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.

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