The Democrats have retaken control of the US House of Representatives as a “blue wave” of opposition to Donald Trump swept the party’s candidates to victory in congressional districts across the country.
A string of wins in Republican districts across North Carolina, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and New Jersey saw the party pass the 218 threshold needed to win a majority in the 435-member chamber, the minimum goal in achieving its aim of reining in Donald Trump’s presidential power.
The chair of the House Republicans’ campaign arm, representative Richard Hudson, was meanwhile in danger of losing his North Carolina House seat in what would be a stunning upset. He narrowly trailed his Democratic challenger on Tuesday evening.
Opinion polls had widely predicted that the Democrats would re-take the House, where the Republicans currently hold a wafer-thin majority. With 214 seats, Democrats needed only a small number of gains to take control from Republicans, who themselves currently have 218 representatives.
The White House had been bracing itself for significant losses amid surveys showing public anger over inflation and cost of living rises, much of it linked to the war with Iran, which has increased the price of oil.
The election took place against the backdrop of Trump’s vice-like grip on the Republican party, which has extended to its representatives in Congress, from whom he has faced scant opposition even while encroaching on what have traditionally been congressional prerogatives.
He has unilaterally frozen and withheld funds appropriated by Congress, ignoring its constitutionally mandated “power of the purse”. His expansion of the Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose wide-ranging tariffs on goods from across the world was also made without recourse to Congress.
Democrats on Capitol Hill vowed a new era of oversight if they won, with a focus on allegations of corruption against the president and his family, as well as on the Iran war, which the president launched – and continues to wage – without congressional approval.
Republicans, by contrast, promised more of the same. Indeed, what little resistance the president faced from his own party seemed likely to diminish further after a purge of independent-minded figures in favor of loyalists.
Democrats also triumphed in the face of aggressive mid-cycle gerrymandering by Republicans in several states. In Florida, Democrats won in three of the four districts the GOP redrew in its favor this year, and is leading in the fourth.
