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There’s been a recent effort to brand the White House as “The People’s House,” which seems very wrong since the president is picked by the complicated Electoral College rather than directly by voters.
It’s the House of Representatives that is closest to the American people and most directly represents their will.
With the last House race of the 2024 election decided – by fewer than 200 votes! – we can say definitively that Congress, like the political divide in the US, will change very little.
The same electorate that returned Donald Trump to the White House with a smidge less than 50% of the vote – a decision that could have a great effect on American life when he takes control of the federal bureaucracy – has also delivered the most narrowly divided House since the outset of the Great Depression, with Republicans holding a slim majority.
That means if the president-elect and his GOP allies don’t find a way to work across the aisle, they’ll have to rely on complete agreement among Republicans in the House. In either scenario, they’ll likely have a hard time enacting much permanent change in American law.
That final contested House race will be won by Adam Gray, a pickup for Democrats in California’s Central Valley.
The movement in this year’s House elections looked like this:
Democrats picked up nine seats and lost eight.
Republicans picked up eight seats and lost nine.
The balance of power would be Republicans’ 220 to Democrats’ 215 when the new Congress takes the oath of office on January 3, but up to three Republican seats are likely to be open by later in the month. Former Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida resigned from Congress when he was briefly Trump’s nominee to be attorney general. And Reps. Elise Stefanik of New York and Mike Waltz of Florida are both expected to leave Congress to join Trump’s administration as the president-elect’s picks for US ambassador to the United Nations and national security adviser, respectively.
That means the true balance, at least to start the two-year legislative term if all three seats are vacant at once, will be 217-215. Republicans will have to be in lockstep to be able to pass anything without help from Democrats, which is the party’s preference.
“Do the math; we have nothing to spare,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters of his historically slim majority.
Trump, meanwhile, will work through the White House with executive orders and rulemaking to enact less permanent change. But Johnson predicted he will be able to maneuver Trump’s controversial agenda through the House: “We know how to work in a small majority here; that’s our custom.”
More of the same
The GOP’s slight edge next year will essentially be a continuation of the past two years, when Republicans held only a slightly larger majority of 222 to 213 after the midterm elections. Two years before that? Democrats had the majority, with a very similar 222 to 212 balance.
That pattern is a symptom of the country’s division but also reflects the lack of competitive districts due to gerrymandering. Incumbents usually win reelection. Only 17 of 435 seats, less than 4% of the House, went from one party to the other in the 2024 election. It’s been 16 years, since the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008, that either party has had a true government majority of more than 250 seats in the House, something that used to be relatively common.
Slimmest majority since the outset of the Great Depression
The last time a minority in the House had 215 or more votes was after the 1930 midterm elections, when Republicans had 218 to Democrats’ 216 and the Farmer-Labor Party had one.
But there’s an interesting footnote.
Back then, there were 13 months between the election and the first day of the new Congress. In that time, 14 congressmen-elect died, including then-House Speaker Nicholas Longworth. Ensuing special elections handed a slim majority to Democrats.
Two years later, a wave of voters hurting from the Great Depression would elect Franklin D. Roosevelt as president and the Democratic Congress that would enact the New Deal.
Look for Democrats to seize on any openings that develop during the coming Congress.
Another nearly tied Congress, convened at the outset of US involvement in World War I in 1917, followed years in which Democrats had been more comfortably in control.
Will of the people
House members can take office at the age of 25, five years earlier than senators and a decade earlier than the president. Unlike the president, members of Congress don’t need to be natural born citizens, which means many more Americans are eligible for the job.
House representatives are chosen by direct elections rather than the antiquated Electoral College, and they’re up for election every two years, instead of four like the president or six like senators. They’re also more representative since their districts are meant to be relatively equal in population, unlike in the Senate, where small states get the same number of votes as large states.
“Here, sir, the people govern: Here they act by their immediate representatives,” Alexander Hamilton said of the House, selling the Constitution to fellow New Yorkers.
The country has changed a lot in the centuries since he said those words. The House, where laws are supposed to originate, has been wracked by gridlock and has ceded some authority to the president. But it remains the most democratic part of the American experiment. And this year, it’s still divided.
