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Of the 26 House races POLITICO forecasted as toss-ups before the election, just five of them remain uncalled. Democrats would likely need to win all five of those, win the remaining three uncalled races forecasted as “lean Democratic” — they currently lead in all three — and eat into some districts initially forecasted as “lean Republican” to win the chamber.
A number of those undecided races are in California, where many votes remain uncounted and where mail-in votes produced a big shift in 2018 in the days and weeks after Election Day.
On Sunday afternoon, the Associated Press called the open-seat race in Oregon’s 5th District, in which the GOP was slightly favored, for Republican candidate Lori Chavez-DeRemer. That put the Republican count at 212.
Pelosi acknowledged in the interview that it would still be a steep climb for her party to win the House. “We’ll see” was about all she offered in response to a question about the possibility.
She added that she was “disappointed” by the outcome of a handful of key House races in New York that Republicans flipped, which came after the state Supreme Court threw out a map the Democratic-controlled state Legislature drew that favored their party.
“That four votes could make a difference at the end of the day,” Pelosi said. “But we haven’t given up.” She also declined to say if she would run for speaker again should Democrats win.
The last 96 hours have been bitter for House Republicans.
“This was a very disappointing outcome on election night, not the one we expected,” Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), who is running to be House GOP whip, said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday” on Sunday morning. “There will be a lot of unpacking the outcome for weeks to come. Did we have the wrong strategy? Why did our message not break through? Why did the voters not buy into the vision and the message that Republicans were selling?”
But Banks predicted Republicans will still win “a very slim” majority. He said a small House majority would serve as “the last line of defense” against President Joe Biden’s agenda.
Democrats’ hopes of winning the House got a surprising boost on Saturday night, when Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez defeated far-right Republican Joe Kent in Washington’s red-leaning 3rd District. Republicans lost the seat after Kent successfully displaced GOP Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler out of the district’s top-two all-party primary, railing against her for being one of the handful of the Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump for his role in inciting the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Outside of the House, one of the last big uncalled races is the Arizona governor race. There, Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs narrowly leads Republican Kari Lake, a former TV anchor who became a prominent booster of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.
Hobbs’ lead is tenuous, but it has persisted. On Sunday evening, an update of almost 100,000 votes reduced Hobbs’ lead by about 10,000 votes. But with 93 percent of the vote counted, Lake will need to score a higher percentage of mail-in votes than she’s been getting to overtake Hobbs.
In a Sunday interview on “Fox News Futures,” Lake said she anticipated that many of the remaining ballots would lean toward Republicans.