The last time the Democratic Party came into a Congress with as narrow an advantage over the Republicans as the one it won last year, the speaker of the House was Samuel Randall.
It’s possible you haven’t heard of him. He died in 1890.
House majorities are always squishy. With hundreds of members, people tend to come and go with some regularity. But data from the House of Representatives itself suggests that the Democrats’ nine-member majority coming into the 117th Congress — if we include Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.), sworn in a month after the Congress began — was the narrowest for the party relative to the GOP since Randall’s 46th.
