With the resolution of an incredibly close House race in California (Democrat Adam Gray unseated incumbent Republican John Duarte), we now know the major results of the 2024 balloting a month after Election Day. It’s a good time to set aside Republican spin claiming a massive landslide victory and Democratic rationalizations about this or that mistake changing everything, and just look at the numbers and the story they tell. As we will discuss, total GOP control of the federal government probably won’t last more than two years, and there are no particular signs of an electoral realignment down ballot. Republican triumphalism and Democratic despair are equally unmerited from the perspective of the election itself.
Trump’s win looks pretty normal
Looking just at the presidential results, the more you look at the numbers the clearer it is that Trump made solid but unspectacular gains compared to his showing in 2020. There is no way his victory over Kamala Harris can be credibly called a “landslide.” He did not win a national popular-vote majority (though he came close with 49.79 percent, according to the most complete results we have). His margin over Harris was 1.5 percent, which is smaller than the margin by which the victor won in every presidential election since 1968 (setting aside the two elections, in 2000 and 2016, when the popular vote loser won the Electoral College).
The popular vote win did, of course, show a marked improvement by Trump from his 4.5 percent deficit against Joe Biden in 2020, and from his 2.1 percent deficit against Hillary Clinton in 2016. The 2024 “swing” to Trump was not, the most recent election analyses confirm, principally a matter of odd turnout patterns afflicting Democrats who were unhappy with their party over this or that issue but disliked Trump as much or more; Democrats lost vote share to Trump, not to “none of the above.”
Trump won the Electoral College by a more decisive 312 to 226 margin, but that’s basically the same margin he won in 2016 and that Biden won in 2020. More to the point, a two-point swing to Harris in just three states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, would have given her an Electoral College majority and the presidency.
Every bit of information we have reinforces the impression that recent inflation and pessimistic assessments of the economy were the killer issues for Harris. They were overwhelmingly the top concerns of swing voters, who also exhibited extraordinarily positive retroactive impressions of Trump’s performance on the economy during his first term. You can argue that her campaign failed to galvanize negative swing-voter feelings about Trump’s character and extremist associations, or that the vice-president might have somehow more sharply distinguished herself from the deeply unpopular president to whom she was lashed.
Republican Senate gains were mostly a reflection of a favorable landscape
Throughout the 2024 election cycle, no matter what was going on in the presidential race, the odds of Democrats hanging on to control of the Senate were consistently low, thanks to an unforgiving landscape. Democrats were defending eight vulnerable seats, three of them in states (Montana, Ohio, and West Virginia) sure to be carried handily by Trump. There were only three theoretically vulnerable Republicans; all of them were in safely red states (Florida, Nebraska, and Texas) and had big money advantages over their challengers.
In the end, Democrats predictably lost Senate races in deep-red Montana, Ohio, and West Virginia, and went 4-1 (winning in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin while losing in Pennsylvania) in the other five competitive races, all in states carried by Trump at the presidential level. Upsets did not materialize in Florida, Nebraska, or Texas. While the national Republican trend helped, it’s safe to say the landscape mattered most in producing the 53-47 majority Senate Republicans now enjoy.
House Democrats did well, and will be able to cause real problems for Mike Johnson
Despite the adverse presidential and Senate results, House Democrats gained one net seat (two if the 2022 elections are the baseline) in 2024 balloting. Democrats won 40 of the 69 districts rated “most competitive” by the New York Times, and split the 22 races rated as toss-ups by the Cook Political Report right down the middle. They flipped three seats each in California and New York, mitigating to some extent the story line of Democratic crisis in deep-blue states.
The results means the narrow margin of control that caused a lot of problems for House Republicans during the last two years will be continued if not intensified, with Speaker Mike Johnson being able to lose just two votes on any pure party-line balloting in the House. There’s an even more perilous short-term situation as House members resign to accept positions in the Trump administration (two special elections for open GOP seats have already been scheduled for April 1 in Florida). Assuming Democrats stay united, there will be a powerful temptation among various House Republican factions to shake down Johnson prior to crucial votes, or even to break ranks entirely in anticipation of difficult midterm elections.
State results showed no major gains for either party
Whatever national wave Republicans could boast based on their presidential performance didn’t really extend to the state level. Neither party made a net gain in governorships, though Democrats did decisively win the most-discussed contest, in North Carolina. Among state legislatures, Republicans achieved no net gain in chambers controlled (though they did bust up Democratic trifectas in Michigan and Minnesota) and wound up with the same percentage of legislators overall that they had going into the election.
