LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE With less than a week to go until the election — and control of the House still a jump ball — Speaker Mike Johnson and potential speaker-in-waiting Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) are doing an 11th-hour criss-cross through the districts that will determine if they are in the majority come January. Where they are today: Jeffries is stumping at multiple events in Alabama for candidate Shomari Figures. Johnson, meanwhile, is doing a blitz through New York for GOP members including Rep. Mike Lawler. How members are feeling: Republicans believe they could hold onto the majority — but they acknowledge that the days over the summer when they believed they could safely pick up a dozen or so seats with President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket are long gone. “It leans our way. We’re probably going to be in control,” said Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.), who put the range of potential outcomes anywhere between a five-seat Democrat majority and a 15-seat Republican majority. Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) put the party at having a “six-out-of-10 chance of growing our majority a little bit, but not much.” He added that “the money thing has been a huge differentiator,” pointing to Democrats’ fundraising dominance. Democrats like Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.), meanwhile, feel bullish about their chances to flip the majority: “Just looking at the six races that we're going to try to visit here in California, all of them are within the margins, some a little bit up, some a little bit low, and that's a good place to be,” Bera said while driving with Rep. Salud Carbjal (D-Calif.) to visit some of those swing districts. “These are all going to be very close races.” The races we’re watching: Among GOP incumbents, we’re keeping a close eye on those representing districts Biden won in 2020, including Reps. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) and Anthony D’Esposito (R-N.Y.). Another fascinating race is a GOP-on-GOP general in Washington state that could take out Rep. Dan Newhouse, one of the final two Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump. As for Democratic incumbents, Rep. Jared Golden is fighting for his political life in rural Maine, and we’re also closely watching the seats Reps. Dan Kildee and Elissa Slotkin are vacating in Michigan. That other election: Whoever controls the House will hold the election we’re really interested in: for speaker. If Democrats triumph, expect a no-drama Jeffries run for the gavel, while Republicans, according to GOP lawmakers we’ve chatted with, could see a pretty big leadership shakeup that might go beyond just ousting Johnson if they are in the minority. The bigger question for the incumbent speaker is if Republicans win, but only a razor-thin majority. “Two or three votes [margin] means who knows what’s going to happen,” Griffith said. Johnson’s allies feel like he would have a good shot of keeping the gavel in that scenario, but it will boil down to two questions: What does Trump do? And how many Republicans turn against the Louisianian after winning every GOP vote last year? “You’ve got a couple of people who have an ax to grind with him,” Bacon said. “I’m not going to let 10 people tell us who the next speaker is going to be.” — Jordain Carney with an assist from Nicholas Wu GOOD EVENING! Welcome to Inside Congress, the play-by-play guide to all things Capitol Hill on this Thursday, Oct. 31, where we are planning to binge the second season of “The Diplomat.”
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