Ohio’s high-stakes special election for Congress and the Kansas Republican primary for governor both remained too close to call on Wednesday, with razor-thin margins separating the candidates in each race.
Republican Party leaders were alarmed by the tight Ohio race in a once-reliably red district, taking it as a vivid expression of the backlash against President Trump in suburban areas. They are now steeling for a 90-day campaign of trench warfare across the country as they fight to keep control of the House, pinning their hopes on a handful of well-funded outside groups and a slashing negative message about Democrats to try to salvage the smallest of congressional majorities.
Republicans believe they can maintain a thin grip on the House by propping up incumbent lawmakers in red-tinged districts. But senior party strategists have concluded that more than a dozen districts currently held by Republicans may already be unwinnable, and the G.O.P. can only afford to lose 22 seats overall to maintain even a 1-seat majority. That leaves them with painfully little room for error over the remaining three months of the campaign.
Veteran party lawmakers have an increasingly bleak view of their prospects in the House, and some fear that Democrats could seize the chamber by a convincing margin.
“There’s a real likelihood that they not only win the House, but they win it by 10 or 12 more seats than they need,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, voicing publicly what many Republican officials have begun to acknowledge privately this summer.
Mr. Graham said a Democratic takeover was no sure thing, noting that “in the era of Trump, things can change in 24 hours, for good or bad.” But he said any Republican in a remotely competitive district could face a difficult general election.
“We’re bleeding among women and the enthusiasm factor for Democrats is worth 7 or 8 points, and sometimes more,” Mr. Graham said, using political jargon to describe just how deep into Republican territory the battlefield might stretch: “If I was a House guy in an R+10 or less seat I’d be getting on the phone and raising money and putting a sign on my dog.”
[Here are key takeaways from Tuesday’s voting.]
In Kansas, Republicans faced uncertainty Wednesday not only about their candidate for governor this fall, but also whether they were creating a political opportunity for Democrats to win the office in November. Should the party ultimately nominate Kris W. Kobach, its hard-right candidate for governor, it could also undermine Republicans in congressional races down ballot.
With all precincts reporting in Kansas shortly before 9 a.m. Wednesday, Mr. Kobach, the secretary of state, was ahead of Gov. Jeff Colyer by just 191 votes out of more than 311,000 Republican ballots cast statewide. The results were likely to remain in flux for at least several days with an unknown number of mail-in ballots not yet counted, a full canvass of all votes still to come and the possibility of a recount looming.
As the state’s top election official, Mr. Kobach would be in charge of overseeing the canvass if he does not recuse himself.
President Trump had endorsed Mr. Kobach the day before the primary, hoping to help his close ally over the finish line and extend his own victory streak of presidential endorsements in competitive Republican primaries. Some Republican leaders were frustrated with Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. Kobach, a hard-line conservative, because they saw Mr. Colyer as a stronger candidate in the November general election.
The winner of the Kansas Republican primary will face State Senator Laura Kelly, the Democratic nominee, and Greg Orman, a businessman running as an independent.
And in another race where Republicans could be vulnerable in November, Sharice Davids, a lawyer who is Native American, won the Democratic congressional primary on Wednesday in a swing district that surrounds Kansas City. She will face Representative Kevin Yoder in the general election. It is one of two Republican-held districts in the state, along with a more rural open seat next door, where Democrats are threatening to shave down the House majority.
In Democratic primaries across the Midwest Tuesday, the party’s ascendant left proved unable to match some of its recent success. In the Michigan governor’s race and in Ms. Davids’ race, candidates running with the support of Senator Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive upstart from New York, both fell short. And in Missouri, a Democrat who challenged veteran Representative William Lacy Clay from the left, and enjoyed the support of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, was soundly defeated.
In Ohio, the Republican candidate for Congress, Troy Balderson, was ahead by 1,754 votes out of more than 202,000 ballots cast — a lead of nearly 1 percentage point. But 3,435 provisional ballots have yet to be counted. Ohio law provides for an automatic recount if the two candidates are ultimately separated by less than half a percentage point.
The Democratic candidate in Ohio, Danny O’Connor, has not conceded the race — he called it “a tied ballgame” on Tuesday night — and is set to face Mr. Balderson again in the November general election.
