Posted November 10, 2022 at 2:30pm
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“No one ever said this thing was going to be easy.”
That’s what Tom Emmer, the Minnesota Republican who chaired the House GOP campaign arm this cycle and in 2020, told reporters Wednesday.
It’s not the kind of jubilant messaging the House GOP was hoping for after Tuesday’s elections. Even if his party gets the gavels in the 118th Congress, Emmer still doesn’t emerge entirely unscathed, since so many in the GOP were banking on a big red-wave win that didn’t materialize.
The 2022 midterms, with their strange twists and unlikely battlegrounds, didn’t turn out the way either party chairman would have wanted. But at least Emmer won reelection. His counterpart over at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Sean Patrick Maloney, couldn’t even do that; he lost to Republican Mike Lawler after a redistricting drama prompted him to run for a seat in which 75 percent of the voters had not seen him on the ballot before.
These gigs chairing the campaign arms are high-risk, high-reward ventures that require the utmost elegance in setting, and managing, expectations. Emmer, who intends to seek the whip job if his party wins control of the chamber once all the ballots are counted, added: “I always said that all I could guarantee was that we're going to win the majority.” Even that isn’t certain yet, though it does seem that Republicans are on a path to win the House majority by a skinny margin.
Emmer did not publicly utter the number of seats he expected House Republicans to pick up. Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who chaired the National Republican Senatorial Committee this cycle, told Niels Lesniewski that he expected his party to win 52-plus seats. If the rest of the nation had followed Florida’s trend, maybe that would have happened, but it’s looking unachievable.
It's not yet clear how the House GOP’s likely small victory will affect Emmer’s leadership ambitions, and he can always remind his colleagues that he beat expectations in 2020 when his party made gains and no members lost reelection. We also don’t know what’s in store for Scott, whom former President Donald Trump has suggested should challenge Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. But we do know they, unlike Maloney, don’t have to move out of their offices and into those cubbies for departing members.
Starting gate
Georgia heads to OT: Both Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker had hoped to avoid a Dec. 6 runoff, but that’s what is going to happen, and both campaigns — as well as national party infrastructure — are gearing up. The DSCC announced a $7 million infusion of field organizing support Thursday morning.
Fun facts on the next Congress: One is a twin. One is a senator’s son. One is Gen Z. One is the first woman from her state to be sent to Congress and the last woman to hold that distinction. Paul V. Fontelo looks at some of the defining traits of the 118th Congress.
Takeaways: While waiting for the final results of this week’s elections, your At The Races team had a number of takeaways from the results we do have this week.
Bookmark these: Here are the winners, so far, of the most competitive Senate races of the cycle. For other incoming senators who won easily on Tuesday, the primary was the real battle. We also kept running lists of how vulnerable House incumbents fared and who won the many open House seats.
Like beating the spread?: With Democrats not losing by as much as predicted, President Joe Biden’s post-election news conference was part victory lap and part olive branch to the Republicans.
Back on PACs: After suspending donations to Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election, another collection of PACs, including those of Amazon and Caterpillar, restarted contributions ahead of the midterm elections, campaign finance disclosures show.
Leaderspeak: On election night, House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy was all ready to be the next speaker, CQ Roll Call’s Lindsey McPherson reported, while Niels reported on Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer laying out an agenda for 2023.
ICYMI
A very messy House, indeed: Control of the House may come down to just a few members and, after any recounts and court fights, disputes over who belongs in the 118th Congress on Jan. 3 will be decided by the House itself. And that’s when, legal experts tell CQ Roll Call’s Jim Saksa, a determined minority could cry havoc and let slip the dogs of procedural war, objecting to seating some contested members-elect and throwing the chamber into utter chaos. Just something to think about in case you miss your pre-election anxiety.
Return of the “badass” Democratic lawmakers: A group of self-described “badass” women with national security backgrounds largely survived the midterm elections, CQ Roll Call’s John Donnelly reports. Of the five defense-oriented Democratic women first elected in 2018, Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., was the only one to lose her race.
