Republicans are projected to win a majority of seats in the House of Representatives, allowing them to keep control of a chamber they’ve held since 2023 and giving them unified control of the government for the first time since Donald Trump’s first term in 2017.
Controlling the House, Senate and White House will make it much easier for Republicans to enact their agenda, especially an extension of sweeping tax cuts set to expire at the end of next year.
House Republicans blundered through the past two years with one of the smallest majorities in U.S. history, struggling to agree among themselves, throwing their leader overboard and often relying on Democratic votes to pass legislation.
Thanks largely to the situation in the House, the 118th Congress was one of the least productive in modern history, and also one of the most vulgar. Given the close divide in the Senate, and the continued presence of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), it’s likely the vulgarity will continue. But with both the House and Senate in Republican hand, more laws will get passed.
Republicans hope to extend $5 trillion worth of tax cuts for American households that will otherwise expire at the end of 2025, possibly with new cuts Trump suggested during the campaign, such as on tipped income, plus new, even deeper cuts for certain corporations. Taxes were the one area Republicans managed to agree with themselves when they last controlled the government in 2017.
There may be less drama this time. After winning election as House speaker in October 2023 following several weeks of leaderless chaos, Mike Johnson (R-La.) kept the House in close alignment with Trump, amplifying his voter fraud lies with symbolic legislation while his lieutenants ran fruitless investigations of the Joe Biden administration.
Republicans will have to pick their speaker in January, and Johnson is a clear favorite. Several far-right lawmakers grumbled about Johnson’s habit of passing government funding bills with Democratic votes, though an alternative speaker candidate has yet to emerge. Johnson’s closeness to Trump ― he even flew to be with the former president on election night ― will likely help him keep his gavel.
It took former Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) 15 House votes to win the speaker’s gavel in January 2023, and he did so only after agreeing to a rules change allowing individual members to trigger a no-confidence vote in his leadership ― a fateful decision that led to McCarthy’s downfall 10 months later. Republicans will have to decide whether they want to continue operating with their speaker under constant threat of deposal.
See full results from the House election here.