Mr. O’Connor, who restrained himself from taking aim at President Trump during the campaign, criticized the president on Wednesday for claiming credit for Mr. Balderson’s apparent success.
“I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about, Mr. O’Connor said on CNN. “Troy Balderson can have all the people he wants fly in from D.C. I don’t think it makes too much of a difference.”
Illustrating the aggressive approach the Republican Party is taking to reinforcing its candidates in conservative-leaning districts, the Congressional Leadership Fund, the principal “super PAC” dedicated to House Republicans, has already begun airing attack ads against Democratic challengers in three traditionally red seats in Kansas, Kentucky and upstate New York. Mr. Trump carried all three districts in 2016 but Democrats are pursuing all of them ferociously.
Corry Bliss, the group’s chief strategist, said Republicans needed to wage a national campaign to disqualify Democrats as a political alternative in the eyes of voters.
“This is a tough environment and we have to give voters a choice in November,” Mr. Bliss said. “One party has cut your taxes and helped create the best economy in decades. The other party says: ‘We will raise taxes, we will abolish ICE and we will put Nancy Pelosi in charge of it all.’”
But Mr. Bliss also sent a stern message to lawmakers in his own party who may not be girding adequately for a fall onslaught by Democrats. The Congressional Leadership Fund spent millions of dollars in Ohio to salvage the campaign of Mr. Balderson.
While Republicans are expected to hold a financial advantage in the fall campaign overall, the party is unlikely to be able to fund similarly expensive rescue missions in dozens of vulnerable districts — many of which have more forbidding demographics than the Ohio seat.
“We have to have members who raise money, run good campaigns and provide a good contrast for November,” Mr. Bliss warned.
The rough election in Ohio was not the only ominous result for Republicans on Tuesday night. In Washington State, where candidates from all parties compete in nonpartisan open-primary elections, Republican candidates posted limp results in three congressional districts, including an open seat in the Seattle suburbs and the seat in Eastern Washington held by Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a member of the Republicans’ leadership team in the House.
And in a sign that they are already bracing for substantial losses, Republican officials have started to contemplate a political triage, weighing which districts may be beyond hope and determining where money can be saved.
Among the seats that Republicans see slipping out of reach are those held by Representatives Rod Blum of Iowa and Jason Lewis of Minnesota, along with more than half a dozen open seats currently held by Republicans in New Jersey, Florida, Pennsylvania and Arizona.
And after tracking the Ohio election late into the night, bleary-eyed Republicans awoke on Wednesday to the news that Representative Chris Collins of New York, who holds a solid-red district near Buffalo, was facing criminal charges for financial fraud.
The news may imperil Mr. Collins’s seat, in a development the party can ill afford given how precipitously its margin of control has already narrowed. More broadly, the specter of one of Mr. Trump’s earliest and most vocal supporters being arrested for insider trading may hand Democrats an opportunity to tar the Republican majority as corrupt.
Democrats, for their part, appear increasingly emboldened even in districts tilting well to the right of center. In Ohio alone, there are three or four other Republican-held seats that could be up for grabs in November, if the political dynamics of the moment hold for the next few months.
And Democrats see the same political sluggishness, on the part of a number of Republican incumbents, that has G.O.P. strategists so anxious about the general election.
Ken Harbaugh, a former Navy pilot seeking a solidly Republican seat in Northeast Ohio, said voters in his area sensed the disengagement of the sitting lawmaker there, Bob Gibbs, a Republican in his fourth term. Mr. Harbaugh is running on some of the same themes — championing affordable health care and attacking entrenched politicians in Washington — that the Democratic candidate in Ohio’s 12th District, Danny O’Connor, put at the center of his campaign.
“The story writes itself when you’ve got an incumbent who’s never gotten a bill passed into law, who hasn’t looked his constituents in the eye in years, hasn’t done a real town hall in years,” Mr. Harbaugh said Wednesday morning. “And people are sick and tired of paying someone to do nothing.”
Mr. Harbaugh pointed to the special election as a sign that voters in Ohio are hungry for change and focused on health care most of all. “They are just sick and tired of a political class that isn’t working for them,” he said.
Mitch Smith contributed reporting from Topeka, Kansas.