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House Democrats did not have the election they expected.

Decision Desk HQ projected Democrats will keep their majority in the House after calling races for Democratic Reps. Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Tom OHalleran in Arizona, officially bringing their count to 219 seats. Many more races have yet to be called.

Democrats faced unexpectedly stiff competition from Republican candidates in multiple districts. Rather than expanding their majority as many Democrats and nonpartisan forecasters expected, the Democratic margin in the House appears to be shrinking after they first flipped the chamber in 2018.

The story of the night for House Republicans was the success of Republican women candidates. Republicans flipped back six seats as of Wednesday morning, with Democrats only flipping two open seats in North Carolina. More races have yet to be called.

Led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrats were widely expected to retain control of the lower chamber of Congress after they gained the advantage in the 2018 midterms. Pelosi and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Cheri Bustos (D-IL) were projecting confidence going into the night, yet Bustos herself wound up in a much closer battle for reelection.

Democrats controlling at least one chamber is still an important result. With Joe Biden formally becoming president-elect, Democrats will control the House of Representatives and the White House, but the partys chances to take back the Senate come down to two uncertain runoffs in Georgia.

House Democrats saw early losses in Florida, where first-term Democratic Reps. Donna Shalala and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell lost to Republicans after Democrats underperformed with Cuban American voters in Miami-Dade County.

In Oklahomas Fifth Congressional District, Democratic Rep. Kendra Horn lost to Republican challenger Stephanie Bice. In New Mexicos Second Congressional District, vulnerable incumbent Rep. Xochitl Torres Small lost to Republican Yvette Herrell. And in South Carolinas First Congressional District, Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham lost to Republican Nancy Mace.

And even though Democrats invested big in Texas, hoping to replicate early success in 2018, they didnt manage to unseat a single Texas Republican member of the House in 2020. Democrats hung on to the two Texas seats they flipped in 2018, but failed to pick up any additional seats.

House Democrats bright spots of the night mirrored presidential trends. Democrats flipped Georgias Seventh Congressional District from red to blue, mirroring a trend at the presidential level of Biden appearing to perform better than expected in Georgia.

Its too early to say exactly what went wrong for House Democrats, who broadly hoped to comfortably expand their majority. District-level internal party polling had shown Republicans with the potential to lose even more seats in 2020.

Many Republican strategists had resigned themselves to the possibility that their House ranks could decrease. Instead, Republicans were the ones making gains albeit modest enough ones to stay the minority party in the House.

Cook Political Reports House editor Dave Wasserman had some early thoughts on Wednesday: Just like Biden, Democratic congressional candidates suffered losses among Hispanic voters in key races. Democrats had bad nights particularly in Florida and Texas; they lost a couple of incumbents in Florida and didnt defeat a single Republican incumbent in Texas, despite making a massive investment in the state to target 10 districts.

Republicans also learned from their losses in 2018 and recruited top-tier women candidates, who were on a winning streak.

After last night, Republicans are on track to more than double their current count of 13 women, Wasserman wrote.

The one bright spot for Democrats is that first-term women candidates, particularly those from national security backgrounds, largely held their own in competitive races. After sounding the alarm for months that the political environment was closer than the polls showed, Reps. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) won her race on Wednesday. She was joined by fellow Reps. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ), Elaine Luria (D-VA) and Abigail Spanberger (D-VA).

These outcomes all elude a clean narrative. Its difficult to say early on how much is based on strategic error, and how much is owed to the bizarre nature of this election year amid a pandemic that significantly hampered Democrats ability to do basic campaigning tasks like door-knocking.

Prior to Tuesday, most Republican strategists were privately resigned to the prospect of a double-digit loss of seats, Wasserman wrote. At this writing, Republicans may be on track to pick up between five and ten seats in the House, ironically about where our expectations started this cycle but certainly not where they ended.

Progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who easily fended off her own well-funded challenger, said that many embattled House Democrats failed to invest enough in digital advertising.

Two years after sweeping races across the country, the party now has to figure out what went wrong for their congressional candidates in 2020.

House Democrats have spent the past two years passing bills at a rapid clip, on everything from sweeping anti-corruption reforms to lowering the cost of prescription drugs to a $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill. But the vast majority of these bills were dead on arrival in the US Senate. It seems likely this ambitious agenda could continue to be on ice, unless Democrats flip two Georgia Senate runoff races that will be decided in January.

One of the few bipartisan pieces of legislation Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, and President Trump were able to agree on was the $2.2 trillion CARES Act at the beginning of the pandemic; a second stimulus package has been held up by partisan bickering. McConnell recently signaled willingness to pass another stimulus package before the end of the year. He called it a top priority for the Senates lame-duck session but was vague on concrete details.

