WASHINGTON -- Congressional Democrats began a period of reckoning Wednesday after suffering losses to their House majority and clinging to a narrow path to Senate control.
As the presidential race headed toward a photo finish, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., faced a political letdown.
In the highly anticipated Senate matchups, Republicans scored easier-than-expected victories in Iowa, Kansas, Texas, Maine, Montana and South Carolina while establishing narrow but steady leads in Georgia and North Carolina.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, claimed victory Wednesday in her bid to secure a fifth term, beating back an avalanche of Democratic money and liberal anger in the most difficult race of her career to defeat Sara Gideon, a Democrat, and strengthen the party's hold on the Senate.
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Her triumph, reported by The Associated Press, preserved Collins' status as the only remaining New England Republican in Congress. She became the first senator in the state's history to be chosen by voters for a fifth term in the upper chamber, dashing Democratic hopes of a crucial pickup as their ambitions of a Senate takeover hung by a thread.
Collins, 67, said she received "a very gracious call" from Gideon, who also gave a concession speech.
"Regardless of the result, we built a movement that will help us make progress for years to come," Gideon said in her concession speech.
Democrats' slim chance at claiming the majority appears to rest on former Vice President Joe Biden clinching the presidential race and Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., falling below his state's legally required 50% threshold, which would set up two runoff elections on Jan. 5 in Georgia that, if Democrats won both, would deadlock the Senate at 50-50.
In that scenario, once Sen. Kamala Harris, a Democrat, was sworn in as vice president, she would provide the Senate's tiebreaking vote, handing the chamber to Schumer.
House Democrats struggled to come to grips with how they managed to lose seats after Pelosi and party strategists predicted gains of 10 or more that would give them commanding control over the chamber.
Instead, they appear to be headed to the smallest House majority in 18 years.
Privately, Democratic operatives acknowledged that they missed the mark in their projection models -- something that also occurred in polling from GOP outlets and media companies -- saying President Donald Trump had run much stronger than expected in the conservative terrain and boosted Republicans down ballot.
"We're going to have to figure out how to get the message to resonate with the rural voters," said Michelle Smith, chairwoman of the Jasper County Democratic Party in Iowa. "Trump blew it out of the water here. It's embarrassing."
Centrists blamed their far-left colleagues who have promoted "revolution" and ambitious policies such as Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal, while those liberals punched back at the establishment for embracing a tepid agenda that did little to inspire the activist class.
"Democrats need to do some soul-searching here," said Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., a veteran centrist. "We're way out in left field, and the inner core of the American voter kind of knows that."
Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., an influential liberal, disagreed. "Maybe the problem was actually that Medicare-for-all wasn't on the ballot yesterday. Perhaps we should be examining how progressive policies like legalizing cannabis and raising the minimum wage won big," he said, noting that those policies prevailed in states Trump carried.
"Progressive policies have always been popular policies, but it's our job to bring them to the American people."
For their part, Republicans credited their surprise showing to Trump's stronger-than-expected performance combined with a line of attack against swing-district Democrats that tied them to the most liberal wing of the House caucus, the self-described socialist democrats in "The Squad," as first-term Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., dubbed them two years ago.
"The choice is going to be between freedom and socialism," Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, told reporters Wednesday, summing up the strategy he mapped out last year.
"Overall, we had a better election than most people thought across the country," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters Wednesday in his home state.
McConnell also blamed some Democrats for getting ahead of themselves by embracing policies such as eliminating the legislative filibuster and increasing the size of the Supreme Court, issues that Senate GOP incumbents used to paint their Democratic opponents as too extreme.
If Biden wins and Republicans hold the Senate, he would be the first president since former President George H.W. Bush to enter the White House without his party controlling both the House and Senate. That would leave Biden's Cabinet picks and other appointments in the hands of McConnell, who mocked "my old friend" Biden for flirting with ideas such as court expansion.
With McConnell in charge, those proposals would be dead on arrival, and any Democratic hopes of expanding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or passing voting rights legislation would face significant obstacles.
In a letter to colleagues late Wednesday, the speaker said the Biden-Harris ticket will have enough votes to win and focused on collaboration with a new administration, but she made no mention of a possible Republican-led Senate stopping the agenda.
"Our Democratic House Majority, working in partnership with the Democratic White House, will now have the opportunity to deliver extraordinary progress," she wrote. "Together, we will continue to deliver on our successful For The People agenda: lower health care costs, bigger paychecks by building green infrastructure and cleaner government."
Information for this article was contributed by Paul Kane, Rachael Bade, Seung Min Kim, Erica Werner and Mark Guarino of The Washington Post; and by Emily Cochrane of The New York Times.