Can Republicans navigate their narrow House majority?

The House elections in 1848 resulted in neither Democrats nor their major-party counterparts the Whigs gaining an outright majority of seats in the House. The anti-slavery Free Soil Party won 9 seats but even adding them to the Whigs’ 106 did not produce a majority. It therefore took 63 ballots to elect a speaker, Georgia Democrat Howell Cobb, who “played an important role in negotiating and securing the passage of the Compromise of 1850,” which temporarily defused tensions that would later erupt in the Civil War, said The Miller Center.

If Trump “were to continue to raid” the narrow House majority to “fill out his White House and Cabinet, Republicans could lose their edge altogether,” said The New York Times. If Democrats were to win all three of the special elections, control of the chamber would flip. It is also possible that unforeseen events could make the GOP’s hold on the chamber more secure. The history of such narrow majorities may offer us some insight into what will unfold over the next two years.

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Lessons from the past

The last time the House was this closely divided, the United States was in crisis. As the Great Depression deepened, it was not clear if Herbert Hoover’s Republicans had maintained their majority in the 1930 elections. While Democrats gained 52 seats, when the dust settled Republicans still held a 218-216 majority, with one third-party lawmaker joining the minority. But a “truly insane thing happened” between the election in November 1930 and when Congress convened in March 1931, which is that 14 members-elect of the House died, said The Washington Post. After a series of special elections were held to fill the vacancies, Democrats emerged with a narrow majority for the remainder of the term. But with Republicans still in charge of the Senate, it is remembered as the “do-little Great Depression’s 72nd Congress” that failed to address the horrors of the unfolding economic crisis, said The Hill.

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