
House control, often overlooked, could be deeply consequential post-election
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Most political discussion about the forthcoming elections has focused on the presidency or the battle for Senate control. But the House of Representatives is up for grabs, too, and the outcome is very much in doubt.
Who wins control matters a lot, as the fate of a range of policies hangs in the balance.
Republicans currently control a very narrow 221-214 majority. Democrats need only gain four seats to win the 218 needed to elect a speaker.
Each party is primarily targeting districts currently held by the party whose presidential candidate lost that seat four years ago. That’s because both parties correctly believe that their House candidates have a better chance to win over someone who is likely to vote for their party’s presidential candidate.
This calculus superficially favors Democrats, as they hold only eight Trump-won seats, while Republicans control 19 seats that President Joe Biden won in 2020.
But drawing firm conclusions from the 2020 presidential vote exaggerates the Democrats’ chances. Ten of these seats are in parts of either California or New York where the Republican candidate for governor carried the district in 2022. California Republicans, in particular, regularly run well ahead of former President Donald Trump in legislative races.
Both parties are also targeting seats where Biden or Trump won only narrowly. Each of those seats are so finely balanced—in which the winning candidate carried it by less than a point—that one can easily see them shifting parties depending on what happens at the presidential level.
That’s increasingly what we see happening: members of Congress do not typically have strong enough identities to cause voters to split their tickets. The share of split-result House seats—districts that voted for one party for president and the other for House member—is at a near 100-year low.
This means control of the House is closely tied to the presidential popular vote result.
If Vice President Kamala Harris wins the popular vote by three points or more, then Democrats have a fair-to-good chance to narrowly retake control of the House. That’s because of the straight-ticket propensities noted earlier. If she wins by three points or more, the Democrat should be favored to win any district that she carries by that much or more, as very few Republicans outside of California have consistently demonstrated the ability to run that far ahead of Trump. Republicans like Rep. Don Bacon (NE-2; Biden +6) and Rep. Brandon Williams (NY-22; Biden +11) will be especially vulnerable.
If she wins by only two points, however, that will be a nearly 2.5-point drop from Biden’s 2020 margin. That would likely move at least five more seats that Democrats currently hold into the Trump column, while making others more vulnerable. It will be hard to see a map where Democrats retake control when the number of Trump-carried seats increases.
While voters may associate the impact of elections with the presidential winner, many of the real policy implications are decided by who wins the legislative race. That’s especially true this year, in part because the individual income tax provisions of Trump’s 2017 tax cut bill will expire in 2025.
Democratic control will surely mean higher taxes, as well as other provisions of the bill being held hostage by the new House. Republican control would likely extend the tax cut provisions.
But there are further economic consequences beyond those headline issues. Chief amongst those are the future of tariffs and trade.
The House is constitutionally required to introduce bills levying taxes or increasing revenue, and Trump’s universal tariff proposal may require congressional approval. This was the general practice for most of America’s history, when some type of protective tariff was broadly accepted by the public. A return to that doctrine could require a return to Congress getting deeply involved deciding what goods are subject to tariff and at what rates.
There’s also the possibility that the Supreme Court will force Congress to adopt that role anyway. Trump may try to impose universal tariffs under authority purportedly delegated by Congress under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, but the conservative Supreme Court’s jurisprudence strongly suggest it wants to cut back on the executive branch’s use of such power.
The Supreme Court could find that any tariffs promulgated by Trump exceed his delegated authority. He would then clearly have to turn to Congress to pass what the courts denied him. A Republican-controlled Congress would be hard-pressed to oppose their president on what is arguably one of his top priorities.
The shape of American industrial policy also likely turns on House control. Democrats clearly want to use industrial policy to steer the nation toward fighting climate change. Republicans would favor reshoring manufacturing more broadly in the name of national security and reinvigorating forgotten communities. That will certainly include levying tariffs as Trump wants, as well as increasing government subsidies and targeted tax breaks for a wide variety of industries and sectors.
In short, House control matters a lot. How these under-the-radar races evolve over the next four weeks could end up deciding how the American economy evolves—or doesn’t evolve—over the next few years.
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