2024’s House Races Are As Close As the Presidential Contest

Hakeem Jeffries could be the sole legislative obstacle to a Trump 2.0 agenda. Photo: Tom Brenner/Getty Images

While it’s true that the consequences of a dead-even presidential contest are difficult to overestimate, they will be enhanced or eroded significantly by the support, or lack thereof, the 47th president enjoys on Capitol Hill. Thanks to a wildly favorable landscape, Republicans are very likely to flip control of the Senate in November. That means control of the House could determine if President Donald Trump has a governing trifecta with the power to do most of what Republicans want legislatively, or if President Kamala Harris has any leverage other than a veto pen in dealings with Congress. It could matter even earlier than Inauguration Day if Team Trump winds up trying to utilize a newly elected GOP congressional leadership to tamper with the presidential results as he attempted in 2020.

Republicans enter the 2024 House elections with the narrowest of majorities: 220 seats out of 435, with Democrats holding 212 along with three vacant seats (two previously held by Democrats, one by Republicans). Re-redistricting by legislative fiat or court order has reshaped the playing field a bit, with the GOP sure to pick up three seats in North Carolina and Democrats gaining a seat in Alabama and one in Louisiana. But the faintest of national trends could either hand the House to Democrats or solidify the GOP’s control.

Thanks to a combination of long-time gerrymandering and partisan polarization, the battleground of competitive House races is not as extensive as you might imagine in a nation as evenly divided as it is right now. According to the Cook Political Report, probably the most authoritative election handicappers, there are currently 42 highly competitive House races (rated either tossups or leaning in one direction or the other). That’s compared to 59 such races in 2020 and 64 in 2022. Of this cycle’s 42 competitive races, 26 are toss-ups; ten lean Democratic; and six lean Republican. If the “leaners” all go the way they are leaning and the toss-up races split down the middle, Republicans would again emerge with 220 seats, a spare three-seat majority. Other forecasts slice and dice the close races a little differently and produce Democratic-leaning projections (CNalysis, for example, gives Democrats a 51.3 percent probability of controlling the House).

One reason it’s difficult to project the outcome is that a disproportionate share of competitive races involve Republican incumbents running in deep-blue California and in New York. Indeed, five seats each in those two states are controlled by Republicans in districts won by Joe Biden in 2020. On the one hand, in an election as close and as polarized as this one, you might expect split-ticket voting to decline and some of these Republicans to lose. On the other hand, there are signs that Trump may improve his 2020 performance in both California and New York even if he loses again nationally, reducing some of the pressure on his ticket mates. And there are local complications as well, particularly in New York, where the Democratic governor is unpopular, the Democratic mayor is in the midst of a major scandal, and Democrats are divided by the Israel-Gaza war.

There has been a recent pro-Democratic trend in the preeminent national House polling indicator, the so-called generic congressional ballot, which typically asks voters which party they want to control the U.S. House. It is an approximation of the national House popular vote, which in all but rare exceptions is in accord with the party winning a majority of seats. In the FiveThirtyEight averages, Kamala Harris’s replacement of Joe Biden as presidential nominee pretty clearly helped Democrats take the lead on the generic ballot; they now lead Republicans by a modest but consistent 1.6 percent (47.0 to 45.4 percent).

Democrats have also been doing well on the fundraising circuit. As Politico explains, while Democratic House candidates in recent cycles have regularly outspent their Republican opponents, GOP-aligned super-PACs have more than made up the difference — but not this time:

Big donors are flooding the fight for control of the House — and, in the final stretch, Democrats have been outraising Republicans.

It’s a stunning reversal: Republican super PACs have been dominant in recent cycles and crucial to helping candidates who have struggled to raise as much as their Democratic opponents. But now that advantage has disappeared in the House.

The best bet is probably still House results that reflect the presidential results, particularly if Trump wins. No party has ever lost the White House and flipped the House in the same election. But in theory we could see an entirely unprecedented triple flip of House, Senate, and White House, leading not only to a divided government but one with new leadership at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. In some respects, that would be a fitting end to this wildly unpredictable election year. But it would make Speaker-elect Hakeem Jeffries the sole legislative obstacle to Trump’s scary agenda, perhaps with some help from the Senate filibuster if Republicans choose to leave it in place.