It’s a fact: 2024 is going to be an interesting election year – and not just for the presidential race. Thankfully, House Republicans just received a huge boon to their efforts to keep their slim majority.
On Tuesday, the GOP’s House campaign arm announced a record month in fundraising. According to the press release, the National Republican Congressional Committee, or RNCC, raised a whopping $9 million in November, the most ever in any month for a non-election year.
As the release stated, “House Republicans stepped up to the plate and helped the Committee hit a fundraising grand slam – led by Speaker (Mike) Johnson and our incredible leadership team.” The release added that this additional $9 million brings their cash-on-hand total to $41.4 million for the 2024 election cycle.
“With partners like this and an incredible political environment, extreme House Democrats should dread yet another cycle in the minority.”
To be sure, this is definitely a huge benefit for the GOP House, but it’s also a much-needed one. Presently, the Democrats are out-fundraising them. According to the latest releases, Dems had $47 million in cash on hand a full two months earlier than this announcement.
Additionally, it’s important to point out here that the GOP already has one of the slimmest majorities in history.
Before New York Republican George Santos was ousted from Congress earlier this month, Republicans held a 222 to 213 majority. Since then, with Santos now gone and former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announcing his resignation before 2024 arrives, that number has dropped to a mere seven ahead.
And thanks to Santos’ ousting and a special election to replace him in a district with not so red ties, the Associated Press estimates that will soon fall to six, bringing the number of House GOP members to 220 and Democrats to 2014.
Then, it is expected that Republican Bill Johnson of Ohio will leave Congress in March when he is supposed to take on a new position at Youngstown University.
And the majority falls by another.
Needless to say, every single dollar in the GOP’s coffers is going to need to count, as is every vote.
As Oklahoma Republican Representative Tom Cole told the AP, “It just makes everything harder. It’s just that simple.” He went on to explain that “perfect attendance” as well as “perfect agreement” is a must. And both are rather hard to achieve, even on good days.
Now, as the Lower Chamber, many would assume the importance of keeping the GOP majority in the House would be less than attempting to return GOP control to the Senate. But as the Founding Fathers designed it, the House is actually one of the more powerful parts of the elected branches – namely due to its more direct accountability by the American people.
This also means that it has the power to do some things the Senate cannot. You know, such as running investigations into the Biden crime family.
You may remember that it wasn’t until the 2022 midterms were over and a GOP-led House was present that Biden’s liberal legislative agenda was effectively halted. Similarly, it wasn’t until the Democrats took back control of the House in 2018 that real impeachment charges were filed against Trump, and his legislative efforts were stalled.
Thankfully, the leadership in House committees is pretty secure, meaning that investigations like that into Hunter Biden’s Ukraine partnership remain intact.
However, as I mentioned before, that thin majority line doesn’t exactly make things easy, and if the GOP expects to stay in control and keep such investigations open, they are going to have to continue to hit records in fundraising and more.
The stakes for the 2024 election cycle are only getting higher by the week for both the presidency and House control.
