When John Boehner suddenly retired in 2015, members of the House Freedom
Caucus showed up at speaker-in-waiting Kevin McCarthy’s office with a
list of demands: In exchange for their support, they wanted McCarthy to
name one of their own to a senior leadership position and embrace rules
changes that empowered conservatives. 

If he refused, they told him, they would band together to block him from
securing the needed 218 votes to be speaker. But McCarthy was unwilling
to subjugate his power in order to appease a splinter faction, and
ultimately, the California Republican dropped his bid for his dream job,
paving the way for Paul Ryan's rise. 

Yet seven years later, McCarthy once again finds his dream held hostage
by the same group of hardliners. Thanks to the GOP’s lackluster midterm
performance, he is seeking to preside over what appears likely to be an
extremely thin majority — a scenario that hands massive leverage to the
far right.

And on Tuesday night at the election watch party for Nevada Democrats on
the Vegas Strip, aides to Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto were cautiously
optimistic about her prospects for victory.

The campaign’s main concern was whether their Republican opponent, Adam
Laxalt, would prematurely declare victory and throw the post-election
vote-counting period into chaos. As Laxalt’s strong rural vote came in,
he overtook Cortez Masto in the count, and Democrats’ concerns
increased. But so far their fears have been misplaced. 

In 2022, this counts as a positive development for American elections.
Candidates are largely refraining from using the seesaw nature of
vote-counting to sow doubts about the results, as Trump infamously did
in 2020.

What hasn’t changed since 2020 is that Nevada (and Arizona and
California and many other states) take days to finish counting. While
still trailing Laxalt, Cortez Masto’s chances of victory improved
Wednesday, with the majority of the outstanding vote consisting of mail
ballots from Nevada’s urban centers, which are Democratic strongholds.

Subscribe to the POLITICO Playbook newsletter

Raghu Manavalan is the Host of POLITICO's Playbook Daily Briefing.
Jenny Ament is the Executive Producer of POLITICO Audio.