Editorial: Who controls the House? The people do.

Who will control the House of Representatives?

With the voting in the rearview mirror and the counting dragging on, it’s the question everyone is asking. On television and radio, the pundits obsess about the minute­-to-minute fluctuations in the data over the seats up for grab in Washington, D.C. By how many points is this candidate up? What is the percentage of ballots tabulated?

In Pennsylvania, the same happens in Harrisburg.

The state House, like the Senate, has been much more Republican over the years than Democratic. In 44 years, the GOP has held the chamber for all but eight terms. The Senate has turned blue just twice in that time. The governors swing between parties with the regularity of a pendulum; Josh Shapiro’s win puts that office in a single party’s hands for three terms for the first time since 1954.

The 2022 election is putting who holds the House reins on the table. Republicans have held both chambers since 2011. Whether that continues is balancing on a few ballots out of Southeastern Pennsylvania.

Then, of course, there is the issue of Pennsylvania’s longest-serving representative, Penn Hills’ Tony DeLuca, who spent so much time in office that even his October death didn’t stop his reelection. That race will go to a special election, as will the now-empty seats of Summer Lee, who is going to Washington as Pennsylvania’s first Black congresswoman, and Austin Davis, who becomes the state’s first Black lieutenant governor.

Both sides want the biggest slice of the legislative pie. The Democrats have gone as far as declaring who their speaker of the House will be — House Minority Leader Joanna McClinton of Philadelphia.

But all of it misses the central point.

This was not an election in which either party maintained control.

This was an election in which the people reminded the parties where the control really lies. It isn’t in the ads or the parties or the experts doing polling. It is in the hands of the voters.

Regardless of who gets control when those Philly suburb races are settled or who keeps it after the three special elections, the parties’ leadership would do well to remember that the power they crave isn’t innate or even earned. It is borrowed from the people.

It’s about time their use of it started to reflect the real ownership.