For now, each caucus leader is trying to position herself or himself as a stronger force heading into 2021.
On Wednesday morning, McConnell declared that Republicans were on the verge of maintaining their control of the Senate despite many dire predictions. “We’re in a pretty good position,” McConnell told reporters in Louisville.
A few hours later House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) joined in with praise for his side’s history-defying effort to win at least a handful of seats as President Trump lost the national vote by more than 4 million votes. “The Republican coalition is bigger, more diverse, more energetic than ever before,” McCarthy told reporters.
Yet Friday morning, Pelosi declared a victory for Joe Biden in the presidential race and noted Democratic gains in the Senate, suggesting that she would have a stronger hand next year. “President-elect Biden has a strong mandate to lead, and he’ll have a strong Democratic House with him and many Democrats in the Senate,” she told reporters in the Capitol.
And Saturday, once Biden’s victory was formally declared, Schumer predicted that his caucus could still win two seats in Georgia and secure control of the Senate for the incoming president. “Senate Democrats are going to do everything we can to help him get things done to help the American people — most immediately by gaining a majority in the Senate,” Schumer said in a statement.
All this adds up to an election with few, if any, parallels from which to draw any predictive expectations. In the past 50 years, only George H.W. Bush entered his first year as president facing a Senate controlled by the opposing party. His administration focused heavily on foreign policy issues that did not require congressional assent, shepherding the end of the Cold War and trouncing Iraqi forces to free Kuwait.
The four most recent presidents started off with their party running the show on Capitol Hill and plotted an ambitious course for their top legislative priorities. Those first two years have proved to be critical to the modern presidency, the period in which the most sweeping bills can be passed and truly define an administration’s legacy.
Bill Clinton passed the 1993 budget bill that raised taxes and the 1994 crime bill that outlawed assault weapons, and President Trump passed a massive tax-cut bill and confirmed a pair of Supreme Court justices in 2017 and 2018. Barack Obama, with Democrats holding their largest House and Senate majorities since the early 1990s, pushed through the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd-Frank overhaul of financial firms and an $800 billion stimulus package in his first two years in office.
Ronald Reagan, who had a solid Senate GOP majority, faced a House where Democrats held a 243-192 majority, but several dozen conservative Democrats broke ranks and worked with the new administration, particularly on a massive tax-cut bill.
As The Washington Post’s Erica Werner reported Wednesday, Democrats had privately mapped out an aggressive timeline for Biden’s two-year agenda that would include shoring up the ACA and revoking some of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts — but those plans required having a larger majority in the House and a clear Senate majority.
Instead, Pelosi’s House Democrats are coming up short.
As of Saturday, Democrats had flipped just three GOP seats, two of which were comfortably in the bag beforehand because North Carolina’s court-ordered redistricting handed them two very liberal districts. And Republicans have knocked off at least eight Democratic incumbents and hold leads in five more races that have not been called.
The minimum net gain of five seats defies all trends during a presidential election. Since 1964, the party that wins the national popular vote in the presidential contest has gained seats in the House all but once, when George H.W. Bush’s allies in the House lost two seats.
Now, Biden’s popular vote lead is heading further and further north, yet McCarthy is the one whose caucus is growing larger. By the time all votes have been counted, Republicans might see gains similar to House Democrats’ in 2012 — up eight seats on the back of Obama’s popular-ballot victory of 5 million votes.
On Friday, Pelosi tried to dismiss the disappointment by noting that the seats Democrats lost were predominantly in districts that Trump won, pulling those GOP candidates with him, but she did not lay out the type of ambitious agenda Democrats had been anticipating.
“We’ll be able to do great things for the American people. As I’ve said, we’ve lost some battles, but we won the war. We have the gavel,” she told reporters, suggesting that a top priority might now be an infrastructure bill.
“So, once we go forward with an infrastructure bill, that is usually not partisan. It isn’t partisan,” she said.
Senate Democrats fell short of their hopes for a clear majority. If Democrats can win the two Georgia Senate races Jan. 5, Biden will enter office in a fashion similar to George W. Bush’s in 2001, albeit with a large popular-vote win.
Back then Bush, after losing the popular vote to Al Gore, entered the Oval Office with a 50-50 Senate. The House GOP dropped down to just 220 seats, plus a conservative independent who voted their way, leaving no room to spare.
But Bush’s team, very experienced hands who had served in his father’s administration, plowed ahead as if they had won a mandate, winning Democratic support for a massive tax cut and a K-12 education bill.
He seemed to realize that any ambition for Biden hinged on at least getting to a 50-50 Senate.
“Now we take Georgia, and then we change the world,” Schumer said.
