Flip This House

Well, they did it: The Democrats have been projected to win a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

NBC News, Fox News, and ABC News all projected that the Democrats would take control of the House for the first time since 2010.

Regardless of its significance (and, yes, it really might be a big deal), the Democrats’ victory could hardly be called a major surprise. The party had been leading in polls in races across the country for months. And despite President Donald Trump’s repeated insistence that Republicans would emerge victorious, the Democratic surge falls well within the historical precedent of opposition parties gaining seats during midterm elections.

Nevertheless, the Democrats’ newly earned majority has its work cut out for it. Will California Rep. Nancy Pelosi regain the Speaker’s gavel, despite her having worked to undercut the party’s energized progressive base? Will Democrats actually put up a fight when it comes to the GOP’s ongoing tax cut scam, efforts to gut healthcare, and xenophobic criminalization of immigrants. Or, being Democrats, will they bring a game of checkers to a gun fight and insist that it’s the civil thing to do?

Of course, regardless of what path the new Democratic House takes, it will still have to contend with a Republican majority in the Senate, and an unabashedly extremist White House that now has a shiny new opposition scapegoat to blame for any and everything that goes wrong in Washington.