Sean Gallup | Getty Images As states across the country continue to count votes in a tight battle for control of the House of Representatives, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Democrats “didn’t give up.” “Whatever the outcome, we’re on the road to taking our country to a better place than the other side took it,” he said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. NBC estimates that Republicans could win 219 House seats once all the undisclosed races are settled — just short of the 218 needed to take a majority — while Democrats could win 216. The projection has a margin of error plus -or-minus four seats. Democrats retained their slim majority in the US Senate, according to an NBC News forecast on Saturday, thwarting an all-out effort by Republicans to exploit economic instability and public discontent for control of the upper chamber of Congress. Republicans hoped, and many openly expected, that a “red wave” would sweep Democrats out of their majorities in both chambers of the legislature. “Who would have imagined two months ago that this ‘red tide’ would turn into a tiny, tiny drop, if at all,” Pelosi, a Democrat who is second in line for the presidency, told the State of the Union” by CNN. ” Sunday. Pelosi said she has also been told midterm voters were swayed by the GOP’s response to the violent attack on her husband, Paul Pelosi, last month. A California man, David DePape, broke into the couple’s San Francisco home, used a hammer and prepared to kidnap and break Nancy Pelosi’s knees, federal prosecutors revealed in a criminal complaint. Nancy Pelosi was in Washington, DC, at the time of the break-in, but her husband Paul, 82, was left with a fractured skull and serious injuries to his right arm and hands. While many members of Congress were quick to express their support and well-wishes for the couple, several Republicans shared misinformation and conspiracy theories about the attack. In a since-deleted tweet, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, suggested the shooter was a “nudist hippie male whore.” Pelosi told ABC that her husband is “getting better” and having “one good day after another,” but told CNN that the trauma of the attack was “intensified” by the “ridiculous, disrespectful attitude” of Republicans. “It wasn’t just the attack, it was the Republican response to it, which was disgraceful,” he told CNN. DePape, 42, was charged with the federal crimes of attempted kidnapping of a federal official and assaulting a family member of a United States official with intent to retaliate against the official. He has pleaded not guilty.
