The road to keeping the Democratic House majority at this point

| 9:09 am EST November 12, 2022
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I keep trying to do the math on the Democrats’ path to the House majority, but the slow reporting from California makes it too confusing. For now, just root for as many wins in the non-California races as possible. That’ll tell us how well we’ll need to do in California.

For instance, if we win a bunch of races like AZ-01, WA-03, AZ-06, OR-05, and AK-01, we’ll go into California only needing to win the the races there that we have pretty good odds in. If we lose a few of the above races, we’ll need to pull off some minor upsets in California.

I’ve tried to use partial vote totals to rank the uncalled House races in California from most likely to least likely, but I can’t do it with any degree of confidence. I do think CA-47 (Katie Porter) and CA-49 (Mike Levin) are likely wins, and must-wins. From there, I’m not willing to hazard a guess.

So we don’t yet know how many wins we’ll need going into California, and for the most part we don’t yet know what the most likely wins are in California. Nor do we know if a CO-03 runoff will finish before or after the closest of California races get called.

To give you an idea of how confusing the landscape is: a minor outlet called AZ-06 for the Republican days ago, yet now some experts think it’s back in play. A local news outlet called OR-05 for the Republicans yesterday, but the Democrat now says it shouldn’t have been called.

Not only is there no consensus on which House races are in play, there isn’t even fully consensus on which races have been called. So if I wanted to do “Democrats need X out of the Y remaining races,” we’re not even sure what a “remaining” race is anymore.

But one thing hasn’t changed all week: Yes the Democrats have a path to the House majority. It’s narrow but it’s also realistic. They have to keep winning most of the close races. But they’ve been winning most of the close races so far. Where it goes from here is a matter of whether that trend continues.