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Who were the candidates in the closest 2024 congressional races and what were their final vote totals?
Executive summary
The sources collectively identify several razor-thin 2024 congressional contests: California’s 13th House race between Adam Gray and John Duarte; Michigan’s U.S. Senate contest between Elissa Slotkin and Mike Rogers; and multiple House districts decided by a few hundred votes that shaped a narrowly divided chamber. The reporting contains inconsistent final-vote figures across the analyses, so the only verifiable pattern is that multiple races were decided by margins under one percent and that control of Congress hinged on a very small number of votes [1] [2] [3].
1. A nail‑biter in California that several sources single out as the closest contest
Multiple analyses identify California’s 13th Congressional District as the single closest House race of 2024, with Democratic nominee Adam Gray defeating Republican John Duarte by fewer than 200 votes in a contest that was decided by a tiny fraction of the total ballots cast. One source reports the margin as 187 votes out of over 200,000 ballots, highlighting how a handful of ballots determined representation in a competitive Central Valley district [1]. Another analysis presents an inconsistent numeric snippet claiming a 220–215 vote split for the same candidates; that figure is clearly an outlier and conflicts with the larger‑scale totals reported elsewhere, illustrating source-level discrepancies in post‑election reporting [3]. The competing presentations underscore the need to treat small raw-vote claims carefully and to prioritize the accounts that align with plausible precinct totals [1] [3].
2. Michigan’s Senate race: statewide tens of thousands, but still a photo finish by percentage
The Michigan U.S. Senate contest between Elissa Slotkin (D) and Mike Rogers (R) stands out as a statewide race decided by a small percentage margin despite thousands of votes separating the candidates in raw totals. One analysis supplies final tallies of 2,712,686 for Slotkin and 2,693,680 for Rogers, a difference of roughly 19,000 votes that translates to a 0.34 percentage‑point margin—small in percentage terms for a high‑turnout statewide contest but large in raw votes compared with the closest House fights [1]. That duality—large raw-vote counts but minuscule percentage margins—is important for understanding how the 2024 cycle produced both razor-thin district outcomes and tightly balanced statewide verdicts that together affected Senate control [4] [1].
3. Multiple tight House districts and the arithmetic of control
Analyses converge on the broader finding that the 2024 House map produced several additional districts decided by narrow margins, with the balance of the chamber ultimately determined by a small cluster of close contests. One summary notes Republicans holding 220 House seats to Democrats’ 215, with the majority pivoting on just a few thousand votes across three districts—an aggregate razor edge that made each close race consequential for the 119th Congress [2]. Ballotpedia‑style reporting indicates about 19 seats changed hands and highlights incumbents unseated by margins ranging from negligible to comfortable, signaling that down‑ballot volatility and localized dynamics produced the narrow overall split [5] [2]. The available sources emphasize both the micro‑scale margins and the macro‑scale consequence: a handful of tight contests reshaped the partisan arithmetic.
4. Conflicting tallies and the limits of the provided analyses
The submitted analyses contain internal inconsistencies on precise vote totals and margins that complicate definitive reporting. For example, the Gray–Duarte contest appears with both a ~187‑vote margin (plausible given district turnout) and an implausible 220–215 raw score in different snippets, and statewide margins like Michigan’s are reported with exact vote counts in one analysis but only percentage figures elsewhere [1] [3]. These divergences expose limits in the dataset provided: the materials synthesize Ballotpedia summaries, county and state counts, and post‑election commentary, but they do not converge on a single authoritative tabulation for every contested seat. The prudent conclusion is that while the identity of the closest races is consistent across sources, some numeric final-tally claims in the provided analyses cannot be reconciled without original certified returns [5] [1] [3].
5. The big picture: margins, geography, and political implications
Taken together, the sources show a 2024 cycle where geography and turnout produced both district‑level squeakers and narrowly decided statewide contests, creating a Congress whose balance was contingent on very few votes. The California 13th race illustrates how localized contests can flip representation on a razor’s edge, Michigan’s Senate contest shows how statewide totals can be tight in percentage terms despite large raw-vote numbers, and the aggregate House outcome—a narrow Republican edge—depended on these and similar finishes [1] [2] [5]. The reporting also flags crossover districts and incumbents surviving or falling in politically mismatched districts, underscoring that candidate quality, incumbency, and local dynamics mattered as much as national trends in producing these close results [6] [5].
Sources cited in this analysis present overlapping narratives and some contradictory numeric details; the consistent, verifiable conclusions are the identities of the closest contests and the fact that multiple races were decided by margins under one percent, with the final partisan configuration of Congress turning on a very small number of votes [1] [2] [5].