Disinformation desk: Glitchy Arizona tabulation machines and an attack on Mississippi websites did not affect voting but did generate a lot of online angst, CQ Roll Call’s Gopal Ratnam writes. He also spoke to technical experts who said the biggest threat to systems is people saying things that are not true.
Health care on the ballot: CQ Roll Call’s ace health team reports that backers of abortion rights saw wins in the five states where referendums were on the ballot this year. South Dakota voters also chose to expand Medicaid eligibility, while voters were split on initiatives related to certain drugs.
Seeking other office with mixed success: Sixteen House members are leaving after seeking other offices this year, CQ Roll Call’s Aidan Quigley reports. Three are moving across the Capitol to the Senate, while Rep. Anthony G. Brown will be Maryland’s attorney general and Rep. Karen Bass was trailing in a tight race for mayor of LA. Others lost races on Tuesday or in primaries earlier this year.
Doyle debrief: Retiring Democratic Rep. Mike Doyle won’t be succeeded by a Republican of the same name. He talked about all the Doyles in the Pittsburgh area and other issues over his 28-year career in the House in an exit interview with Saksa.
What’s next: CQ Roll Call’s John T. Bennett writes that with the potential for divided government comes an expectation of Republican-led investigations into Biden’s administration and family, but few hints about what potential policy changes are on the table.
WA03 update: After defeating GOP Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler in the primary for Washington’s 3rd District, Republican Joe Kent, a hard-line conservative, was trailing his Democratic opponent Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in what had previously been a race rated Solid GOP by Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales. She was leading by almost 5 percentage points with about 66 percent of the ballots counted, according to The Associated Press around midday today. Herrera Beutler voted for Trump’s impeachment after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and Kent had the endorsement of the former president. Perez owns an auto repair business.
Democracy project: The Bipartisan Policy Center this week launched a democracy program aimed at strengthening American institutions, the group said. Six projects are part of the overall program: elections, digital democracy, campus free expression, presidential leadership, structural democracy and congressional exchange. The last will aim for members of Congress from the opposite parties to visit each other’s districts.
What we’re reading
Stu says: Stuart Rothenberg sums up what we should think about all the talk about a “red wave” and Democratic senators in trouble in New Hampshire and Washington: Fuhgeddaboudit. Voters decide, not pollsters.
From our opinion pages: Columnist Mary C. Curtis looks at who gets the blame and credit after the midterms, while columnist Walter Shapiro analyzes how voters make their decisions and economists Jeff Dominitz and Charles F. Manski try to explain the limits of what polling can do.
You don't know him from Adam: The Colorado Sun profiles Adam Frisch, the Democrat who may oust Colorado GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert in a race that wasn't targeted by either party.
#PASen: Democrat John Fetterman flipped a Senate seat by defeating Republican Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania’s high-profile race. Politico talked to his team about how the campaign did it, including a late summer decision to spend money meant for the final weeks of the campaign to compete with GOP outside groups on the airwaves.
The count: 2
Assuming Alaska remains Republican regardless of who wins, that’s how many of the three remaining uncalled Senate races — Arizona, Georgia and Nevada — either party needs to win to take majority control. The chamber next year stands so far at 48D, 49R. Democrats need to control only 50 seats because Vice President Kamala Harris breaks ties. Republicans need to control 51 to rule.
