Election 2024: Which Party Will Control Congress?

Most of the talk about Election 2024 has focused on the race for the White House. But almost as consequential will be which party wins control of the House and Senate. Those contests look to be nip and tuck, just like the presidential race.

To review where things stand going into the election, control of Congress is divided. Republicans run the House. But just barely. Their margin is 220 to 212, with three seats vacant. That is one of the narrowest margins in the history of the House. That has consequences. If five Republicans defect on any vote, they lose their majority.

The margin in the Senate is also close but favors the Democrats. They hold forty-seven seats, and four Independents caucus with them. That two-vote margin is deceptive. The Senate filibuster limits the power of the majority. Most, though not all legislation, needs sixty votes to clear the Senate. That gives Senate Republicans influence that their House Democratic counterparts lack.

This November, Democrats see a chance to retake the House. They fared much better than expected in the 2022 elections. Midterm usually mean big losses for the president’s party, especially when the economy is doing as poorly as it was two years ago. But Democrats held their losses to just seven seats. While many Democrats were grumbling this summer that President Joe Biden would be an albatross on their chances to retake the House, his departure from the race and the smooth transition to Kamala Harris stirred newfound optimism.

Nonetheless, control of the House looks to be a coin flip. One reason is that the outcome of most House races is already known. The combination of the heavy partisan lean in most states—good luck winning a House seat as a Democrat in Utah or as a Republican in Massachusetts—and gerrymandering means that only 10 percent of House races are competitive. Not surprisingly, both parties are pouring money into those races. That helps keep them competitive. Voters could still break heavily for one party or the other in these competitive races, handing a comfortable majority to either the Democrats or Republicans. But we won’t know until the votes are counted.

Things look similar on the Senate side. One difference with the Senate is that only one-third of seats are up for grabs in any election. This year that means thirty-four Senate races. That map looks to favors Republicans. Democrats and Independents are defending twenty-three seats, while Republicans are defending just eleven. All those seats are in states that Donald Trump won in 2020.

The bad news for Democrats is the Senator Joe Manchin, who became an Independent earlier this year, has declined to run for reelection. The Republican candidate seeking his seat in deep red West Viginia should win in a landslide. Meanwhile, Democratic Senator Jon Tester is running behind his Republican opponent in Montana. That has left Democrats hoping they can defend all their other seats and pull off a surprise victory in another red state. Their best chances are in Florida and Texas, where incumbent Senators Rick Scott and Ted Cruz have small leads, and in Nebraska where independent Dan Osborn is leading incumbent Deb Fischer in some polls. (Osborn, who initially sought the Democratic nomination, says if he wins a Senate seat he hopes to create an “independent caucus” rather than side with either the Democrats or the Republicans.) But that looks to be a tall task. So the conventional wisdom for now is that Republicans will retake the Senate.

The vote counts in these competitive races will be buffeted by the same misinformation and disinformation plaguing the presidential election. And the source won’t be just irate domestic partisans and troublemakers. Russia, China, and Cuba are already trying to interfere in some congressional races. They won’t stop on November 5. In some races, the vote count could last for days if not weeks. So it is possible that who controls Congress will not be known on Election Night.

The size of the majorities in the House and Senate will matter nearly as much as which party holds them. Small majorities are harder to manage because a few maverick members can derail legislation. Just look at the challenges Chuck Schumer, Kevin McCarthy, and Mike Johnson faced in the current Congress. Now imagine a situation in which a decision by an Independent like Osborn to caucus or not caucus with the Democrats or the Republicans decides controls of the Senate. That majority likely will be fragile.

It also will matter whether one party controls both the House and Senate, or if Democrats and Republicans split control. Getting Congress to work is harder in the latter case. The concessions needed to get bicameral agreement can become what persuades maverick legislators in the majority party to bolt.

A Congress that struggles to discharge its constitutional duties will complicate U.S. foreign policy. It is true that presidents have more freedom of action overseas than at home. But they do not make foreign policy as they wish. Their challenge is greatest when they face a divided Congress. Just look at Biden’s struggle to persuade Congress to send more aid to Ukraine. If divided government means that the opposition party controls the Senate, the next president could struggle with the basic task of assembling a Cabinet and staffing other senior administration positions. As has been evident for the last decade, politics doesn’t stop at the water’s edge.

So when it comes to congressional races, the same advice applies as for presidential races: Buckle up. There could be substantial turbulence ahead.

