Republicans won the House. Now comes the hard part.

We were expecting a close election for the U.S. House of Representatives — and that’s exactly what we got. It took until Wednesday, Nov. 13 — eight days after Election Day — for ABC News to report that Republicans are projected to hold onto the chamber. And while we don’t yet know what the exact seat margin will be, we do know that it will be another small Republican majority — which could make it difficult to pass much of President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda.

How many seats will Republicans win?

As of Wednesday at 2:30 p.m. Eastern, ABC News is reporting that Republicans have won at least 218 seats in the next House and Democrats have won at least 208.

We still don’t know the winner in nine seats, five of which Democrats currently lead in and are likely to prevail in. That would take them up to 213 seats. Of the other four seats, Republicans look favored in Iowa’s 1st District, where Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks’s 802-vote lead is likely to hold up even if Democrats request a recount, and Alaska’s at-large district, where Republican Nick Begich has a large enough lead that it will probably withstand the redistributions that happen as part of ranked-choice voting on Nov. 20. However, there is genuine suspense over who will win California’s 13th and 45th districts; Republicans currently have more votes counted there, but Democrats have been closing the gap as more ballots have been counted.

Add it all up, and we expect that Republicans will finish with a House majority in the range of 220 to 222 seats. That’s virtually unchanged from the 221-214 majority that they went into the election with.

Republicans’ path to victory

That doesn’t mean there wasn’t some churn under the surface, though. So far, Republicans have flipped seven seats from blue to red, and Democrats have flipped six seats from red to blue.

There are three clear explanations for most of these flips. First, five of these seats were virtually predestined to change hands because they were redrawn to be safely Republican or Democratic. In North Carolina, Republicans enacted a new congressional map that was heavily biased toward their party and turned three Democratic-held districts — the 6th, 13th and 14th — deep red. Alabama and Louisiana also adopted new congressional maps after the Supreme Court affirmed that the Voting Rights Act requires states to draw districts where nonwhite voters are the dominant voting bloc whenever reasonably possible. As a consequence, Alabama’s 2nd District and Louisiana’s 6th District went from majority-white, solidly Republican seats to majority-Black, solidly Democratic seats.

Second, Democrats flipped a handful of seats in New York. The Empire State was also redistricted earlier this year, but its map didn’t dramatically change. Instead, these flips can be chalked up to the fact that New York Republicans won several House seats in 2022 that they had no business holding, based on the districts’ partisanships. That year, a localized red wave hit New York, carrying former Rep. Lee Zeldin to within 6 percentage points of the governorship and helping Republicans flip four House seats. As a result, Republicans this year were defending seats like the 19th District (which would have voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 by 4 points under the current lines), 22nd District (Biden by 11 points) and 4th District (Biden by 15 points). Democrats flipped all three seats last week.

Third, Republicans gained two seats in Pennsylvania and one in Michigan — two presidential swing states where Trump did a little bit better than expected. While we don’t yet know who carried these districts on the presidential level in 2024, Biden carried the current Michigan 7th and Pennsylvania 7th by less than 1 point in 2020, and Trump carried Pennsylvania’s 8th by 3 points. Given the shift toward Trump in those states this year, it seems likely that he carried all three districts this time around, and House results often mirror the top of the ticket.

Otherwise, virtually every other seat went the way that our preelection forecast predicted. So far, every seat that we had rated as “Lean,” “Likely” or “Solid” Republican has gone red, and every seat that we had rated as “Likely” or “Solid” Democratic has gone blue.* Toss-up seats have split 2-1 in favor of Democrats, while the only upsets so far have been in our “Lean Democratic” category: Republicans won Colorado’s 8th District, Nebraska’s 2nd District and the two aforementioned Pennsylvania seats despite being down in the polls there.

The small GOP majority could spell trouble ahead

Assuming Republicans do end up with something in the neighborhood of 220-222 seats, their House win may not feel like much of a victory. In January 2023, Republicans walked into the Capitol with a 222-213 majority and proceeded to take 15 ballots to elect a speaker. That speaker then lost his job in October, and it took 22 days to replace him. On multiple occasions, new Speaker Mike Johnson had to rely on Democrats to pass foundational legislation, and the 118th Congress will likely go down in history as one of the least productive on record.

Having failed to pick up many (any?) seats in this election, House Republicans could once again have trouble governing in 2025-26. Their saving grace may be the fact that parties in power tend to be more cohesive than parties out of power: With Republicans also in control of the White House and Senate, the House GOP will have a strong incentive to pass legislation that makes the new administration look effective — or else risk the wrath of Trump himself.

But with such a narrow majority, it will take only a handful of dissenters to tank a bill, and many members of the House Freedom Caucus have clashed with Trump before when his wishes have conflicted with their hardline stances. And it’s possible that the GOP’s majority will temporarily shrink even more in the first few months of 2025 since at least two Republican representatives may resign in order to take jobs in the Trump administration.

Plus, Republicans would be wise to do all their legislating in the next two years, because they probably won’t have the chance after that. The small GOP majority makes it likely that Democrats will take back the House in 2026. Since the end of World War II, the president’s party has lost an average of 25 House seats in midterm elections.**

That’s a big part of the reason parties rarely hold a federal government “trifecta” — simultaneous control of the presidency, Senate and House — for longer than two years. Since 1981, every president to enter office with a trifecta lost it in the next midterm.

The past is no guarantee of the future, but some back-of-the-napkin math suggests Democrats have a clear path back to the majority in 2026. Based on election results as of Wednesday at 2:30 p.m. Eastern, Republicans are winning 12 districts by 3 points or less. They are winning 17 districts by 6 points or less. And they are winning 23 districts by 9 points or less.

According to the Cook Political Report, Republicans are currently winning the national popular vote for the House by about 4 points — although, with many votes still uncounted in heavily Democratic California, this will probably eventually narrow to about 3 points. But in 2018 — the other midterm election with Trump as president — Democrats won the House popular vote by 9 points. We may not see such a dramatic swing in 2026, and not every district will swing by the same amount, but it’s easy to see a world where Democrats take back the majority without breaking much of a sweat.

In a fiercely fought 2024 race for control of the House, Republicans came out on top. They can rightly take a lot of satisfaction from that. But recent history suggests their time in control of the chamber may be like philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s description of life without government: nasty, brutish and short.

Tia Yang contributed research.

Footnotes

*Ironically, this is not what we wanted to see: Statistically, seats with a 60-75 percent chance of going to one party (the definition of our “Lean” category) should go to the opposing party 25-40 percent of the time, and seats with a 75-98 percent chance of going to one party (the definition of our “Likely” category) should go to the other one 2-25 percent of the time. That didn’t happen, suggesting our forecast could have been better calibrated.

**Compared with how many seats the party held going into Election Day, not how many seats it won in the previous election. This is why our numbers may differ slightly from other sources. We also count vacant seats as belonging to the party that previously held them.