Tag: Republican House

The state of the battle for the House of Representatives, explained

Republicans are playing whack-a-mole in their struggle to keep the chamber.

Paul Ryan at the Capitol on September 13, 2018. Credit: Astrid Riecken, Getty Images

Three weeks before the 2018 midterms, more than a dozen Republican-held House seats appear to have tipped toward Democrats — and dozens more are in play too, according to polls and expert race ratings. Meanwhile, only a handful of Democrat-held seats appear to be in danger of flipping to the GOP.

The magic number for Democrats is 24: that is, they need to pick up, on net, 24 seats from Republicans to cement a House majority.

Currently, there are not yet that many individual contests in which Democrats are believed to have a solid advantage over GOP candidates. If we exclude toss-up contests and look only at how many races are at least leaning toward flipping, the Cook Political Report currently has Democrats favored to gain 15 seats on net. FiveThirtyEight has them clearly favored to net around 22, which would be agonizingly close.

Yet here’s the thing: There are many more remaining toss-up and other competitive contests — and they’re overwhelmingly in Republican-held districts.

View the complete October 16 article by Andrew Prokop on the Vox.com website here.

A day of chaos at the Capitol as House Republicans back down on ethics changes

 

The following article by Robert Costa, Mike DeBonis and Philip Rucker was posted on the Washington Post website January 3, 2017:

A day of pageantry to open the 115th Congress and usher in a new period of Republican governance was overtaken Tuesday by an embarrassing reversal on ethics oversight, with the GOP gripped by internal division and many lawmakers seeking to shield themselves from extensive scrutiny.

The 19 hours of tumult was set in motion the night before behind closed doors at the Longworth House Office Building, where Republican lawmakers decided over the objections of Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) to amend House rules to effectively gut the independent Office of Congressional Ethics. Continue reading “A day of chaos at the Capitol as House Republicans back down on ethics changes”