The fallout of last month’s high-stakes election and recent battles within Congress are offering early clues of what will set the tone for politics in 2025.
Democrats are looking to regroup from a disastrous Election night, with the race for Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair giving the party one of its first chances to reset next year.
Meanwhile, Republicans are enjoying their trifecta — yet battles over President-elect Trump’s nominees and government funding are already underscoring fault lines within the party.
Here are five things that will shape politics in 2025:
Divisions between Congress and Trump
The month or so after the election was a triumphant moment for Republicans — and maybe also just a fleeting honeymoon period.
Weeks after winning Congress and the White House, tensions are already bubbling up between some Republicans on the Hill and Trump. In the Senate, divisions have emerged over some of Trump’s nominees — particularly Department of Defense pick Pete Hegseth and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii), the president-elect’s choice for director of National Intelligence.
Hegseth garnered scrutiny after a police report made public last month included accusations from a woman who said he sexually assaulted her seven years ago. The incident didn’t result in any charges, and Hegseth has denied any wrongdoing, describing what happened as consensual. He is releasing her from a nondisclosure agreement.
Meanwhile, Gabbard’s nomination as the U.S.’s top intelligence officer also faces an uncertain road ahead in the Senate given that she has met with deposed Syrian leader Bashar Assad, has offered sympathetic views to Russia and called on Trump previously to pardon Edward Snowden, who has remained in Russia for more than a decade after leaking classified national intelligence.
While senators were able to successfully torpedo former Rep. Matt Gaetz’s (R-Fla.) chances as Trump’s attorney general pick, Senate Republicans, particularly those up in 2026, may not be able to afford the political cost of tanking too many others without risking primary challenges.
Meanwhile, Rep. Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) Speakership looks potentially precarious after his initial bipartisan government funding legislation got spiked following disapproval from Trump, Elon Musk and others.
While Congress ultimately avoided a precarious shutdown right before the holidays, some House members voiced their discontent over the way top House Republicans handled the government funding bill, which passed in a third, slimmed-down iteration and without Trump’s request to lift the debt ceiling.
Johnson had received Trump’s backing to remain Speaker after the November election, though it’s unclear whether he’ll be able to muster enough support among his colleagues — and Trump — to keep the gavel on Jan. 3.
Elon Musk’s influence
Musk has become an increasingly influential figure in politics. Musk — best known as the co-founder of several major companies, including SpaceX and Tesla — spent at least $250 million in efforts to help Trump win last month, a staggering sum for one individual.
Musk’s influence has only grown since Trump’s win. For one, both he and Vivek Ramaswamy were chosen by the president-elect to take the helm of advisory group “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), which Trump said will “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cute wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
The House and Senate have created DOGE caucuses in response.
More recently, Musk and Ramaswamy garnered attention for their fierce opposition to Johnson’s initial government spending bill, with some members of the party endorsing their points. Later on, Trump and Vance both came out and also rejected the bipartisan government funding bill.
“They’re poised to be very involved in delivering on Donald Trump’s agenda,” one GOP lawmaker told The Hill earlier this month, referring to Ramaswamy and Musk.
Trump and his team have rejected the notion, however, that Musk is the one calling the shots, particularly regarding Trump’s decision to oppose Johnson’s government spending bill.
“As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR [continuing resolution], Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view. President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop,” Karoline Leavitt, transition spokesperson for the Trump-Vance team, said in a statement last week.
And during a Turning Point USA event in Arizona over the weekend, Trump noted of Musk, “he’s not going to be president, that I can tell you.”
“And I’m safe, you know why? He can’t be, he wasn’t born in this country,” he added of the South African-born billionaire.
The Trump factor in primaries
2025 isn’t a major election year, with the biggest contests being held on the state level in New Jersey and Virginia. But that doesn’t mean attention isn’t already turning to the 2026 midterms — and what role Trump will play in the GOP primaries that year.
With tensions already spilling out into the open on Capitol Hill, some Republicans who cross the president-elect could prove vulnerable heading into their reelection campaigns.
Most recently, Trump re-upped his threats to primary Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) over his opposition to raising the debt ceiling without spending cuts. It could be a preview of what’s to come as the president-elect looks to oust members of his party who get in the way of his agenda.
The Trump factor in GOP primaries is certainly nothing new. In fact, his endorsement has played a key role for years, often determining who gets his party’s nomination — though not always who goes on to win in the general election.
During the 2022 midterms, some of his candidates — Senate candidates Herschel Walker in Georgia and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, for example, in addition to Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake — won their Republican contests but were unable to cross the finish line that November.
Trump still notched a few wins that year, namely endorsing his now Vice President-elect JD Vance in the Ohio Senate GOP primary.
Democrats’ efforts to pivot after devastating election
Democrats are still reeling from a difficult election, where the party lost every battleground state and saw several key senators, including Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, lose their seats, ultimately costing them their majority in the upper chamber.
Members of the party have conducted their own postmortems, though many Democrats say one of the biggest reasons their party lost last month was because of how voters feel about the Democratic brand.
“Our brand is really upside-down right now,” Ken Martin, the chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party and a candidate for DNC chair, told The Hill in an interview earlier this month.
“First time in modern history where we’ve seen, you know, the perceptions of the two American political parties, where the majority of Americans believe that the Republicans represent … the interests of the working class and the poor and Democrats are for the wealthy and elite,” he continued.
One looming question is how Democrats will regroup and tackle some of those very issues members of the party have identified as setbacks postelection. One of the first clues may come from the DNC chair race, taking place in February, as the party elects one of its first leaders.
Martin has clinched at least 100 endorsements from DNC committee members, while Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and another DNC chair contender, has notched prominent endorsements from centrist Third Way and progressive groups like MoveOn.
International crises
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war have brought political divisions to the forefront and even served as a flashpoint in tight elections.
The Israel-Hamas war, in particular, roiled Democratic and GOP primaries this past cycle — even when there wasn’t a competitive contest. The most prominent example is the Democratic presidential primary where members of the party angry over the Biden administration’s handling of the war voted “uncommitted” in the Democratic primaries against President Biden.
Though some advocates were initially hopeful about Biden’s decision to step down and Vice President Harris’s ascension to Democratic presidential nomination, that didn’t stop advocates from exerting pressure on the DNC, Harris’s campaign and others to have a Palestinian speaker at the party’s convention this past summer.
Meanwhile, the Russia-Ukraine conflict has spotlighted divisions among the isolationist faction of the wing eager to curb U.S. involvement in the Russian invasion and interventionist Republicans who believe the U.S. should be doing more to support Ukraine.
On top of that, Trump has stirred tensions in Latin America with his calls to retake the Panama Canal and with Denmark over his musings about buying Greenland.
