2024 was the year of the weird US election – a primary election process that was all over by the end of January meant a pseudo-campaign that was staggeringly boring for six months, even with the former president on trial in a New York court room.
Then it all kicked off with an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the end of Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, and a very intense three-month scramble by Kamala Harris to stop the Trump juggernaut.
She didn’t, and 2025 is now the year of Trump’s second coming.
Time Magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ won a good solid victory in 2024. It was a clear, undisputed win.
Backed by majorities in the Senate and the House of Representatives, Trump is set up for a transformative – possibly revolutionary – presidency over the next four years.
He won 312 Electoral College votes, to Kamala Harris’ 226.
This was the final, actual result, counted when the delegates to the Electoral College gathered in their state Capitols to cast their ballots on 17 December.
No funny business, no “faithless electors”, no challenges, no claims of fraud or vote rigging. Just a straight up vote, as expected. But it was no landslide.
A landslide was Ronald Reagan winning 525 Electoral College votes in 1984, the last actual landslide victory in a US presidential election.
Or Nixon winning 520 votes in 1972, or Franklin Roosevelt getting 523 in 1936, or even Lyndon Johnson winning 486 votes in 1964. They were all landslides. 312 Electoral College votes is pretty average.
It was six votes more than Joe Biden got in 2020, but 20 fewer than Obama got in 2012, and 53 fewer than Obama in 2008.
His winning margin – 1.5 percentage points – was nothing special either. Indeed it was the fifth smallest margin of victory in the 32 presidential races since 1900.
In an electoral system that has become increasingly tight over the decades, Trump’s margin of victory was not as big as he likes to claim.
He made much of winning the popular vote, a notable achievement considering Republicans start with fewer registered voters than the Democratic Party: it was all the more notable considering that voters knew what a Trump presidency was like, and voted for more.
With all the votes counted, the winning margin more than halved from election night, when it was 3.12% to 1:48% at final tally.
This was due to the late counting of postal and early votes (41% of these votes were, as far as is known, as not all states record party affiliation, cast by Democrats, 38% by Republicans, the balance by Independents).
Again, it was not a big margin. Reagan in 1984 won by 18 percentage points. But few victories in US presidentials are by big margins, at least in this century.
The last time anyone won a presidential election by more than five percentage points was in 2008, when Obama recorded a seven point win.
Then there are the actual number of votes. Trump won 77,284,118 votes. That is the second highest number of votes anyone has ever got in a US presidential election – an impressive feat. But the highest number of votes ever was won by Joe Biden in 2020, the Covid election, when he got 81,284,666.
The gap between Biden and Trump was 4,000,554. The gap between Trump and Harris was 2,284,323.
Turnout was lower in 2024 than in 2020 by about 2.7 percentage points, or some 2.2 million people.
156,302,318 voted on 5 November. With just over 75 million votes, Harris was some 2.3 million behind Trump. But in the US system, a candidate can still win the presidency even if they lose the popular vote.
If just 229,726 votes had gone the other way in three swing states – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – then Harris would have won the election, with the bare minimum of 270 Electoral College votes. In this scenario, Trump would have lost, with 268 Electoral College votes.
The first few months of Trump’s second term could easily tip over into chaos and stasis, the inability to get things done damaging his legacy almost from the get-go.
By the same measure, if 65,000 votes spread across Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin had gone the other way, Trump would have beaten Biden in 2020, while 78,000 votes going the other way in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would have made Hillary Clinton president in 2016.
So in an electoral system that has become increasingly tight over the decades, Trump’s margin of victory was not as big as he likes to claim. A solid, undisputed win, but nowhere close to being a landslide.
And the effect of his win on the balance of power in Congress is worth taking another look at.
Yes, the Republicans are back in charge of both houses, but only just. The House of Representatives in particular has seen the Republican majority filleted by the general election to just a five-seat lead – 220 to 215.
That is the narrowest majority in a century. And it’s getting narrower.
The resignation of Florida Representative Matt Gaetz cuts it to four, while the cabinet nominations of Mike Waltz (also Florida as National Security Adviser) and Elise Stefanik (New York, as UN Ambassador), cuts the margin to just two seats – at least temporarily, while by-elections are arranged.
But that is a far from comfortable margin, especially when it comes to pushing controversial legislation through.