Campaign Update

The chances of another Harris-Trump debate look to have gone to zero. Harris accepted CNN’s offer for an October 23 debate, but Trump let yesterday’s deadline for accepting the invitation pass without formally responding. The former president was emphatic, however, in a Truth Social post on Wednesday night about his position on another debate: “THERE WILL BE NO REMATCH!” The Harris campaign denounced Trump’s decision as “a disservice to the American people.” With another debate off the table, Harris and CNN agreed to turn the October 23 event into a televised town hall.

Debates aren’t the only thing Trump has taken a pass on. His campaign has so far declined to participate in the official presidential transition process. The Presidential Transition Act established a process by which presidential nominees can prepare before Election Day for assuming office should they win. Each campaign is given office space, transition funding, and a jumpstart on getting security clearances for their incoming teams. The Trump campaign has not said why it has declined to participate in a process that would maximize the chances it can hit the ground running on January 20. One possibility is that the Trump campaign prefers not to accept the limits on transition fundraising that come with accepting government support.

Biden denounced Trump on Wednesday for having “led an onslaught of lies” about the federal government’s response to the destruction caused by Hurricane Helene. Trump has falsely claimed, among other things, that Biden had not returned calls from Georgia’s governor, that the federal government was denying help to Republican areas, and that the Biden administration had diverted disaster assistance to help support illegal immigrants. Trump’s fabrications have not dented his poll numbers.

The Uncommitted Campaign, the pro-Palestinian group critical of President Joe Biden’s response to the war in Gaza, announced last month that it would not endorse Harris. That position was good news for Trump, whom the group acknowledged was even less sympathetic to its position. The reality of that fact looks to have sunk in. This week an Uncommitted leader posted a video saying that “Trump’s allies are openly pushing for the destruction of Palestinian human rights and silencing those who fight back.” As a result, the group is now urging its supporters “to orient less toward who is the better candidate and more toward what is the better antiwar approach in building our collective power.”

What the Candidates Are Saying

On Monday night, CBS’s 60 Minutes released its interview with Harris. Correspondent Bill Whitaker spent some time on foreign policy. When it came to Israel, Harris sidestepped a question about whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was an ally, saying that “the American people and the Israeli people are allies.”

When asked if she would be willing to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the war in Ukraine, Harris answered: “Not bilaterally without Ukraine. No. Ukraine must have a say in the future of Ukraine.” She went to add that questions about expanding NATO to include Ukraine “are all issues that we will deal with if and when it arrives at that point. Right now, we are supporting Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia’s unprovoked aggression.”

Harris was asked about China but never ventured, and was not pushed, to go beyond boilerplate responses. She said that the United States “must win the competition for the twenty-first century with China. We must be able to compete and win.” She also said that she was not “going to get into hypotheticals” when asked if she would order the U.S. military to defend Taiwan. Given that the official U.S. policy on Taiwan for the past four decades has been one of strategic ambiguity, that was an appropriate answer to give.

In a bonus video that CBS released, Whitaker asked Harris which country she considers to be the greatest adversary of the United States. She answered: “There’s an obvious one in mind, which is Iran.” That comment caused a tizzy among national security types. They were quick to argue that China is the greatest adversary the United States faces today, which is undoubtedly true. But the United States is also closer now to conflict with Iran than it is with China. And Harris was clearly right to say that “Iran has American blood on their hands.”

One viewer who was not impressed with Harris’s answers was Trump. In a post on Truth Social, he called for revoking CBS’s broadcast license. He complained that 60 Minutes edited the interview to make Harris to look good and demanded that CBS released an unedited transcript of Harris’s conversation with Whitaker.

At a rally in Juneau, Wisconsin, on Sunday, Trump returned to a favorite talking point, tariffs. He said he was willing to impose tariffs as high as 200 percent on Chinese vehicles imported from Mexico. In a speech to the Detroit Economic Club yesterday, he said he would be willing to go to “1,000 percent” tariffs. Perhaps more significantly, he said that should he become president he plans to “formally notify Mexico and Canada to invoke the six-year renegotiation of the USMCA to seek strong new protections against trans-shipments so that China and other nations cannot smuggle their auto parts through Mexico.” The Harris campaign quickly pointed out that the vice president made the same pledge weeks ago.

