Republicans ran a dysfunctional house. Voters shrugged and re-elected them

Washington: A historically long and divisive fight to choose one speaker. A near default on the federal debt, followed by a mutiny on the House floor and multiple government shutdown scares. The ouster of the speaker, followed by weeks of paralysis and another vicious fight over who should lead next.

For almost two years, House Republicans have barely been able to overcome their own intraparty feuding to keep the government functioning. But despite it all, they emerged Wednesday night, when The Associated Press declared that Republicans had effectively won control of the House, with a wafer-thin majority almost identical to the one they have now.

The apparent success of their battle to keep control of the House of Representatives suggests that they paid little political price for the chaos and dysfunction they presided over, a period when Congress struggled to carry out even the basics of governing.

And it suggests that members of both parties overestimated how much voters would judge them by their job performance.

In January, House Republicans will be part of a governing trifecta led by President Donald Trump and helped along by a Republican-led Senate. That poses its own perils for the party, which is still operating with a punishingly small margin in the House, and will now be expected to produce major legislative results as a result of its unified power.

But the lesson of the past two years, said Brendan Buck, who served as a top adviser to two Republican speakers, may be that in Congress, "it's riskier to do big things than to do nothing at all."

Many Republican lawmakers have spent the past two years arguing otherwise, referring to their party as a clown car, lamenting its performance and predicting that voters would punish them for it.

Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., representing a district that both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris won, vented last year that some of his colleagues on the far right -- those who ousted their own speaker -- actually "want to be in the minority. I think they would prefer that, so they can just vote no and just yell and scream all the time."

(Bacon narrowly won his race over the weekend, according to the AP.)

It wasn't just mainstream Republicans who had a dim view of their colleagues and thought the party was setting itself up for defeat. The hard-right Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, ranted on the House floor one gray afternoon as his colleagues labored to pass spending bills: "Nobody in this country looks at Congress and says, 'Wow, heck of a job, guys and gals, well done.' Who would do that?"

Democrats delighted in the scathing GOP self-criticism that seemed like fodder for their campaign attack ads, believing it would help make the case to voters that Republicans did not deserve to be reelected.

At the end of 2023, Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., who over the past two years made a full turn toward Trumpism, threw up her hands and proclaimed that it was already too late for Republicans to get their act together.

"We lost our majority six months ago," she said, bemoaning the fact that her party could not figure out a message on reproductive rights that actually resonated with women.

Roy may have been right that nobody looked at Congress and thought, "heck of a job." Instead, it appears that nobody looked at Congress and thought much of anything at all.

With Trump at the top of the ticket, Republicans managed to hold onto or flip more than a dozen of the most hotly contested districts in the country.

It is not the result Democrats anticipated just over a year ago, when they watched with alarm (and some amount of smug satisfaction) as Republicans struggled to elect a speaker after ousting their own.

When the House finally elevated a hard-right Republican, Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who embraced his nickname "MAGA Mike," House Democratic leaders thought his hard-line views on abortion rights, coupled with his prominent role in helping Trump try to overturn the 2020 election results, would help them frame the election as a necessary purge of an extremist Congress.

When the Republicans looked to Democrats over and over again to provide the bulk of votes to raise the debt ceiling and pass short-term spending bills to avert the ever-looming government shutdowns -- one of them just weeks before the election -- Democrats seized the opportunity to present themselves as the responsible actors who were stopping the car from careening off the road.

And when Harris replaced Biden as the party's nominee in July, House Democrats thought they once again had a shot at winning the majority.

But doing the bare minimum seems to have worked out for the House GOP.

The House of Representatives has long been a deeply unpopular body. About 72% of voters hold an unfavorable view of Congress, according to a Pew Research Center poll from 2023. They were not primed to notice much of a difference between a good day on Capitol Hill and a dysfunctional one.

Control of the House ultimately was determined less by how its leaders wielded their power, and more by larger political winds, which this year favored Trump. He made gains with almost every demographic group across the country.

Rep. Patrick T. McHenry, R-N.C., the chair of the House Financial Services Committee who served as temporary speaker for three weeks before his colleagues chose Johnson, said Republicans' conduct clearly did nothing to earn voters' trust or support. The fact that they won it, he said, is "proof that the American people don't pay attention to the details of our politics."

McHenry then corrected himself: "It's probably less about paying attention and more about not caring."

House Democrats, for their part, have been crowing that they outperformed the top of the ticket by a larger margin than in any presidential election cycle since 2004.

That may be a tough statistic for depressed Democratic voters to celebrate. After all, they still lost as Republicans swept the executive and legislative branches. But in 2016, when Trump first won the presidency, Democrats won 194 House seats.

This year, the most vulnerable Democrats across the country overperformed Harris by 5%. In 2020, they outperformed Biden by just 2%.

Given the political headwinds they faced, Democrats cheered themselves by noting that they kept the Republican majority so small that it was likely to be just as divided and dysfunctional in the next Congress as it has been over the past two years. And this time, Republicans will not be able to blame a Democratic-controlled Senate if they are unable to produce legislative wins.

"Their showing this year will put them in good position to win the majority in 2026, when Republicans will have to defend what are sure to be a series of extreme and unpopular MAGA policies that will be tangible rather than theoretical for voters," said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster.

In the end, it's not clear that good behavior or bad behavior in Congress matters much to voters.

"It was bigger factors," said Sarah Longwell, the anti-Trump Republican strategist who conducts focus groups across the country. "Trump overperformed and dragged members over the line with him. But generally, what's happening in Congress is not top of mind for voters."