Turns out, it's a bad idea to joke about going to a "public hanging"

More women than ever ran for political office this cycle. Sign up for our newsletter following them.

More than two weeks after Election Day, results from the last few outstanding House races are still straggling in. (Stay with me, everybody. We can do it.) But Congress isn’t holding off on that whole governing thing while it waits for every last member to show up.

Republicans are trying to combat perceptions that they’re losing women by electing them to congressional leadership positions. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is marshaling her forces and waiting for someone to challenge her bid for speaker. Democrats’ newly minted celebrity, New York congresswoman-to-be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is using Instagram Storiesto shed light on Congress’ inner workings. Which brings me to a personal request: Can we please, for the love of God, stop talking about Ocasio-Cortez’s bank account and shocking tendency to wear clothes? (I know, I know — Democratic socialists are just so radical.)

Walmart wants its money back. The retail behemoth asked Mississippi Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith Tuesday to return a donation it made to her campaign. The awkward request came just a few weeks after Hyde-Smith tried to compliment one of her supporters by remarking, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I'd be on the front row.” Walmart isn’t the only company rethinking its support for Hyde-Smith: AT&T, Leidos, Union Pacific, and Boston Scientific have also asked her to give them their money back. She apologized for the remarks for the first time at a Tuesday debate.

FYI: Hyde-Smith will still probably win in her Nov. 27 run-off against Democrat Mike Espy, but outside groups are using her controversial comments in their ads.

In a case of truly stellar timing, a photo also surfaced Tuesday of a beaming Hyde-Smith in a Confederate hat while visiting the Jefferson Davis Home and Presidential Library in 2014. (If you’re struggling to recall when Jefferson Davis was president of the United States, he wasn’t; he was president of the Confederacy.) Hyde-Smith captioned the photo “Mississippi history at its best!”

Stacey Abrams ended her campaign for the Georgia governorship. Abrams, the first black woman to ever nab a major party gubernatorial nomination, had hoped to win enough provisional and absentee ballots to trigger a run-off against Republican Brian Kemp. But on Friday, she acknowledged that wasn’t going to happen — although she still went after Kemp in a blazing speech. "Stoicism is a luxury and silence is a weapon for those who would quiet the voices of the people,” Abrams declared. “And I will not concede because the erosion of our democracy is not right."

FYI: As Georgia’s secretary of state, Kemp oversaw voting this cycle; he resigned from that job just after Election Day, following accusations of voter suppression that pockmarked the race. This week, Abrams said she was almost blocked from voting at her polling place.

Republican women are still falling to the blue wave. Two House races with female candidates lost their races over the last week, and the GOP’s odds don’t look good in another district.

• Republican Rep. Mia Love, the lone black Republican woman in Congress, and Democrat Ben McAdams spent the last few days trading the lead in the race for Utah’s 4th Congressional District. McAdams was projected to be the winner immediately after Election Day, but Love, a “rising star,” snuck into the lead over the weekend — only to crash back down Tuesday, when McAdams officially defeated her by less than 700 votes.

• Republicans missed their chance to elect the first Korean-American woman to Congress this past weekend, when Young Kim lost California’s 39th District to Democrat Gil Cisneros. Kim’s loss makes Democrats’ takeover of Orange County complete, despite the region’s legacy as “the birthplace of Richard M. Nixon and modern-day conservatism,” as the New York Times put it.

• Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney is sweating in New York’s 22nd District. Democrat Anthony Brindisi is beating Tenney by nearly 2,000 votes, but the Associated Press hasn’t called the race yet and the district’s last few counties hope to wrap up counting ballots by Thanksgiving.

FYI: Brindisi is taking full advantage of his likely win: He’s among the 16 congressional lawmakers who signed a letter opposing Pelosi as speaker.

Much of the media, including this newsletter, has zeroed in on the 538 elected seats in Congress. But state legislatures have also undergone a huge upheaval since Election Day, when at least 1,743 women won seats, according to the Center for American Women and Politics. (More than 1,200 were Democrats.) Women will now comprise about 27 percent of all state lawmakers, after more than a decade of their numbers hovering between 23 and 25 percent. That’s a higher percentage of women than we’ll have in Congress. FYI: Despite high hopes for Nevada, the state ultimately failed to become the first in U.S. history to elect an majority-female state legislature. The top of the ticket in Michigan, however, is now almost all Democratic women.

— Republican Jenifer Sarver, a former congressional staffer and current communications strategist who ran for Texas’ 21st Congressional District and lost in the primary.

Over the last week, I spoke with Sarver and several other Republican women about what will happen to the GOP if the party doesn’t take steps to ensure that its future is, at least partly, female. Even though the overall number of women in Congress will rise to a historic high, the number of Republican women in Congress will actually drop. So far, only 13 Republican womenhave won seats in the U.S. House, compared to 89 Democratic women.

“I don’t want to get something because I’m a woman. I don’t want someone to say, ‘I’m only voting for you because you’re a woman,’ because that discredits all of the other attributes about me,” Sarver said. “But on the other hand, unless we start actively making choices, things will never change.”

Only one kind of woman really managed to surf the so-called “pink wave” this year: Democrats. With the number of Republican women in Congress dwindling, Republican strategist Rina Shah told me that the party’s problems with women are “a five-alarm fire.”

“The party won’t survive,” she said. “It just won’t, if this continues.” Read more here.

Politics can seem like a series of hyperbolic races and battles, overly focused on statistics and optics, but policy is what ultimately changes people’s lives. VICE News correspondents traveled across the country on Election Day to talk to activists, candidates, and ordinary Americans about the on-the-ground issues they’re fighting for and voting on.

Katie Hill did it: The first-time candidate flipped California’s 25th Congressional District and joined the wave of Democratic women who helped retake the House. But in the final installment of the VICE News Tonight on HBO’s “She’s Running” series, Hill not only wins herself a seat in Congress — she also deals with what comes next.

That’s all for this week, but if you want to say hi — or send any tips — email me here. You can also find me on Twitter at @carter_sherman. Thanks to Leslie Xia for the design.