Arizona Democrat wins election to father’s seat in Congress

Democratic congressional candidate Adelita Grijalva won a special election on Tuesday night against Republican challenger Daniel Butierez. She won the race with roughly 69% of the vote to represent Arizona’s 7th Congressional District, according to unofficial results. She takes the seat of her late father, Raul Grijalva, who held the seat for 22 years until his death in March.

What does that mean for the House of Representatives? The addition of Grijalva weakens the House GOP majority, proportionately changing the chamber’s balance of power. Republicans currently hold 219 seats while Democrats will soon control 214. When Grijalva is sworn in sometime next month, Republicans will have just a two-vote margin over a simple majority—the 217-member threshold needed to pass most legislation.

But what does that mean practically? The diminished margin will put renewed emphasis on GOP party unity and will give U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., less room to account for Republicans inclined to buck the party line. Key pieces of legislation over the last year passed by just one vote, including President Donald Trump’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

If Grijalva joins the rest of her Democratic colleagues on a procedural vote to force a vote over whether the Department of Justice should release all of its files on Jeffrey Epstein, Johnson will be powerless to stop its consideration. That measure is currently one signatory short of the 218 needed to advance the legislation to the floor.

Dig deeper: Tight margins are nothing new to the embattled speaker, but with government funding on the horizon—and the prospect of a government shutdown in the cards—things look to only be getting harder from here. Listen to my segment on The World and Everything in It on that upcoming consideration.