The diminishing path to a Democratic House majority runs through California
PoliticoHudson, in a Wednesday interview on Fox News, credited the party’s performance largely to President-elect Donald Trump, calling him “a net positive everywhere across the country for Republicans.” One Republican working closely on House races believes that, at worst, the party will lose only one seat, and that the GOP could pick up a seat or two. “This is a lot of anxiety for folks who are going to have to make come-from-behind wins in order to pick up these congressional districts.” The stakes were especially high in the blue bastion of California, Mitchell said, “because basically the only thing that’s going to insulate the state from Donald Trump’s most severe policy proposals, like mass deportations, is going to be whether or not one of these seats goes Democratic.” Amid the tussling over which party has the upper hand, there is a rare point of agreement between both sides: It’s going to take a while. “We know that there’s just a lot of ballots left to count,” California Rep. Pete Aguilar, the third-ranking House Democrat, told POLITICO. The party infamously swept seven GOP-held seats in 2018, only after a marked “blue shift” of late-processed mail and election day ballots — an outcome then-Republican Speaker Paul Ryan derided as “bizarre.” “We had a lot of wins that night, and three weeks later we lost basically every contested California race,” Ryan said after his party’s drubbing in the 2018 midterms.