A year full of extraordinary drama is at its close.
A former president running for reelection narrowly survived an assassination attempt.
A sitting president’s disastrous debate saw him forced to abandon his reelection bid.
A freshly-minted Democratic nominee surfed a wave of initial enthusiasm that receded in the end.
A motley array of figures from other spheres had a political impact of their own, from Elon Musk to Taylor Swift.
Capitol Hill got in on the action toward the end of the year, as the government came close to a shutdown in an episode that shook Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) leadership of the ever-fractious Republican conference.
Here are the big winners and losers of the year.
Winners
President-elect Trump
There is no question that Trump is the biggest political winner of the year.
Even many of those who detest him acknowledge the stunning nature of his comeback.
He was defeated in 2020, impeached for his role in inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, indicted in four criminal cases and convicted in the only one of the four that came to trial. Yet none of it mattered, at least in the voters’ minds.
Trump performed better in this year’s election contest against Vice President Harris than he had in either of his past presidential runs, prevailing in the popular vote as well as the Electoral College.
Trump is the first person since former President Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century to win non-consecutive terms.
On top of all that, Trump came within a whisker of being killed in a shooting at a Butler, Pa. rally in July.
His defiant, clenched-fist gesture moments later became one of the most emblematic images of 2024.
Elon Musk
The world’s richest man had the kind of year that makes his many critics despair
Having spent more than $250 million to help get Trump elected — and made X, formerly Twitter, a much more hospitable place for right-wing voices in general — Musk was rewarded by being placed atop the newly invented Department of Government Efficiency.
Musk will be joined at the helm of the quasi-department by 2024 GOP primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. The fact that its name reduces to the acronym “DOGE” — a name of a cryptocoin that Musk has sought to boost – is a characteristic touch.
Some on the left label Musk an oligarch because of the way his wealth and influence intersect. His businesses have contracts worth billions of dollars with the federal government — a government in which he will now play a role.
There is, of course, the possibility of Musk overplaying his hand. By year’s end, some sardonic online critics were branding him as “President Musk” and casting Trump as his vice-president.
It seemed like the kind of trend Trump was likely to notice — and be displeased about.
Trump’s former Democrat nominees: Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard
Kennedy and Gabbard have trodden idiosyncratic paths.
Kennedy, the scion of the famous family, has gone from a praised-by-liberals environmental lawyer to a Trump backer known mainly for his extreme skepticism about vaccines.
Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman who backed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for the presidency in 2016, has latterly been denounced by former party colleagues and by more hawkish Republicans for her foreign policy views.
Gabbard’s 2017 meeting with now-ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is often cited, as are her views on the war in Ukraine, which critics contend are too pro-Russia.
Still, as 2024 comes to a close, Kennedy is poised to become Health and Human Services Secretary while Gabbard has been tapped by Trump to be Director of National intelligence.
It’s a remarkable political turnaround for two figures who, until recently, seemed to have been cast out onto the weirder fringes of American politics.
Joe Rogan and other podcasters
Rogan and other podcasters rose to a new level of political salience this year.
Rogan doesn’t really cast himself as a political expert, and the long and affably meandering conversations he has with guests are far removed from the format of traditional news media.
But it was his approach — and his huge audience — that helped Rogan secure his three-hour interview with Trump in October. Their conversation has received more than 53 million views on YouTube alone.
Trump also appeared on a number of other podcasts, reportedly at the suggestion of his youngest son, Barron.
Harris made some podcast appearances, the most prominent being on Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy.” But the fact that she never appeared before Rogan’s massive audience may have been a misstep.
More broadly, some Democrats now argue they need their own Rogan-type figure.
That narrative is a bit over-simplistic in that Rogan, though he seems to be trending rightwards recently, famously said he would vote for Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist, back in 2020.
In any event, the bottom line is it was a banner year for podcasting and its most visible proponent.
Mixed
2028 Democratic hopefuls: Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro
If Harris had pulled out a victory, she would have put the presidential hopes of several other members of her party on ice — likely for eight years.
Now the field has opened up, which could be good news for the governors of California, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
All campaigned hard for Harris, so they can’t be accused of disloyalty. And all have political skills.
There are complications, however. First, Harris could yet run again. Second, Newsom and Whitmer would have to get over any resistance within their party to picking a Californian or a woman again, right after a female nominee from the Golden State lost.
Shapiro, who was considered to be Harris’s running mate this year before losing out to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, doesn’t suffer from that problem.
But some political insiders wonder if Pennsylvania is on its way to becoming more reliably red, as Ohio and Florida have done in recent years — something that might diminish Shapiro’s appeal as a nominee.
