The 2024 election season is finally over! (Well, for the most part.) Election Day has set Republicans up with a government trifecta, with former President Donald Trump (FL) set to return to the White House after 4 years as the 47th President of the United States.
PRESIDENT:
Heading into Election Night, there were 7 swing states that were important for candidates to win (bolded in the table). Trump ended up winning all of them, resulting in a 312-226 Electoral College victory for him — larger than his victory (306-232) in 2016. He won the states of Wisconsin (0.8%), Michigan (1.5%), Pennsylvania (1.7%), Georgia (2.2%), and Arizona (5.5%), which he won in 2016, in addition to turning Nevada red (3.1%) for the first time since 2004 and retaining North Carolina (3.3%). (All flipped states are italicized in the table.) Trump also won the popular vote for the first time in his three elections: the result looks to be about 49.9% to 48.3% when Vice President Kamala Harris (D-CA) was expected to win it by about 2.2 points. Harris needed about a 1.8% swing to win Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and the election.
Swing state polls underestimated Trump by about 1 to 4 points, which generally falls within a margin of error. Harris performed poorly even in some safe Democratic states: for instance, New Jersey was decided by less than 6 points when President Joe Biden won it by almost 16, and New York shifted over 11 points to the right. While Harris won Rhode Island by 13.5 points and Massachusetts by 24.5 points, those margins were 7.3 and 9 points worse than Biden’s. Trump came within a percentage point of winning Bristol County, too; the last time the Republicans carried a Massachusetts county was in 1988, when the state went to then-Governor Michael Dukakis (D) by single digits in a national landslide for Republican George H. W. Bush.
Trump’s gains with Latinos and men in general (especially young men) helped him improve upon his margins from the last few elections. Florida and Texas, which have large Latino populations and are supposed to be competitive, both went to Trump by over 13 points and swung by 8 to 10 points to the right from 2020.
Trump, 78, will become the oldest President to enter office, passing Biden’s record by a few months. He will become only the second President to serve non-consecutive terms, after Grover Cleveland (D-NY) served as the nation’s 22nd and 24th President from 1885 to 1889 and 1893 to 1897. Senator JD Vance (R-OH), 40, will become the 50th Vice President of the United States. He will be the second youngest Vice President — a few months younger than future President Richard Nixon (R-CA) was in 1953, and older than only John C. Breckenridge (D-KY), who was 36 in 1857. (The nation’s youngest Presidents, John F. Kennedy (D-MA) and Theodore Roosevelt (R-NY), were 43 and 42 when they took office in 1961 and 1901.)
Harris was attempting to become the first woman, woman of color, and Asian-American to become president. Following 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton (D-NY), she was the second woman to lead a presidential ticket — and the second to lose to Donald Trump. Democrats’ struggles in this election could be attributed to various things, including economic issues, border concerns, sticking by the Biden administration, and not properly connecting with voters. Harris ended up running behind most Senate Democrats. Her lack of a true primary and shortened campaign may have hurt her, too, and she suffered from low Democratic turnout: while Trump received more votes (77 million) than he did in 2020 (74 million), Harris received 7 million less votes (74 million) than Biden did (81 million). Although he seems to have fallen just short of a majority, Trump is the first Republican to win the popular vote since George W. Bush did in 2004. The fact that Harris lost the popular vote by 1.4% when Hillary Clinton won it by 2.1% despite losing the election in 2016 is another poor sign for her campaign.
SENATE:
Democrats were already facing long odds to retain the Senate: it would be hard for them to keep seats in red states like West Virginia, Montana, and Ohio. While they were blown out in West Virginia (41%), they lost by closer margins in Montana (7.1%) and Ohio (3.6%). Democrats were also defending seats in the competitive states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Nevada. Despite Harris’s abysmal Electoral College performance, they won all but one of those seats. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) won their elections by under 1%, while Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) won theirs by around 2%. While incumbent Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) won her election by over 15 points, fellow Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) lost re-election by 0.2% to Republican challenger Dave McCormick. Other states (listed in the table) were not as competitive. Democrats won seats in 4 states that Harris lost: Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, and Arizona.
Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse defeated State Representative Patricia Morgan by around 20% to win reelection to a fourth term. Surprisingly, in a more liberal state, Elizabeth Warren (D) won re-election by a smaller margin against moderate Republican John Deaton.
Republicans will enter 2025 with a 53-47 majority in the Senate under new Senate majority leader John Thune (SD). JD Vance (R-OH) will have to leave the Senate to become Vice President, as well as Marco Rubio (R-FL) if he becomes Secretary of State, so Republican appointees will fill both of those seats.
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES:
In 2022, Republicans won a 222-213 majority, although they would later lose former Rep. George Santos’s (R-NY) seat to a Democrat. Two races that are separated by only hundreds of votes have yet to be called in California as of November 24; Democrats and Republicans lead in one each. If current results hold, Republicans will have 221 seats, retaining a majority for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) — with no net gains compared to before Election Night. Democrats made gains in redrawn districts in New York, while Republicans did in North Carolina. Each party won their fair share of competitive seats, but Republicans were able to win enough of them to maintain their majority. Democrats won all nine House seats in Massachusetts and both seats in Rhode Island by comfortable margins. As I wrote in my previous article, Republicans ran candidates in only 2 seats; given Harris’s underperformance, maybe they could’ve done better than usual in the rest of the seats had they ran candidates.
The vote to elect a Speaker may be tight, though: Republicans took a while to elect Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as a Speaker in 2023, later ousting him and taking time to elect Johnson. They might be down 3 Representatives, since Trump has nominated Michael Waltz (FL) and Elise Stefanik (NY) for administrative roles, while Matt Gaetz (FL) resigned when he had been nominated for Attorney General.
TRUMP’S ADMINISTRATION PICKS SO FAR:
Trump has already nominated all of his Cabinet Secretaries already, as listed below. All of them are Republicans except for Kennedy.
State: Marco Rubio, Senator from Florida and 2016 presidential candidate
Treasury: Scott Bessent, hedge fund manager
Defense: Pete Hegseth, veteran and Fox News host
Justice (Attorney General): Pam Bondi, former Florida attorney general (previously nominated Matt Gaetz, Representative from Florida)
Interior: Doug Burgum, North Dakota governor and 2020 presidential candidate
Agriculture: Brooke Rollins, former Trump administration official
Commerce: Howard Lutnick, businessman and co-chair of Trump transition team
Labor: Lori Chavez-DeRemer, outgoing Representative from Oregon
Health and Human Services (HHS): Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., independent 2020 presidential candidate
Housing and Urban Development: Scott Turner, former Trump administration official
Transportation: Sean Duffy, former Representative from Wisconsin
Energy: Chris Wright, fossil fuel executive
Education: Linda McMahon, former Administrator of the Small Business Administration and co-chair of Trump transition team
Veterans’ Affairs: Doug Collins, former Representative from Georgia
Homeland Security: Kristi Noem, South Dakota governor
Trump also nominated current Representatives Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and Michael Waltz (R-FL) to be the UN ambassador and national security advisor, respectively. New Republican Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic Representative from Hawaii and 2020 presidential candidate, was nominated to become Director of National Intelligence. Billionaire Elon Musk and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy are also leading an independent “Department of Government Efficiency” advisory group. There has been pushback against nominees like Gaetz, Hegseth, and Kennedy, though, with Gaetz withdrawing from Attorney General consideration.
The coming months should see the formal certification of the Electoral College, the filling out of various other roles for the second Trump administration, the swearing in of the 119th Congress on January 3rd, and the second presidential inauguration for Donald Trump on January 20th. The second Trump administration will have a Republican trifecta in government; time will tell what they can accomplish with it.