The most fiercely competitive state ballot measures involved abortion policy, with abortion-rights supporters winning seven (in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and New York), and their opponents winning three (in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota, though the Florida abortion-rights measure did win a majority but failed to reach a super-majority threshold). Though the Florida outcome was a bitter disappointment for the largely Democratic pro-choice forces, their overall record in 2024 remained positive.
Looking ahead, neither party is a clear favorite
Though a lot of currently unknown factors will determine the shape and intensity of the 2026 midterm elections, the odds are very good that Democrats will have at least one trophy in plain view: control of the House. In 20 of the last 22 midterm elections, the president’s party has lost a minimum of four net House seats, and an average of 32. Last time he was in office, Trump’s party lost 40 net House seats. From what we know of the new Republican regime’s plans for the next two years, it seems very likely that it will cash in a lot of political capital to achieve highly controversial policy goals, which almost always means a short-term loss of popularity. A lot of House Republicans are going to be walking planks on high-profile votes in 2025 that could be fatal in 2026.
On the other hand, Republicans would have to really screw up to lose control of the Senate in 2026; they will again benefit from a favorable landscape. While they must defend 22 seats, 21 are in states Trump carried on November 5; the other is held by Maine veteran Susan Collins, who regularly overperforms her national party. Fully 20 of the seats at risk are in states Trump carried by at least 11 percent in 2024. It will be a really hard nut to crack, particularly since Democrats will have to defend vulnerable senators of their own in Georgia (Jon Ossoff) and Michigan (Gary Peters). Since Republicans control the White House and the vice-president’s tie-breaking vote, Democrats would have to flip four seats to regain control. The 2028 landscape is significantly less slanted toward Republicans, but if they enter it with their current three-seat cushion (or more, depending on what happens in 2026), a flip will still be a tall order.
How about the big prize, the presidency, which presumably Donald Trump will be giving up in 2028? The good news for Democrats going forward is that in 2028 the Biden administration will be an increasingly distant memory, and Republicans will without question be held accountable for economic discontent, which is very likely to continue or even intensify. The GOP gains among Democratic “base” constituencies (especially Latinos and young voters) that received so much attention this year are most easily explained by short-term reaction to deeply negative economic perceptions rather than some fundamental alienation from the Democratic Party that we can take for granted going forward.
Even without factoring in the possibility that the new Republican regime in Washington will overreach and become quickly unpopular (which will almost definitely be the case if the massive cuts in non-defense federal spending the GOP is contemplating are enacted), there’s no particular reason to assume that J.D. Vance or some other MAGA inheritor will begin the 2028 presidential cycle as a favorite against a Democratic nominee who (this time!) will be chosen by an open primary process.
There’s no clear evidence of a Republican realignment
Every time either party wins a high-stakes election, particularly if it results in a governing trifecta, there’s talk in the air of realignment, of a shifting of tectonic plates that changes the position of the major parties for a generation. We heard it from Republicans in 2004, just before a precipitous decline in George W. Bush’s popularity that cost the GOP control of Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008. We heard it from Democrats in 2008, just before they lost the House in a calamitous 2010 midterm with the Senate following suit in 2014. In 2020 Democrats told themselves the defeat of Trump (followed by his much-condemned refusal to accept it) meant the MAGA infection of the GOP was at a definitive end.
These realignment dreams were all illusions, and there’s no clear evidence today’s are any different. Do Trump’s gains among the fast-growing Latino population mean Democrats are doomed in future presidential elections? Bush’s very similar gains in the same demographic group (and also, lest we forget, among Black voters) sure didn’t stick. Does the GOP’s 2024 progress among young voters guarantee a glorious future? Probably not, since they’re still losing among the under-30 voters, aside from the fact that a slightly new cohort arrives every year, now featuring first-time voters whose crucial experience will be with the reign of overwhelmingly Christian conservative Republicans who may disappoint their economic aspirations and foreign-policy views just as much as Biden did.
There’s also virtually no chance that future elections will feature an octogenarian Democratic incumbent who takes his sweet time giving way to a vice-presidential successor who struggles to come up with a “change” message, even as her opponent survived two assassination attempts. The weird stuff about 2024, including its weird presidential winner, will probably be more noteworthy to historians than any long-term trend it signaled. So the smart expectation going forward is continued partisan polarization and highly contested elections, not some red apocalypse.
