Narrow majorities are tailor-made for contentious speakership elections, as McCarthy’s weeklong, 15-ballot grind in January demonstrated. The Democrats swiftly used their majority to elect John Nance Garner of Texas as speaker and control the House. By that time, Democrats had flipped three GOP-held seats in special elections and gained a 219-214 majority (or 1.15 percentage points). Unfortunately for the Republicans, the House wouldn’t actually meet to organize itself and start legislative business until Dec. When that Congress’ term officially began on March 4, Republicans had a one-seat majority – 217 to 216, with one member from Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party and one vacancy. House Republicans got the short end of the stick again in 1931, during the 72nd Congress. They joined with the Democrats and the “independent Progressive Republican” to reelect Champ Clark of Missouri as speaker, thus enabling the Democrats to – just barely – retain control of the chamber, by a margin of less than half a percentage point. After gaining seats in the 1916 elections, Republicans had, on paper at least, a 215-213 edge over Democrats (including one “independent Republican” and a self-described “independent Progressive Republican”) when the new House met for the first time on April 2, 1917.īut since neither party had a majority, the balance of power was held by four representatives from minor parties – two Progressives, a Socialist and a Prohibitionist. The closest margin of all, though, occurred in the 65th Congress of 1917-19. So did three of the six Congresses that met between 18. Of the seven Congresses that met between 18, for example, four had narrow majorities, as we define them. political history when closely divided Houses were more common. There have been a few other periods in U.S. If there was any discrepancy between those three sets of figures, we downloaded a list of all members who served in that Congress from the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress and determined who was actually in office on the date it first assembled. For each of those Congresses, we compared the party division figures in the House Clerk’s biannual election reports with those reported by the House historian and on each Congress’ Wikipedia page. That was when Congress began to convene at the official beginning of its term in early January, less than two months after the November elections. In a handful of cases where the majority comprised an alliance of two or more parties, we used that total instead.įor the 74th Congress of 1935-36 and onward, this process was fairly straightforward. Any difference of less than 5 percentage points was considered a “narrow majority” for the purposes of this analysis. We calculated the difference between the majority- and minority-party shares of the House’s total voting membership to make the differences comparable across Houses of varying size, we then expressed them in percentage-point terms. Given the thin Republican majority in the new House of Representatives, Pew Research Center conducted this research to learn about similar situations in the past and how they played out.įor each Congress, we took as our reference point the first day the House actually convened to organize itself and begin its legislative work. That means McCarthy is under tremendous pressure to keep his caucus – especially the four dozen or so members and allies of the House Freedom Caucus – in line. history, tied with the 107th Congress of 2001-02 and the 83rd Congress of 1953-54. In fact, the 2.3 percentage point edge that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s Republicans held at the start of the current Congress is the fifth-smallest in U.S. After a long run of comfortably large Democratic House majorities from the late 1950s through the early 1990s, narrow majorities – defined for this analysis as margins of control of fewer than 5 percentage points – have prevailed in a third of the 15 most recent Houses. Slender House majorities (which in this analysis we’re measuring as of the first business day of each Congress) have become more common in the past few decades. Following the election of Democrat Jennifer McClellan to fill a vacant seat in Virginia, they have just a nine-vote edge on Democrats, 222 to 213 (or 2.06 percentage points) – even slimmer than the Democrats’ House majority in the previous Congress, and the tightest margin in nine decades. House Republicans are working with one of the narrowest margins in U.S. (Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images) House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and others arrive at a rally marking the 100th day of Republican control of the House of Representatives at the U.S.
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