Nathan's notes
A special At the Races dispatch from Nathan L. Gonzales: With all of the pre-election consternation about polling and angst about projections, it's surprising that there weren't more surprises. Outside of a potential loss by Boebert in Colorado's 3rd District, everything else has gone as expected. I am surprised that Democrats collectively won so many of the closest and most competitive House races. But looking at the Toss-up races individually, I'm not surprised a Democrat won them. It looked like Republicans were getting a late surge from independent voters who disapproved of Biden and were concerned about the economy. But that didn't happen, and Democrats won toss-up races by at least a 2-to-1 margin, and that drove down Republicans' net gain. Instead of gaining 13 to 30 seats, it's going to be closer to 4 to 11 seats, including the narrow possibility that Democrats maintain control of the House. That's the surprise. The Senate has gone as expected. The final Senate result will fall within our preelection range of a Republican gain of two seats to a Democratic gain of a seat. The fight for the Senate was likely to come down to Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona, and that's exactly what happened.
Candidate confessions
Sen. Ted Cruz says his wife, Heidi, was not happy with him for spending so much time on a cross-country bus tour promoting Republican candidates [many of whom lost].
“I’ve been doing politics now a decade. She lit into me towards the end of that bus tour at a level I’ve never seen, because I had not been home in a long time. I was on the road, doing a rally, doing a rally in Florida,” the Texas Republican said during a post-election taping of his “Verdict” podcast. “You know, I missed my daughter Catherine’s 12th birthday because I was out doing a rally to save this country. Now, that hurts. I hate missing my daughter's birthday.”
He also said he was supposed to take Catherine to a Houston Astros World Series game but couldn’t make that either.
Shop talk: Kevin Lata
Lata was the campaign manager for Maxwell Alejandro Frost, a 25-year-old Florida Democrat who won an open House seat on Tuesday and will become the first Gen Z member of Congress.
Starting out: Lata, 32, was in his mid-20s when he was hired as an organizer in northern New Hampshire for Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign. "I was very bad at my job initially, and every night I would go to bed thinking Bernie's going to lose because of me,'' Lata recalled. "When you start a new thing, there's obviously a learning curve, but I just kept at it." He says he wound up as one of the higher-performing organizers on the team, and Sanders ended up in first place in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. "We won by 20 some points, so it all worked out, at least in New Hampshire."
Most unforgettable campaign moment: "Helping to elect the first Gen Z member of Congress is something I don't think I'll ever forget,'' Lata said. In the spring of 2021, Lata was living in Mexico when Frost reached out and asked him to work on the campaign. The heavily Democratic district, which is centered in Orlando, is currently represented by Val B. Demings. When she opted for a Senate run, 10 Democrats jumped into the race. Initially, it was a tough climb: Few took Frost seriously because of his age, Lata said. "We were at 5 percent in the polls" two and a half months before the Aug. 23 primary, Lata said. But Lata said he knew Frost would win the primary as soon as early voting numbers came in and he was ahead by 3 percentage points. Winning the general election this week brought another unforgettable moment: the congratulatory call Frost received from Biden.
Biggest campaign regret: “On campaigns, it’s very easy to look at moments and say you should have done this or that,’’ Lata said. “The fundamentals are at the core of a good campaign: doing the call time and building a really good team. That trumps any good decision or bad decision you’re going to make.”
Unconventional wisdom: Focus on fundraising and meeting people where they are, Lata said. "It's probably very conventional wisdom, but it's something that can be very hard to do. Put in as much call time as possible. If you focus hard on that, then a lot of other pieces will fall into place." Money, he noted, is "the metric by which people assess strength, viability and your potential chance to be successful. We would start the day at 9 a.m. and we would do call time until 5 p.m., then we would do campaign events and then Maxwell would go til 1 a.m., and we'd do this every single day." Raising money is one of the less appealing aspects of politics, Lata acknowledged. "Everybody wants to focus on the speeches and the policy stuff, and all of that is really important, but everything else becomes a lot easier if you make sure fundraising is a big priority, especially for younger folks and untraditional candidates."
Coming up
Members-elect, and even some candidates in races that have not been settled, will be descending on Capitol Hill next week as new member orientation begins. Plus, the lame-duck session of Congress gets underway as departing House members vacate their office space and relocate to much less glamorous parts of the House office buildings.
Photo finish
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