Here. 218 is a majority of the 435 seats.

2026: Current count is at least 40 seats flipped from R to D, from 214 to 254 called, and plausibly 45 flips for 259. President’s party loses the largest number of seats since 1994, loses control of House.

2022: President’s party loses 9 seats and house control, 222-213.

2018: President’s party loses 41 seats and House control, 235-199.

2014: President’s party loses 13 more seats, despite already not having House control, expanding opposition control to 247-188.

2010: President’s party loses 63 seats and House control, 242-193.

2006: President’s party loses 31 seats and House control, 233-202.

2002: President’s party gains 6 seats, expanding House control to 229-204.

1998: President’s party gains 5 seats, narrowing the opposing party’s control to 223-211.

1994: President’s party loses 54 seats and House control, 230-204.

Before that, House elections dynamics were a bit different. National party identity wasn’t as strong, and split ticket voting was more common, so Democrats held House control even as Republicans won the White House 5 out of 6 elections.

This is mixing up two related but distinct ideas.

The electoral college system leads to a winner-take-all for the electoral votes of any given state, with the exception of Nebraska. Passing a Wyoming rule or something similar to expand the size of the House, and increasing the number of electoral votes from 538 to 900 or whatever won’t change that basic dynamic.

Yeah, yeah, Wyoming has a house seat elected by a population of 590,000, a little bit smaller than the national average house district population of 780,000, but that’s not nearly as big of a source of voting power discrepancy compared to the existence of the Senate, or the winner-take-all phenomenon that happens in the Electoral College.

So yes, I agree that the Apportionment Act needs to be repealed/modified, but don’t agree it should be as high a priority as electoral college reform.

Yeah, the whole story needs to be told because it’s just so, so much worse than even what you were saying.

lame duck implies that the sitting president would be restrained in some way.

Mainly restrained by the fact that they’re running low on time remaining in office. No matter how you slice it, time keeps marching forward, and people who want to continue to have careers after January 20, 2029 will start making moves to move up after Trump moves out.

For the unique dynamic in the Trump administration of requiring absolute loyalty to a particular man, that means that the expiration date will cause significantly more turmoil and turnover in his inner circle, as they position for the 2028 campaigns, where they maneuver to inherit Trump’s power he’s never been keen on sharing anyway.

He went to jail and her mother took his side.

No, he was facing criminal charges for raping her from the ages of 9 to 12, so her mother actively helped him flee the state and hide from justice until he died 25 years later. The mother chose to stand by her child’s rapist, moving states with him and leaving her children behind, so the state where they were left behind had to take the abandoned children into custody.

Ramaswamy tracked down the mother and said “yeah, let’s get her on camera to call Acton a liar.”

They pale in comparison to what’s happening somewhere like Paris.

Protests and disruption in Minnesota did a lot at the beginning of this year. There were many violent clashes coming out of those protests. Two protestors were killed, dozens were permanently injured or disabled, hundreds more were hospitalized, and thousands were arrested. And the result of those protests were the firing of the senior official in charge of the Department of Homeland Security, several other immigration officials, and a major pullback of operations, an end to that style of aggressive immigration enforcement operations.

Meanwhile, other action included legal work that got literally thousands of arrestees released and the resignation of many of the prosecutors brought on to try to investigate and prosecute fraud in the Somali American community, a racially targeted and legally unsupported use of law enforcement resources.

The whole operation was also a disaster for the popularity of the ruling party, and we’ll see in the next 16 hours or so just how badly this costs them in the actual power structures of our governments.