With the presidential race between incumbent Donald Trump and Democrat challenger Joe Biden still in doubt and the GOP’s tenuous grip on its Senate majority dependent on two run-off elections in Georgia, it’s easy to forget that there are still races in the House of Representatives that haven’t yet been decided.
California has been notoriously slow counting votes throughout the years and this year, two House districts in the state (Districts 21 and 25) remain undecided, although on Friday the Associated Press did call District 21 in favor of Republican David Valadao. Should that result hold up, it will represent yet another flipped seat for the GOP as Valadao will have won the seat he lost just two years ago to Democrat TJ Cox.
Also in the Golden State, Republican incumbent Mike Garcia is looking to hold onto his seat in District 25, an area just north of Los Angeles. As of this writing, Garcia is leading Democrat challenger Christy Smith by just under 600 votes. It’s the second time in less than two years that the two have faced off as the same seat was vacated by Democrat Katie Hill. Hill, who won the seat in 2018, chose to resign after she was implicated in a sex scandal with a female staffer in October of 2019.
In Iowa, Republicans look to flip yet another seat held by Democrats. Current representative Dave Loesback, a Democrat, announced last year that he would not seek reelection, so fighting it out this cycle was Democrat Rita Hart and Republican Marianette Miller-Meeks. Out of more than 394,000 votes, with a recount finished on Saturday, the current tally shows that Miller-Meeks retains a scant 6 vote edge over Hart.
Iowa’s state canvassing board is scheduled to meet today — which is the legal deadline in the state — to certify the election results, although legal challenges from the Hart campaign are expected.
Neither side was happy with the results of the recount. After the initial tabulation, Miller-Meeks held a 282 vote lead over Hart. That lead later narrowed to just 47 votes after late-arriving mail-in ballots and provisional ballots were counted. Precinct reporting errors also needed to be corrected in two counties. The Miller-Meeks campaign was especially vexed over a 131 ballot discrepancy between the tabulation of ballots received by the Scott County auditor and ballots included in the county’s certified canvass of the election. The discrepancy favored Hart by a large margin.
The Scott County recount board chose to adjourn by a vote of 2-1 last Wednesday rather than address that discrepancy, a decision that irked the Miller-Meeks campaign.
“Even if you include everything that broke right in Rita Hart’s favor in Scott County — which we disagree with, we don’t think that was an accurate recount — even including that, Marianette Miller-Meeks still won this race,” said Alan Ostergren, an attorney working for the Miller-Meeks campaign. “So I don’t see where the Hart campaign has anything it can point to in its benefit in an election contest, but it would be speculation on my part to see what they would allege in their court filings if they did go that point.”
The Hart campaign is falling back on a tried-and-true Democrat talking point — voter suppression.
“Unfortunately, as this process continues, the Miller-Meeks campaign has sought to keep legitimate votes from being counted — pushing to disqualify and and limit the number of Iowans whose votes are counted,” Zach Muenier, Hart’s campaign manager, said in a statement. “We have said from the beginning of this recount process that the most important thing is that Iowans’ voices are heard and their votes counted fairly. Moreover, under Iowa law, the recount was limited to the universe of ballots initially counted after election day.”
Well, of course they were limited to the votes originally tabulated. That’s why it’s called a recount. You can’t simply add votes after the fact, although Democrats would like to be allowed to do just that.
The race in New York’s 22nd District is as tight as any of them, as it’s been reported that incumbent Democrat Anthony Brindisi has claimed a 13 vote lead over Republican challenger Claudia Tenney. On Tuesday, Judge Scott DelConte ordered eight counties in the upstate New York district to update their ballot counts and submit them to the court. That update appears to have given Brindisi the slight lead, which the campaign touted on Friday.
“Election results from the remaining counties in the district show Anthony Brindisi has now taken the lead.” the campaign boasted on Friday. “We are hopeful that once New York’s 22nd congressional district is certified, Representative Brindisi will be sworn in again to continue his bipartisan work oh behalf of this district.”
Not so fast, countered the Tenney campaign. With over 300,000 votes cast in the district, election night totals showed Tenney ahead by nearly 30,000 votes. Tenney’s campaign claims that the new vote count is “misleading and inaccurate,” claiming that it includes invalid votes, which the campaign is challenging in court.
“Those ballots should not — and must not — be counted. The hearing in court has already established that the current tally includes invalid votes and that the process to review and count the massive amount of paper ballots is fractured,” said Tenney campaign spokesman Sean Kennedy. “Today’s misleading and inaccurate tally is rife with errors and mistakes that must be rectified before this election is certified. It is far from final.”
So, as of now, Republicans could pick up as many as three more seats in the House and hold on to another should Garcia fend off his opponent in CA-25. 2020 has been an odd year in countless ways. But one of the craziest things has to be this: How can a candidate — Joe Biden — be so popular as to garner more than 80 million votes — the most in United States history — and still have no coattails dragging up down-ballot candidates?