Speaker Mike Johnson
Johnson has been able to hold onto the gavel. This in itself is no small thing given the volatile nature of the GOP conference.
On the other hand, the limits of his power are also evident. A painstaking deal that Johnson had worked out to try to keep the government open at the end of the year collapsed under the weight of the vocal opposition of Trump and Musk.
He then scrambled to put together another compromise, which passed in the nick of time.
Johnson has trying days ahead too.
His party did well to hold onto a House majority at all, but it is an exceptionally narrow one.
The math gives extra leverage to hardliners and assorted mavericks who the Speaker might struggle to corral in the new Congress.
Losers
President Biden
It’s been an ignominious end to a 50-year political career for the president.
Having finally scaled the peaks by winning the presidency in 2020 — a quest he had first attempted in 1988 — Biden exits after one-term, pushed out by his own party.
The reason is plain: Biden’s disastrous performance in a June debate with Trump, where his halting, meandering answers sharpened doubts about his age and cognitive abilities.
Biden was facing an uphill climb to reelection before that, and not only because of his age.
Inflation hit its highest point since the early 1980s earlier in his term, inflicting a political wound from which he never recovered. The huge increase in unauthorized border crossings during his tenure also proved to be a major vulnerability.
Overseas, Biden’s support for Israel’s assault on Gaza has infuriated many progressives, while it’s not at all clear his support for Ukraine in its war with Russia will ultimately be decisive.
Biden’s supporters contend his legislative achievements, and his presidency, have not received their just desserts.
That may be so. But it’s also true that Biden seems highly unlikely to avoid the stench of failure that clings to one-term presidents.
Meanwhile, some in his party blame him for hanging on so long, wishing instead he would have announced far earlier that he would not seek a second term.
Such a scenario would either have allowed Harris to run a longer campaign, or paved the way for an open primary where another nominee could have emerged.
Vice President Harris
Harris stood on the brink of history — and failed to make it happen.
Her defeat in the presidential election was devastating for her and for her party.
Her performance was uneven, encompassing a strong debate with Trump but several other moments that disappointed even some supporters — like her declaration during an appearance on ABC’s “The View” that she would have done “not a thing” different to Biden while in office.
Defeats in presidential elections are hard to come back from, too. Only two people have done it in living memory: Trump this year, and former President Nixon, who lost in 1960 before winning in 1968 and 1972.
Still, Harris’s supporters assert that hers is a unique case. Her entire campaign lasted just 107 days and she faced serious headwinds not of her making — specifically, a negative public perception of the economy as well as Biden’s low approval ratings.
Within Democrat ranks at least, Harris herself has escaped some of the blame that normally accrues to defeated nominees.
Her future remains a big question-mark, with some suggesting she might consider a run to be governor of California when Newsom is term-limited out of office in 2026.
Old-school Republicans
Trump’s capture of the GOP is now complete.
This is reflected even in his nominations as president-elect this time around. The MAGA forces are triumphant and Trump is feeling no pressure to include representatives of the old Republican establishment, as he apparently did after his 2016 win.
His election victory is a stinging rebuke to the most anti-Trump Republicans. Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) even hit the campaign trail with Harris, but her appearances were more notable for the backlash they engendered than for their effectiveness in winning conservative voters over to Harris’s cause.
On Capitol Hill, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) is retiring while Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is stepping down as GOP leader.
Those decisions make prominent, Trump-skeptical voices even rarer in the GOP.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.)
Congressional Democrats had as disappointing an election as their presidential nominee.
Schumer will shortly cease to be majority leader after Republicans gained four seats in the upper chamber. Losses for Democrats in West Virginia and Montana always looked likely, but the defeats suffered by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Bob Casey (D-Pa.) stung badly.
Democrats had been in an odd position going into November, with many political insiders asserting the party had a better chance of flipping the House than it did of retaining control of the Senate.
In the end, they came up short in the House as well, netting just one seat overall.
That’s a galling situation for Jeffries, who fails to become Speaker — and consequently fails to have much power to put serious brakes on Trump’s agenda.
The Squad
The left has not enjoyed any notable ascendance this year, even after the electoral failures of Biden and Harris, both generally seen as more centrist figures.
To the contrary, the group of progressive lawmakers known as ‘The Squad’ saw their ranks thinned with the defeats of Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.) in primaries.
The Squad’s leading light, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), closed the year losing her bid to lead Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), a lower-wattage figure more than twice Ocasio-Cortez’s age, prevailed comfortably in that contest.
The left is not without hope. They have got some broader traction with the argument that Democratic Party leadership has become too distant from working-class issues — and from working-class anger. There may indeed be some appetite for a more economically populist stance from Democrats in the years ahead.
But it was a tough year for the left all the same.