What the Pundits Are Saying

Jeffrey A. Friedman and Andrew Payne argued in Foreign Affairs that it is a myth that foreign policy doesn’t matter in U.S. presidential elections. They summarize their case this way: “Even if voters attach limited significance to individual foreign policy issues, they want to make sure that candidates are fit to serve as the country’s commander in chief.” The first half of that sentence concedes the point that most discussions in this genre make, namely, that most voters are not pulling the lever for one candidate versus another based on their stances on foreign policy issues. Friedman and Payne’s broader point that voters favor candidates they see as strong is undoubtedly true. No candidate runs for office championing their weakness. But how voters decide who is strong and who is not may have nothing to do with foreign policy. Indeed, the causal arrow may go in the other direction. Voters may decide they like a candidate, and as a result, see whatever the candidate says about foreign policy as exemplifying strength.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget released a report this week assessing the fiscal impact of the policy changes that Harris and Trump propose to enact should they make it to the White House. Such forecasts are difficult to make because campaigns seldom spell out their proposals in great detail. Even when details exist, some uncertainty inevitably exists over the precise impact that changes might have. While noting these challenges, the Committee concluded: “Under our low- and high-cost estimates, we estimate Vice President Harris’s plan could have no significant fiscal impact or increase debt by $8.10 trillion through 2035, while President Trump’s plan could increase debt by between $1.45 and $15.15 trillion.” The price tag on Trump’s tax plan went up this week after he pledged to end “double taxation” on Americans living overseas and to make interest on car loans tax deductible. One conservative economist quipped that Trump was offering “ice cream and candy with none of the vegetables” with his growing list of tax breaks for all kinds of voters.

Princeton Professor Julian Zelizer asked in Foreign Policy whether “October surprises” are overblown. After reviewing an array of surprise events in the final month of various presidential campaigns, he concludes that “the breaking news of an October surprise didn’t change the outcome.” The fact that polls have barely budged over the past month, despite two debates, a second attempt on Trump’s life, and a widening war in the Middle East, suggests that Election 2024 will break the historical pattern. That’s especially the case with the growth of early and mail-in voting. Millions of Americans have already made their choice for president. 

ProPublica’s Doug Bock Clark and Heather Vogell explored how a change that Georgia’s Election Board recently made to the state’s election procedures could shift the outcome of the presidential race in the Peachtree State. The new rule empowers county election boards to toss out votes from whole precincts if they determine that there have been voting irregularities. The rule change was pushed primarily by Republicans and Trump supporters. The rule gives local elections boards great discretion to determine when irregularities occur, and election boards in several Georgia countries are controlled by officials who contend that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. A Georgia court is now considering legal challenges to the procedural change. Polls currently show Trump with a one-point lead over Harris in Georgia, meaning that concerns that a misuse of this new discretion could change the election’s outcome are not misplaced.

Concerns that election deniers might try to put their thumb on the electoral scale next month are not limited to Georgia. Reuters’ Joseph Tanfani and Nathan Layne found “37 election skeptics on the election boards of the five most populous counties in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania–including 20 who have voted in the past to not certify results. Many smaller county boards in those states also include election deniers. Wisconsin was the only swing state whose big county election boards appeared free of such skeptics.” 60 Minutes ran a segment this week on how the senior election official in Maricopa County, Arizona, which encompasses Phoenix and surrounding areas, was defeated this past summer in his primary reelection bid by a fellow Republican who questions the integrity of Arizona’s 2020 vote count.

In all, if the presidential race turns out as close as the polls show, contested counts in the battleground states will be inevitable, as will be a surge in Hurricane Helene-style disinformation.

What the Polls Show

The New York Times’s Nate Cohn assessed why some polls show Harris leading nationally but neck to neck in northern battleground states, while others show the reverse. His answer is methodological: “This divide is almost entirely explained by whether a pollster uses “weighting on recalled vote,” which means trying to account for how voters say they voted in the last election.” While that distinction is only meaningful to pollsters—and not reducible to a one-sentence summary—it highlights that even scientific polls reflect a fair amount of art.

Gallup reported that 40 percent of American voters plan to cast their ballots early this year. Democratic voters (46 percent) are more likely to say they will vote early than Independents (43 percent) and Republicans (31 percent). Half of Trump’s supporters do not expect him to concede if he loses.

The Pew Research Center found that three-quarters of Americans think that Harris will concede the election is she loses but that only a quarter of Americans think that Trump will concede if he loses. Half of Trump supporters agree that he will not concede the election.

The Campaign Schedule

Election Day is twenty-five days away (November 5, 2024).

Electors will meet in each state and the District of Columbia to cast their votes for president and vice president in sixty-seven days (December 17, 2024).

The 119^th U.S. Congress will be sworn into office in eighty-four days (January 3, 2025).

The U.S. Congress will certify the results of the 2024 presidential election in eighty-seven days (January 6, 2025).

Inauguration Day is 101 days away (January 20, 2025).

Oscar Berry assisted in the preparation of this post.