The House Hangs in the Balance, as Fetterman’s Win Boosts Senate Democrats

Democrats displayed unexpected resilience in the 2022 midterms, flipping a Republican-held Senate seat in Pennsylvania and rebuffing G.O.P. candidates in a wide array of House seats. But the party’s excruciatingly narrow margins in both chambers meant the battle for power on Capitol Hill remained undecided early Wednesday morning.

In the House, Republicans have a multitude of pathways to seize control from Democrats, needing to flip just five seats, and G.O.P. leaders expressed bold confidence about their chances overnight.

“When you wake up tomorrow, we will be in the majority and Nancy Pelosi will be in the minority,” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader, predicted to supporters at 2 a.m.

Yet when he spoke, only a single House Democratic incumbent had been formally defeated, a sign of how the night fell far short of Republican expectations. A number of Democrats were trailing in races that were still too close to call, including the chairman of the Democratic House campaign arm, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, whom Mr. McCarthy predicted would ultimately lose.

The 2022 midterms were hard-fought — over crime, inflation, abortion, immigration and democracy itself — and the results so far reflect a deeply yet closely divided nation. For Republicans, their hopes of an emphatic repudiation of President Biden and his party had morphed into a district-by-district slog.

Republican majorities in one or both chambers would usher in a new era of divided government at a turbulent moment in American politics, all but freezing the Democratic policy agenda for the second half of Mr. Biden’s first term and very likely signaling the start of endless investigations into the administration.

On the Friday before the election, Mr. Biden warned in unusually blunt terms what the future would look like if Republicans took both the House and Senate. “It’s going to be a horrible two years,” Mr. Biden said in a Chicago speech to donors.

In the weeks before the election, Democrats had been forced to spend time, energy and money deep in blue territory, in liberal parts of California and New York, where Mr. Biden had won with ease two years ago. The tilt of the battleground map was widely seen as a sign of Mr. Biden’s unpopularity.

Yet on Tuesday, Democrats mounted a stiff defense in a remarkably diverse set of geographic and demographic corners of America. Incumbents fended off Republican challengers in an upscale suburb in Kansas, a sprawling exurban district in Northern Virginia, a conservative-leaning seat that encompassed Toledo in northwestern Ohio and a district in Central Michigan that drew more than $25 million in outside spending.

Representative Mayra Flores, a Republican from South Texas, began Tuesday posting an image on Twitter of a cresting red wave. “TODAY’S FORECAST,” she captioned it. Sixteen hours later, she had an update: “The RED WAVE did not happen.” She had just been defeated by Representative Vicente Gonzalez, a Democrat.

Overall across the country, Election Day seemed to have unfolded smoothly for millions of Americans. But in some communities, lawsuits were filed and scattered problems were reported, including technical glitches that disrupted ballot counting in Arizona’s Maricopa County.

The closeness of the races across the nation and the slow counting process in many states, including California, injected a high level of uncertainty into where the final margin in the House would land. For Mr. McCarthy, a slim majority would complicate both his path to the House speakership and his ability to govern should Republicans take control.

The biggest win of the night belonged to a Democrat: John Fetterman, the sweatshirt-wearing lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, who defeated Dr. Mehmet Oz in a fierce battle for Senate that cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

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Nov. 9, 2022, 5:06 a.m. ET

“I am so humbled,” Mr. Fetterman said after 1 a.m., delivering a victory speech in a black hoodie.

His win brightened Democrats’ chances to keep hold of a 50-50 Senate where the party did not have a single seat to spare. The Pennsylvania seat that Mr. Fetterman won is currently held by a Republican, the retiring Senator Pat Toomey.

Now, in order to keep the Senate majority, Republicans must flip two other Democratic-held seats, with three potential opportunities still uncalled as of early Wednesday: Arizona, Nevada and Georgia.

In Georgia, Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, led Herschel Walker, a Republican former football star, with nearly all of the vote counted early Wednesday morning. But Mr. Warnock was hovering shy of the 50 percent threshold he would need to avoid a runoff in December.

In other key Senate races, Senator Maggie Hassan, Democrat of New Hampshire, won re-election, while two Republicans whom Donald J. Trump had endorsed and helped win primaries — Representative Ted Budd of North Carolina and the best-selling author J.D. Vance in Ohio — both won as well.

Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, comfortably won re-election despite facing a Democratic challenger, Representative Val Demings, who was fueled by $73 million in campaign contributions.

Florida was a bright spot for Republicans. Mr. McCarthy boasted of winning four House seats there. And Gov. Ron DeSantis coasted to re-election, with his race called by The Associated Press just minutes after the polls closed.

The results cemented the fact that the once-battleground state has shifted decidedly to the right in recent years. Nowhere was that clearer than in the heavily Hispanic and populous Miami-Dade County, where Mr. Rubio and Mr. DeSantis were both ahead; Mr. Biden had carried that same county in 2020 even while losing the state.

In a victory speech, Mr. DeSantis, who is considered a possible 2024 candidate for president, said Republicans had “rewritten the political map” of the state.

Two Democratic candidates for governor once seen as rising stars in the party — Beto O’Rourke in Texas and Stacey Abrams in Georgia — were defeated.

But Democrats scored notable successes in other governor’s races, especially in presidential swing states where Republicans had nominated a candidate who had embraced the election denialism espoused by Mr. Trump.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin turned back such Republican challengers. In Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, the state’s attorney general, dispatched his far-right opponent.

In Arizona, Kari Lake, another Trump-aligned Republican, was locked in a race that was too close to call with Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state.

The Democrats also won back the governorships of Massachusetts and Maryland from departing anti-Trump Republicans.

The victories came even as polls showed Democrats were battling intense national headwinds, with voters deeply concerned about the economy and inflation. Republicans sought at every turn to tie Democratic candidates to their national party, while Democrats often portrayed their opponents as far outside the political mainstream, especially on issues of abortion.

Some Democratic strategists believe the party’s efforts to make abortion one of the defining issues of 2022, after the Supreme Court overturned nearly 50 years of precedent and eliminated the federal right to an abortion in June, had strengthened the party’s hand, galvanizing the Democratic base.

Even before the polls closed, people close to the White House were already bracing for Republican-led investigations on Capitol Hill, as far-right members — including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who was stripped of her committee assignments by Democrats — could join the powerful House Oversight Committee, which has broad subpoena power.

“There will be voters in my race who vote for change because of the economy,” said Representative Tom Malinowski, Democrat of New Jersey. “That doesn’t mean they’re voting for chaos. That doesn’t mean they’re voting for Marjorie Taylor Greene to spend the next two years burning down the House of Representatives.”

He was trailing early Wednesday, but the race remained uncalled.