The first few months of Trump’s second term could easily tip over into chaos and stasis, the inability to get things done damaging his legacy almost from the get-go.
Federal budget issue unresolved
Indeed events on Capitol Hill immediately before Christmas – that is in the outgoing Congress, with a bigger, though still narrow majority of 219 to 211 – show the potential for chaos has if anything increased as a result of the election.
Because while the Congressional arithmetic may have changed, the issues have not.
One of them is the federal budget, which remains unresolved: government shutdowns have been averted several times over the past year by the use of “Continuing Resolutions”, special funding packages to keep the government lights on and money moving in the short term.
And the first “CR” package put together by Mike Johnson, the speaker of the outgoing House of Representatives, was torpedoed by the right wing of his own party, after the temporary spending package was criticised on social media by Elon Musk.
But this fiscally ultra-conservative rump of 38 members of the House was not done.
Trump had demanded a suspension, or better still abolition, of the federal debt limit, as part of the funding deal Mike Johnson had negotiated with the Democrats to avert a government shutdown for another three months.
The Republican rebels were dead against this, insisting that serious action is taken to stop the debt rising immediately. They rebelled on a second CR deal, and this time the Democrats voted with the rebels, shooting down the Trump approved package in flames.
The CR passed at the third attempt, clearing Congress with just 37 minutes to spare before the federal government ran out of cash.
But the version that passed did not give Trump his debt limit suspension. That issue will come back to the House in March, when once again the US government will face a shutdown. Only this time the Republican majority will be the slenderest imaginable. And the 38 Republican rebels voted against all three resolutions.
And this was despite Trump threatening to subject any house member who did not vote for a debt level suspension with a primary election in their district next year – the ultimate punishment for dissidents in America’s largely uncompetitive House elections.
The US federal budget, and its associated massive deficit and accumulated debt, is one of the most pressing issues in US politics, and it and associated tax cutting plans will take up most of the US domestic political agenda and energy in the year ahead.
Most republicans want to cut the deficit by cutting spending, in order to set the debt (now 120% of GDP) on a path to greater sustainability.
Plenty of Democrats would also like to see the federal budget put on a sustainable path too, but neither party can (or will) agree on what needs to go and what needs to stay.
A budget and debt fight that has been years in the making now looks increasingly likely to happen in the year ahead, and Trump’s tax reform programme is intimately bound up in the fiscal arithmetic involved.
The pre-Christmas week skirmishes in the House are pointers to how the process could unfold, and with it some of the big-ticket items Trump has sold to the American public.
One way of cutting government spending is to look for inefficiency and waste.
I have lost count of the number of governments in various countries that have come to power promising to end waste in government spending.
They are usually ousted by another party or coalition also promising to end wasteful spending. And on it goes, linked arm in arm with its ever-present companion, the pledge to cut “red tape”.
This time around Trump is outsourcing the process to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, two businessmen, who head the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (it is not a government department, but an advisory panel).
“We’re not touching social security other than we make it more efficient, but the people are going to get what they’re getting.”
The young make jokes about two people running a government efficiency drive, older ones recall Ronald “Landslide” Reagan’s spending commission from 1982, the Grace Commission which came up with 2,478 recommendations for cuts to government spending and efficiency gains – almost none of them implemented.
Run by businessman Peter Grace, a team of 160 CEOs, backed by 2,000 business people and a $76 million entirely privately-funded budget offered a detailed route map to changing the way the federal government did things.
Almost nothing was done, apart from tax cuts, but the spending reductions/efficiency gains that would have helped balance the books were not done, and the federal deficit and consequent debt tripled during Reagan’s watch.
The problem, highlighted by the Grace Commission and subsequent (private sector) monitoring was the means to getting things done.
Grace suggested that about 27% of its recommendations could be implemented by Executive Order of the president, but the remaining 73% would need legislation in Congress.
And that included the really big and really difficult things, like health spending and the pension packages of federal employees, including the military.
Trump has backed away from taking on the health budget, and has pledged no cuts to welfare programmes.
In an interview with NBC’s long running ‘Meet the Press’ show – his first with network TV since the election – Trump said: “We’re not touching social security other than we make it more efficient, but the people are going to get what they’re getting. Okay? So the entitlements remain, and we’re not raising ages or any of that – it’s off the table.”