Even on infrastructure one of the few places where there seemed to be bipartisan agreement getting a bill through could be elusive. Should Democrats flip the Senate, Pelosi has provided them a road map.

But its too early to say if they will get to use it.

Update: This piece was updated with recent Decision Desk calls in several key House races.

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Democrats win majority in House, will keep control for two more years - Vox.com

James Clyburn, the House majority whip and Democratic kingmaker who played an outsized role in Joe Bidens successful presidential run, has said the sloganeering of the Black Lives Matter protests and other social justice efforts this summer might have hampered them at the polls.

Clyburn, a Black South Carolina congressman and prominent figure in the civil rights movement, likened the defund the police mantra of certain activists to civil rights efforts in the 1960s, when some public support for the movements objectives was eroded by radical messaging.

Clyburn invoked memories of John Lewis, the civil rights icon who died this year.

I came out very publicly and very forcibly against sloganeering, Clyburn said Sunday on CNNs State of the Union. John Lewis and I were founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. John and I sat on the House floor and talked about that defund the police slogan, and both of us concluded that it had the possibilities of doing to the Black Lives Matter movement and current movements across the country what Burn, Baby, Burn did to us back in the 1960s, Clyburn said.

Burn, Baby, Burn became a street slogan during the Watts civil unrest of 1965 in Los Angeles, at the time the largest and costliest uprising of the civil rights era.

We lost that movement over that slogan, he said.

He added: We saw the same thing happening here. We cant pick up these things just because it makes a good headline. It sometimes destroys headway.

As an example, Clyburn cited the defeat of South Carolina US Senate hopeful Jaime Harrison, who ended up beaten comprehensively by the incumbent Republican Lindsey Graham in a race many had hoped he would win after he turned a longshot campaign into a real contest.

Jaime Harrison started to plateau when defund the police showed up with a caption on TV, ran across his head, Clyburn said in a separate Sunday appearance on NBCs Meet the Press.

That stuff hurt Jaime. And thats why I spoke out against it a long time ago. Ive always said that these headlines can kill a political effort.

Clyburn also attacked the Democratic partys progressive left wing, members of which have already broken ranks and fired the first shots in a looming battle for the future political direction of the party.

Sometimes I have real problems trying to figure out what progressive means, he said.

Clyburns comments followed a salvo by left-wing rising star Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez who has taken the opposite position, reflecting deep rifts in Bidens victorious party as it prepares to reoccupy the presidency.

In a no-holds-barred, post-election interview with the New York Times, she warned that if the Biden administration does not put progressives in top positions, the party would lose badly in the 2022 midterm elections.

The leftwing New York congresswoman sharply rejected the notion that progressive messaging around the summers anti-racism protests and more radical policies like the Green New Deal had led to the partys loss of congressional seats. She said the party needed to play to its core base of supporters, not reach out to centrists, or soft Republicans.

If the party believes after 94% of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organisers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organised Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic party is the John Kasich won us this election? I mean, I cant even describe how dangerous that is, she said.

Kasich is a former Republican governor of Ohio who campaigned for Biden, endorsing him as a centrist that moderate Republicans could get behind.

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James Clyburn: defund the police slogan may have hurt Democrats at polls - The Guardian

Heading into Election Day, Democrats were optimistic about expanding their majority. That didn't happen. At least seven Democrats lost their seats, including a handful of freshmen who had flipped districts in 2018 that had backed President Donald Trump in 2016. Meanwhile, Republicans held on in suburban areas where Democrats were hoping to make inroads.

Democrats made historic gains in the 2018 midterms when they took the House back from Republicans after being shut out of power in Washington following the 2016 elections when Trump won the White House and Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress.

Republicans had hoped to go on the offensive in 2020 by targeting Democratic lawmakers in Trump districts. When the House voted to impeach the President, Republicans vowed that moderate Democrats would pay a price at the ballot box and warned that impeachment would cost the party their majority. They eventually pivoted to a message about law and order in many districts, trying to tie Democratic candidates to the "defund the police" movement and to the national party.

Amid the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic and ensuing economic fallout, it looked as if the political landscape would benefit Democrats by the closing weeks of the 2020 election, which saw Democrats -- flush in cash -- competing in once-red House districts, while Republicans worked to stem their losses.

Republicans ousted several Democratic incumbents in districts that backed Trump in the last election, including freshman Democratic Reps. Kendra Horn of Oklahoma, Abby Finkenauer of Iowa, Joe Cunningham of South Carolina and Xochitl Torres Small of New Mexico. They also defeated the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, 15-term Rep. Collin Peterson, whose rural Minnesota district strongly backed Trump four years ago.

