About this election
The 2022 United States House of Representatives elections were held on 8 November 2022, at the midpoint of Joe Biden's term. Republicans won a narrow majority, taking 222 seats to the Democrats' 213, a net gain of about nine seats that ended four years of Democratic control and made Kevin McCarthy Speaker after a protracted fifteen-ballot election in January 2023. Republicans won the national popular vote for the House by 50.01% to 47.29%, with 54,227,992 votes to 51,280,463.
All 435 seats were contested, each elected by first-past-the-post in a single-member district, with 218 needed for control. As with every House election, this page presents the national popular vote and the resulting party composition rather than a single regional map. The 2022 elections were the first held under district lines redrawn following the 2020 census, a redistricting cycle that proved roughly neutral in its overall partisan effect after court rulings reshaped several state maps.
With inflation high and President Biden's approval low, many analysts had predicted a large Republican wave. Instead the party achieved only a modest majority, one of the weakest midterm performances by an opposition party in decades. The backlash to the Supreme Court's June 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, concerns about election denialism among some Republican candidates, and the relative quality of the competing nominees were widely cited as factors that blunted the expected wave.
Republicans made their most important gains in New York, where redistricting and a strong statewide showing delivered several suburban seats and effectively decided control of the chamber, and in Florida, where the party swept newly drawn districts. Democrats, in turn, flipped seats in states where court-ordered maps favoured them and held up better than expected in the Midwest. The net effect was a closely divided House mirroring the closely divided country.
The narrow Republican majority produced a fractious Congress: the difficult election of Speaker McCarthy was followed in October 2023 by his removal — the first time in history the House had voted out its Speaker — and a prolonged search for a successor. The slim margin gave hard-line members repeated leverage and made governance, including basic funding of the federal government, a recurring struggle through the rest of Biden's term.
Federal Election Commission (FEC), official 2022 House general-election results — fec.gov.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.