But Musk has promised a two trillion dollar cut to federal spending (presumably over a ten-year period: the total federal budget is 6.7 trillion dollars: ripping almost a third out of it all at once would cause an economic collapse).
In an interview on Fox News in December, Vivek Ramaswamy said of the two trillion target “we are not thinking small. We are playing big here because we have a once in a generation mandate. Right now the American people have voted for drastic reform of the government: our federal government is broken”.
According to Ramaswamy, a fourth branch of government, officials of the administrative state, make most of the rules and take most of the decisions, not elected representatives. In his view that is holding back the US economy.
“So what do we want to do? We want to go in and slash and burn that bureaucracy to help Americans stimulate the economy, and return self government to the people we elect.”
Education department target of cuts
A well-known target of the cuts to come is the US Department of Education, which Trump says he will abolish in its entirety, and return control of education to individual states.
This, it is claimed, will improve education standards through greater competition and accountability from voters.
Badly performing states would get worse, and this would have adverse consequences for their economies – and thus inbuilt incentives to local politicians to improve standards. It would also give more flexibility to states in terms of religious or social education issues.
Ramaswamy also pointed to the Department of the Interior (Trump’s nominee to head it is Doug Burgum, a wealthy businessman and Governor of North Dakota, who was his campaign adviser on energy policy, AKA “drill baby, drill!”).
According to Ramaswamy, the Interior Department (which unlike its European namesakes deals with national parks, federal lands and nature protection, not crime and terrorism) is holding back America’s “energy dominance” by blocking or slowing down oil and gas permits or pipeline permits. “So I think that is the root cause of our failure as a country, this unelected fourth branch of government.”
So a lot of detailed work to come. And if the Grace Commission ratios hold today, most of that work will entail legislation, or repeal of legislation, in Congress.
Which brings us back to that very narrow majority in the House. Which is up for election again in November 2026. Which means an awful lot of legislative matter has to pass through the constraining pipe of Congress in a two-year period. A tough ask at the best of times. But a very tough proposition with a tiny majority in the lower house and an upper house that still has a mind of its own.
Last November’s general election saw one third of the Senate seats up for election (Senators serve a six-year term).
The Republicans made a net gain of four seats (three of them very narrow margin victories, especially in Pennsylvania, the last seat to be filled). this gave them their 53-47 majority in the upper house, but they still need at least seven Democrats to support measures, in order to overcome the filibuster – a sort of qualified majority of 60 that most measures need in order to pass the upper house.
Even before the new Senate is seated, its Republican members have been flexing their muscles, forcing the exit of one Trump nominee – proposed Attorney General Matt Gaetz – and threatening two more, Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard at Defence and Director of National Intelligence respectively.
The Senate as a collective body, and individual Senators within it, is not short of a sense of its own worth and Constitutional role. A republican majority in the upper house is no guarantee that Trump’s legislative programme will be waved through.
All of that that raises questions about what sort of mandate Trump, and surrogates like Ramaswamy, can claim for the kind of radical change he has spoken of bringing about.
“Mandate” is an elusive, slippery, elastic concept in electoral politics: all sorts of politicians claim one for all sorts of things, and Trump is no different (even though he and his supporters insist he is not “a politician”, with all the negativity that term has come to denote).
But Trump is clearly the winner of the election, and has the right to try to get his agenda implemented.
The simple fact is more Americans voted for Trump than for Harris, and that popular vote translated into an Electoral College victory as well.
In a democracy, one vote more than the other person gives the winner all the “mandate” they need – especially if that winner has the kind of larger than life, salesman-style personality that Trump has.
He can make, and has been making, the scale of his victory seem more overwhelming than it was.
Which is all part of maximising the power of the Trump presidency relative to the rest of the US government. But the presidency still needs the rest of the US government if it is to achieve anything. And while it has the numbers – just about – in Congress, and an ideologically supportive Supreme Court, waging war on the administrative state will be an energy sapping, all-consuming affair.
Although Trump and his allies won the elections and gained a new mandate, they face the same old problems, with the same old narrow margin of power, and the same small window of opportunity of implementing real change.
The next mid-term election is less than two years away.
It’s now or never for Donald Trump, and most of what he has promised to the MAGA faithful.
