Sean Patrick Maloney is a tale of two nights: The best of times, the worst of times

“I don’t like to lose, but my opponent won this race. He won it fair and square, and that means something. So I’m going to step aside, and I had a good run,” Maloney, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said Wednesday morning at the group’s new outpost in the Navy Yard neighborhood of D.C.

At a few points on Wednesday, Maloney fought back tears, unable to celebrate his finest moment on the national political stage because of what had happened back home. His husband and senior aides lined a side wall, tears rolling down their faces.

Maloney’s defeat is a stunning end to a two-year stewardship of the party’s House campaign arm that had its share of controversy.

Maloney left his own campaign office Tuesday in Rockland County, north of New York City, and flew down to Washington so he could join House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other leaders watch the results pour in.

Once early data from exit polls revealed the importance of abortion rights to voters rivaled sky-high inflation, it became clear that the Maloney theory of the case was probably right. Democrats were engaged in district-by-district battles, not getting swept up in a nationalized political storm, and good candidates could defeat Republicans if they focused on the right issues and built good campaigns.

Republicans had a target list that included 11 Democratic incumbents who were sitting in districts that President Donald Trump won in 2020 or that Joe Biden narrowly won, by less than five percentage points. The GOP considered these the base of their expected “red wave,” but instead they appear to have won just four of them.

Republicans remain likely to pick up the handful of seats to claim the majority, but in a very narrow fashion that will leave their fractious caucus in a state of peril over how to govern.

Independent analysts expected a minimum of 15 seats for Republicans — and sent lots of signals they would win more than 30 seats — but instead House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) felt the political embarrassment of political reporters doing their TV hits from a near-empty ballroom at his victory party.

It may take several more days to officially determine if the Republicans won the majority, and, on this score, Maloney stood tall Wednesday.

“If we fall a little short, we know that we gave it our all, and we beat the spread,” Maloney said.

Yet, when McCarthy did come out of his shell, in the predawn hours Wednesday, he predicted a GOP majority and gloated about having defeated Maloney, the first time a campaign committee chair has lost in 30 years.

“Our chairman took an arrow for us,” Pelosi told Democrats on a conference call Wednesday afternoon, according to the notes of a participant who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private call.

McCarthy and his allies, particularly the Congressional Leadership Fund, became fixated on the idea of defeating Maloney as a big political trophy as part of their expected big wins. Outside GOP groups spent nearly $9 million in ads against Maloney by Oct. 19, a tally that is likely to have grown by several million in the final two weeks of the campaign.

When they unveiled their “target list” in June, Republicans listed every race in alphabetical order by state — except for Maloney’s, which they listed first.

Similar vanity plays came in Orange County, where Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) is likely to have faced more than $10 million in outside GOP negative ads, and a longtime Democratic district in Rhode Island that saw more than $5 million in outside funding from conservatives.

Biden won the Maloney, Porter and Rhode Island districts by more than 10 percentage points each. Republicans lost in Rhode Island and, with almost half the votes to count, Porter is in a narrow lead.

“We resisted the temptation to chase shiny objects,” Maloney said Wednesday.

It was a clear dig at the GOP effort to win those reach seats, indirectly suggesting it led to Republicans not winning more favorable seats and leaving some of their own incumbents exposed to surprising defeats.

That analysis provided a political deja vu moment for Maloney, who led a large review of how House Democrats lost 13 seats over the 2020 cycle despite Biden defeating Trump by more than 7 million votes.

In a May 2021 interview, exclusively showing the 52-page PowerPoint, he faulted his predecessor for chasing those shiny-object races deep in GOP territory without first locking down their own incumbents.

But Republicans did capture Maloney’s seat, along with three others in New York, which is likely to account for the bulk of the margin for the skinny new GOP majority.

It’s a bitter ending to a convoluted series of events back home in the Empire State, where Maloney, 56, originally believed the Democratic-run power brokers in Albany had drawn a map that would’ve provided a net gain of seats for New York Democrats.

Then a judge ruled that map invalid and installed a court-appointed special master to draw up new district lines. Maloney’s home resided in the new 17th Congressional District, but two-thirds of the district was new to him, and he jumped into that seat without consulting other Democrats in those nearby counties.

Liberals were furious because Rep. Mondaire Jones (D) represented more of the new district but his home was not there — Maloney faced sharp criticism from colleagues who felt he was pushing aside a younger person of color.

Jones ran unsuccessfully in a Lower Manhattan district and obviously remained bitter about the situation. He tweeted one word Wednesday almost immediately after Maloney’s defeat became official: “Yikes.”

Others expressed more understanding to the split-screen day for Maloney.

“He had bad news and good news. The good news was, his efforts were successful around the country in keeping us in the ballgame,” House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters.

Maloney’s ambition and confidence are not cloaked. That’s impressed Pelosi, who is appreciative of his analytical instincts, but it sometimes rubbed colleagues the wrong way.

He learned politics at the side of Bill Clinton, as a 1992 campaign aide and then a White House staffer. After a few early attempts to launch his own career, he defeated a GOP incumbent for the House in 2012.

He has long wanted the DCCC reins, winning an assignment to perform an after-action review of the disappointing 2016 campaign. The existing staff cooperated but some viewed it almost like an internal affairs review.

After 2018 elections launched Democrats into the majority, he made a brief run to become DCCC chairman. The long shot bid got cut short by a health episode, bowing out only to return after another disappointing election, 2020, winning the support of his colleagues to take the difficult mission at a time history suggested Democrats would lose big in Biden’s first midterm.

By late last winter, Maloney had again analyzed enough data to understand that what his party lacked was something more intangible — authenticity with voters — and he counseled Democrats to focus entirely on issues that resonate with them.

“The problem is not the voters,” he said during a March interview at the Democratic issues retreat in Philadelphia. “The problem is us.”

Most Democrats got the message and focused campaigns on kitchen-table issues and accusing Republicans of trying to outlaw abortion. It worked, just not for Maloney, whose time was split between his national duties and trying to defend his own district.

And now he plans to do another “deep dive,” as he calls his after-action reviews: of his own race.