Repeat Candidates Largely Fall Short in the House
November 26, 2024 · 3:51 PM EST
The second time isn’t always the charm.
In nearly half of the most competitive House races of 2024, one or both of the major nominees were repeat candidates. But while returning House hopefuls often bring real advantages to the table — they can avoid expensive primaries, have existing donor networks, and sometimes even have residual name ID — almost all of 2024’s cohort fell short once again.
Of the 27 Democratic and Republican nominees in competitive races in 2024 who were also their party’s nominee in 2022, just four of them went from defeat to victory. A fifth, Democrat Adam Gray in California’s 13th District, remains in the hunt.
Moreover, 12 of the 27 didn’t even improve upon their 2022 performance, winning a smaller share of the vote than they had the first time.
(This count doesn’t include candidates such as Virginia’s Derrick Anderson or Wisconsin’s Rebecca Cooke, who ran in 2022 and lost in their primary before winning the nomination in 2024, or candidates such as Oregon’s Jamie McLeod-Skinner, who was the Democratic nominee in 2022 but lost the primary in 2024.)
Both parties returned roughly equivalent numbers of nominees in competitive races — 14 Republicans and 13 Democrats. And there wasn’t a clear pattern among the winners and losers. Two winners are Republicans, and two or three of the winners are Democrats, depending on the result in California's 13th.
But on the whole, returning Republican candidates improved, increasing their vote share by 1.65 percent on average. Democratic candidates lost ground, dropping an average of 0.5 percent in vote share.
The Winners
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the four successful repeat candidates were also among the most improved from last cycle.
Republicans Tom Barrett (Michigan) and Nick Begich III (Alaska), and Democrats Laura Gillen and Josh Riley (both New York) all increased their vote share by more than 2 percentage points.
Begich was the most improved candidate of the cycle, though Alaska’s unique ranked-choice system makes it more difficult to make a direct comparison to other candidates — or to his own 2022 performance.
This year, Begich defeated incumbent Mary Peltola by 2.6 points after the ranked choice voting tabulation, 51.3-48.7 percent. In 2022, Begich placed third in the general election, behind Peltola and former Gov. Sarah Palin, with just 23.3 percent. Using Alaska’s “cast vote record,” researchers at University of Colorado simulated a final round matchup between Peltola and Begich, rather than Peltola and Palin, and found that Peltola would have defeated Begich by 55.4-44.6 percent.
That means Begich increased his vote share by 6.7 percent from 2022, by far the largest increase of any repeat candidate. The difference in margin between his two races was a whopping 13.4 points in his favor.
Barrett, who won Michigan’s 7th District, increased his vote share by 4 points, from 46.3 percent to 50.3 percent. But Barrett had the benefit of running against a new candidate, former Democratic state Sen. Curtis Hertel, rather than his 2022 opponent, Rep. Elissa Slotkin. Hertel, a career politician, was less compelling than the former CIA officer Slotkin and trailed Barrett for the entire election.
Every Republican repeat candidate who ran for an open seat improved on their performance from 2022, though Barrett was the only one of that bunch to win.
Gillen, the Long Island Democrat who defeated Rep. Anthony D’Esposito on her second try, improved her share of the vote by 3 points from 48.2 to 51.2 percent.
Unlike in 2022, Gillen did not face a competitive, expensive and late primary that hamstrung her ahead of the general election. That year, Gillen raised just $1.8 million overall — this year, she raised at least three times as much ($6.1 million through Oct. 16). She also benefitted from a slightly improved political environment in New York relative to the midterms. In both 2022 and 2024, Gillen outran the top of the Democratic ticket by roughly 2 points. In 2022, when Gov. Kathy Hochul lost the district by 5.7 points, that was not enough for Gillen to win. But in 2024, Kamala Harris won a narrow plurality, enough for Gillen to flip the 4th.
Riley, the other New York Democrat, increased his vote share by 2.2 points from 2022, bouncing back from a 51.5-48.9 percent loss to Republican Marc Molinaro to a 51.1-49.4 percent victory.
Like Gillen, Riley raised significantly more money as a second-time candidate (at least $8.7 million vs. $4.2 million) and benefitted from an improved environment in New York. Hochul lost his district by 6.7 points in 2022 but Harris carried it by a fraction of a percent in 2024. And unlike in 2022, when New York’s tortured redistricting process pushed Riley to run in three different districts before settling in the 19th, the Democrat had to contend with just one minor redistricting change this year.
So Close, Yet So Far
A number of candidates improved considerably from their 2022 showings but still fell short of outright victory.