Democratic incumbents also suffered losses in South Florida, where they may have been dragged down by Latino support for Trump at the top of the ticket with freshman Democratic Reps. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Donna Shalala both losing reelection.

The GOP held onto a number of seats in districts that Democrats had targeted this year and hoped to flip, even in suburban areas that had looked to be moving away from the President. Republicans also put Michigan's 3rd District back in their column after losing it when Rep. Justin Amash, now a Libertarian, left the GOP.

Democrats did flip two seats in North Carolina that court-mandated redistricting had redrawn to be much more favorable to them and were widely expected to go blue.

Privately, Democrats are venting, with moderates accusing liberals of pushing policies easily demonized by Republicans that made it harder to win their races. Liberals argue that it's the progressive policies that are turning out the base -- not incremental approaches favored by centrist members. And many are second-guessing decisions by party leaders, including the failure of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to cut a big-ticket stimulus deal in the weeks before the election.

On a tense call Thursday, Pelosi tried to rally her troops by making the argument that Biden had achieved a "mandate" for Democrats -- and that House Democratic losses had more to do with lawmakers running in conservative districts where Trump's base turned out in droves to help reelect the President, according to sources on the call.

"We did not win every battle, but we won the war," Pelosi told her colleagues, sources said.

Manu Raju contributed to this report.

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Democrats keep control of the House, CNN projects - CNN

Many Trump voters in Zapata know one another, and they have formed an unofficial booster club and support group. It includes Ricardo Ramirez, 51, the president of a local bank branch, and Jack Moore, 45, an oil-field construction worker who said the Democrats of 50 years ago are not the same Democrats today.

Many residents in this part of Texas have strong Christian, anti-abortion, pro-gun and back-the-blue views that put them more in line with conservatives than liberals, and in Zapata, there is a strong sense among his supporters that Mr. Trump will bring jobs to the economically struggling region.

In a brief exchange during the final presidential debate, Mr. Biden had said he would transition from the oil industry because of its pollution, a remark that did not go unnoticed by Zapata residents, including Yvette Gutierrez De Leon, 56, who is a secretary for an oil-field services company and who voted for Mr. Trump.

At the end of the day, in the little bit of oil field that is still left, if it goes away tomorrow our county will go away, Ms. De Leon said. Oil is all we have here.

Isela Gonzalez-Lindquist, 42, a saleswoman at a Laredo mattress store, said she voted for Mr. Trump even though she was opposed to his plans to extend the border wall in the area, because she believed it would hurt wildlife and infringe on the rights of property owners.

I want to convey that he is not perfect and we know that, but he is the best candidate for the job, she said. I like Trumps grit and that hes not a career politician.

James Dobbins reported from Zapata, and Manny Fernandez from Houston. David Montgomery contributed reporting from Austin, Texas.

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In Texas, an Emerging Problem for Democrats on the Border - The New York Times

Yet heres one thing I worry about: As we celebrate these ballot efforts, theres a risk that we downplay the threat drugs pose. As Ive written, a quarter of the kids on my old school bus in Oregon are dead from drugs, alcohol or suicide deaths of despair so I strongly believe that decriminalizing drugs should not lead to any relaxation about their dangers.

Under the new Oregon measure, manufacturing or selling drugs will still be crimes, but possession of small amounts of heroin, cocaine or methamphetamine would be equivalent to a traffic ticket. The aim is to steer people into treatment so that they can get help with their addictions.

That focus on treatment, which Oregon will fund with marijuana taxes, is critical. Seattle has in effect decriminalized possession of hard drugs, by exercising prosecutorial discretion, but it never adequately funded social services for people wrestling with substance abuse. That has led to a backlash among voters irritated by open drug use.

We did miss the boat here in Washington State when we licensed cannabis, Dan Satterberg, the prosecutor in King County, which includes Seattle, told me. We should have dedicated much more of the tax revenue to building a better public health response to our behavioral health crisis. The states that are just getting into the pot business should learn from our mistake.

The new Oregon law is modeled after one in Portugal, which pioneered decriminalization and has emphasized treatment of those with addictions. As a result, Portugal now has, along with Greece, one of the lowest drug fatality rates in Western Europe. I visited Portugal a few years ago to report on its drug situation, and I found that while no narcotics policy works as well as we might hope, Portugals succeeds much better than others.

I hope other states will also experiment with addressing addiction through public health measures. A useful next step would be to provide safe injection sites, thus saving lives of many people who now die from overdoses.

Criminalization of drugs in the United States has failed by every metric, notes Alex Kral, an epidemiologist with the nonprofit RTI International. Oregons new policy offers us a much needed opportunity to evaluate alternatives to criminalization of drugs.

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Republicans and Democrats Agree: End the War on Drugs - The New York Times