
Ms. Steel, a former county supervisor who is Korean American, and Mr. Chen, a local businessman who is Taiwanese American, both worked to court Asian American voters in a district where they are influential. Inflation and crime were focal points, particularly given the increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans. And in Orange County, which used to be a Republican stronghold but has been divided in recent election cycles, it is no surprise to see a tight race.
Open seats
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California’s 13th District, a newly drawn area in the Central Valley, leans Democratic on paper: Mr. Biden would have carried it by 11 points in 2020. At the same time, though, it would have voted last year to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, who easily fended off the challenge statewide.
In the House race, a Republican farmer, John Duarte, faced a Democratic member of the State Assembly, Adam Gray, who has called himself a “radical centrist.” Both championed water rights for farmers. A majority of adults in the district are Hispanic, a group that has traditionally supported Democrats. Fewer than 100 votes separate the two.
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New York’s 22nd District, based around Syracuse, became one of the most competitive in the state after redistricting and the retirement of Representative John Katko, a Republican, who represented much of the district in its earlier incarnation. The seat is in an upstate region that Democratic presidential candidates have carried, and it was long a target of Democrats. Mr. Katko’s retirement seemed to be the opening they had waited for.
The race matched Brandon Williams, a Trump-aligned Republican business owner, against Francis Conole, a moderate Democrat who is a Naval Academy graduate and Iraq war veteran. Republicans, who were strong in New York congressional races, flipping four Democratic seats, are eyeing Mr. Williams’s narrow lead with optimism.
ImageElection workers processing ballots in Phoenix on Sunday. The winners of two Arizona House races are not yet known.Credit…Rebecca Noble for The New York Times
The more surprising battlegrounds
Incumbents in trouble
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No major forecaster predicted that Representative Lauren Boebert would be so vulnerable in Colorado’s Third District, but with more than 95 percent of the estimated votes counted, she was leading her Democratic challenger, Adam Frisch, by only about 1,000 votes late Monday afternoon. Given how few are left to count, she has a good chance of surviving, but it’s not over yet, and Mr. Frisch’s campaign is running an intensive effort to have voters complete an official curing process if their ballots were rejected for issues like signature mismatches so that they will be counted.
The district leans Republican, even more so after redistricting, and Mr. Frisch, a former member of the Aspen City Council, was not well known before he entered the race. But Ms. Boebert is one of the biggest far-right provocateurs in Congress, and in an election in which voters rejected many extreme candidates, that appears to have been a liability.
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Representative Ken Calvert, in California’s 41st District, is another Republican incumbent who was widely believed to be safe but is now locked in a close race. As of Monday, he had a lead of about 2.6 percentage points over his Democratic opponent, Will Rollins. But only about three-quarters of ballots had been counted, and what remains could be Democratic enough for Mr. Rollins to take the lead.
Mr. Calvert has been in Congress for 30 years and is accustomed to winning re-election by double digits. Much of the shift this year is attributable to new borders; his seat was redrawn to include Palm Springs, which has a large and Democratic-leaning L.G.B.T.Q. community. Mr. Rollins, a former federal prosecutor, is gay, and Mr. Calvert has long opposed gay rights legislation, though he voted this year for a federal bill to recognize same-sex marriages.
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Arizona’s First District, yoking relatively liberal Scottsdale to conservative Paradise Valley and other communities in northeast Phoenix, includes most of the region that Representative David Schweikert represented before maps were redrawn. Mr. Schweikert was the only Republican in Arizona’s congressional delegation to accept the state’s Electoral College votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr., but he received a surprise endorsement in his primary from Mr. Trump. He is seeking a seventh term against Jevin Hodge, a Democrat who oversees a Head Start program and would be Arizona’s first Black congressman.
The seat has the highest share of white residents of voting age in a rapidly diversifying state, and it includes some of Arizona’s wealthiest communities. Mr. Schweikert and Mr. Hodge are separated by less than three-tenths of a percentage point.
Open seats
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Arizona’s Sixth District, which runs from Tucson to the New Mexico line, features the sole Republican in an Arizona House race who did not receive a Trump endorsement: Juan Ciscomani, a former aide to Gov. Doug Ducey, who pushed back on claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
The Democrat, Kirsten Engel, a former state senator, ran on abortion access and water issues. Mr. Ciscomani leaned into the threat of drugs from the U.S.-Mexico border. Redistricting made this majority-white seat less competitive, and somewhat more favorable to Republicans, but less than a percentage point separates the two candidates, with 89 percent of the estimated votes counted.
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California’s 450-mile-long inland Third District links the Democratic-leaning suburbs of Sacramento to conservative communities east of the Sierra Nevada. It is 80 percent white, and registered Republicans outnumber Democrats. But with nearly half the votes remaining to be counted, the Republican candidate is leading by six percentage points.
Kermit Jones, the Democrat, is a former Navy flight surgeon who campaigned on a federal fire insurance plan in a region that has been devastated by wildfires made worse by climate change. The Trump-endorsed Republican, Kevin Kiley, is a state assembly member who called for a more secure southern border and voted against a ballot measure that easily passed on Election Day to add abortion rights to the state constitution.
Source: nytimes.com