In Texas’ 34th District, former Rep. Mayra Flores won 48.7 percent of the vote in her comeback attempt after winning just 44.2 percent against fellow Rep. Vicente Gonzalez in 2022, an increase of 4.5 percent.
Flores raised more money in 2024, but also received a massive boost from the top of the ticket, as Donald Trump surged to carry this district by 5 points after losing it by 15 points in 2020.
In Iowa’s 1st District, Democrat Christina Bohannan came heartbreakingly close to avenging her 2022 loss to GOP Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks. While the race is officially in a recount, Bohannan trails by 796 votes.
Bohannan increased her share of the vote from 46.6 percent to 49.9 percent, even as Harris lost ground in the district relative to 2020, losing it by 8.4 points (according to elections analyst Drew Savicki). That gap means Bohannan was not only one of the most improved repeat candidates, but also one of the strongest House Democrats in the country relative to the top of the ticket.
Several of 2024’s biggest improvers were candidates whose races weren’t seen as competitive ahead of Election Day but ended up relatively close. One of the biggest House surprises in a night that largely went according to expectations was New Jersey’s 9th District, a Solid Democratic seat that may have actually voted for Trump at the top of the ticket.
Republican Billy Prempeh has been his party’s nominee three cycles in a row, losing by double digits to the late Democratic Rep. Bill Pascrell in 2020 and 2022. But the combination of an open seat race and Trump’s surge among Latino voters and urban areas helped Prempeh increase his vote share by 2.3 points from 2022. He still lost to Democrat Nellie Pou, 50.8-45.9 percent.
If Republicans seriously contest the seat in 2026, they will likely look for a different candidate than Prempeh, an Air Force veteran who once posed with a QAnon flag and raised just $41,000 for his campaign.
Prempeh wasn’t the only Republican retread to post a strong performance in a district that was not on the competitive radar ahead of election day. In California’s 21st District, Michael Maher improved upon his 2022 showing against Democratic Rep. Jim Costa by 1.8 points, holding the veteran Democrat to a 4.8-point victory that took days to be called.
The Biggest Losers
Colorado Democrat Adam Frisch lost the closest House race of the 2022 cycle, when he burst onto the political scene to hold controversial Rep. Lauren Boebert to a 554-vote victory in the Republican leaning 3rd District.
But in 2024, he suffered the biggest drop in vote share of any repeat candidate on the battlefield from 49.9 percent to 45.8 percent — in part because he no longer had Boebert to run against. The Republican incumbent, wary of a rematch after her close call, moved to the other side of the state to run for retiring Rep. Ken Buck’s open seat, depriving Frisch of an effective foil.
In her place, Republicans nominated Jeff Hurd, a low-key attorney who was massively outspent by Frisch but still managed a comfortable 5-point victory, 50.8-45.8 percent.
Frisch was the only Democratic repeat candidate to run for an open seat rather than against his 2022 opponent. But because Boebert had been uniquely vulnerable, Frisch didn’t see the boost that Republicans running in open seats did.
In Michigan, Democrat Carl Marlinga nearly defeated Republican John James in 2022, falling short by just 1,600 votes — a 0.5 percent margin. But in 2024, despite increased support from national Democrats, Marlinga saw his share of the vote decrease from 48.3 percent to just 45 percent, the second-largest drop of any repeat candidate this cycle.
The Republican who saw the biggest drop in support from 2022 to 2024 was Connecticut’s George Logan, a former state senator and national party favorite who won 49.6 percent of the vote against Democrat Jahana Hayes in 2022. But in 2024, Logan only managed to capture 46.6 percent of the vote, a decrease of 3 points.
The Bottom Line
Running for Congress is expensive, time consuming, and taxing on candidates’ personal and professional lives.
It is difficult to run once, let alone twice in what can be a three year commitment. For most of 2024’s unsuccessful two-time candidates, two times is enough.
But for some of them, especially the ones who saw the most improvement, it might be hard to stay away. Maryland’s Neil Parrott and Michigan’s Paul Junge were actually making their third consecutive bids. Several others had made unsuccessful runs earlier in their careers.
There’s precedent for that — Iowa’s Miller-Meeks ran three times unsuccessfully before winning an open seat in 2020. The late Minnesota Rep. Jim Hagedorn lost three races to Democrat Tim Walz in 2012, 2014 and 2016 before winning an open seat race in 2018.
And some of 2024’s first time candidates who lost close races, such as Democrat Janelle Stelson in Pennsylvania’s 10th, and first-time nominees, like Cooke and Anderson, might be back again, hoping to prove that the second time might be the charm after all.