About this election
The 2020 United States House of Representatives elections were held on 3 November 2020, alongside the presidential and Senate votes. Democrats retained their majority but were sharply reduced, winning 222 seats to the Republicans' 213 — a net loss of about a dozen seats from their 2018 high, leaving Nancy Pelosi with one of the narrowest majorities in modern history. Democrats nonetheless won the national popular vote for the House by 50.30% to 47.20%, with 77,122,690 votes to 72,466,576.
All 435 seats were contested, each by first-past-the-post in a single-member district, with 218 needed for a majority. As with every House election, this page shows the national popular vote and the chamber's resulting composition rather than a single regional map, because the result is the sum of hundreds of separately drawn district contests.
Most forecasters had expected Democrats to expand their majority on the strength of Joe Biden's presidential win; instead Republicans staged a striking recovery down-ballot. No Republican incumbent lost re-election, while thirteen Democratic incumbents — many of them freshmen first elected in the 2018 wave — were defeated. Republicans flipped a net fourteen seats, their first net gains in the House during a presidential year since 2004, even as their presidential candidate lost.
The result revealed significant ticket-splitting in both directions: a number of districts backed Trump for president while electing a Democrat to the House, and others backed Biden while electing a Republican. Republicans performed especially well among Latino voters in south Texas and south Florida, reclaiming seats they had lost two years earlier, and recovered ground in suburban districts that had swung Democratic in 2018. The closest race, in Iowa's second district, was decided by just six votes.
The wafer-thin Democratic majority shaped the first two years of the Biden administration, forcing the party to legislate with almost no margin for defections and giving outsized influence to small factions within the caucus. The narrowness of the majority, and the durability of Republican strength in competitive districts, foreshadowed the party's loss of the House in 2022.
Federal Election Commission (FEC), official 2020 House general-election results — fec.gov.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.