By the end of this week, the states will have completed the canvassing process, but we have all of the results from the local election authorities.  In the Senate, we knew going into the year that this would be a difficult map.  The last several cycles for this Senate class (2018, 2012, and 2006) have been generally favorable for the Democrats allowing us to keep seats in several states (Ohio, Montana, and West Virginia) that have been trending Republican.  While we hoped to keep those seats, it was always going to be an uphill battle.  The only swing state that we lost was Pennsylvania and that was a close one.  There will be a couple of vacancies due to people taking positions in the Trump Administration, but these vacancies are in Republican states and the governors should fill the vacancies rather quickly.  (It is my understanding that, in both states, the special elections for the remainder of the term will be in November 2026.)

The House was essentially a wash.  Seventeen seats changed hands with Democrats picking up a net of one seats.  Right now, the House is nominally 220-215.  However, Matt Gaetz opted against returning to avoid the release of an ethics committee report that would kill his hopes of becoming governor of Florida in 2026.  Thus, when the House convenes on January 3 to elect a speaker, the margin will be 219-215.  Shortly after January 20, there will be two more resignations by people who will be sacrificing their futures working in the Trump Administration.  That will bring the margin down to 217-215 through, at least, mid-April, when Florida will fill its two seats.  Even assuming, as seems likely given the seats, that Republicans win all of the special elections, a five-vote majority only allows the Republicans to lose two votes on a bill.

Let’s start with the bad news, it only takes a simple majority in the Senate to fill judicial vacancies.  If Trump continues to work with the Federalist Society, he should be able to get most of his nominees confirmed.  However, there are Republican judges who could have taken senior status in the first Trump Administration but didn’t.  Likewise, the presumption is that a president should get to fill his administration with whatever qualified people that he wants.  Of course, Trump like naming unqualified people to posts.  Republican Senators will have to choose which nominees to fight (or at least slow down in the hopes that they withdraw).  Right now, there are at least three nominees for cabinet level positions that the Senate should reject — Hegseth for Defense, Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence, and Kennedy for Health and Human Services.  In recent years, the tendency has been for doomed nominees to withdraw rather than forcing the Senate to officially reject them but Trump might want the fight.

The good news is that the Republicans will not be able to get much done.  Aside from reconciliation bills, it takes sixty votes to end the filibuster in the Senate.  And even reconciliation bills require a budget resolution and are limited to changes that primarily impact the budget.  While the Republicans will try to add substantive provisions to the reconciliation bill, anything like a massive change to immigration law will probably be stricken from the bills.

In the House, that narrow majority (even narrower than this past Congress) will make it hard to get anything done.  The (anti-)Freedom Caucus has shown a congenital inability to compromise over the past Congress.  And Trump simply is not a hands-on type of guy who will say that this is the bill (with these provisions) that he wants.  So the Freedom Caucus will push for the most extreme version of Trump’s wish list.  On the other hand, there are several members of the Republican Caucus who have to be worried about 2026.  It would only take a 2% swing from 2024 for Democrats to win the following seats (which includes every seat outside of North Carolina that flipped this cycle):  Alaska, Arizona First, Arizona Sixth, California Forty-first, Colorado Eighth, Iowa First, Iowa Third, Michigan Seventh, Nebraska Second, Pennsylvania Seventh, Pennsylvania Eighth, Pennsylvania Tenth, Virginia Second, and Wisconsin Third.   If the Democrats find decent candidates, these seats could very well flip in 2026.  And there are a handful of other seats with only slightly larger margins that could flip if the Democrats find good candidates.  Putting to the side Pennsylvania’s Tenth which was only close because the Republican in that seat is nuts, that is thirteen Republicans who will want to put the brakes on some of the nuttier ideas that the more extreme members of their party will be trying to push through.  And each of these thirteen will want to demonstrate that they are willing to break from their party when appropriate.  In short, it is likely that once again, the Republican speaker will need to look for help from the Democrats on “must pass” bills like the debt ceiling and appropriations, and that very little substantive outside of that will get passed.