Donald Trump is preparing to return to the Oval Office of the White House, being able to count, like eight years earlier, on a Congress in his control. By getting a 218e headquarters, on November 13, while the counting of votes continues in a handful of constituencies, the Republican Party has in fact retained the absolute majority in the House of Representatives obtained during the mid-term elections, in 2022, traditionally delicate for the party that occupies the presidency.
This is a good result, considering the high number of Republican candidates in districts that favored Joe Biden in 2020. The narrow majority of 220 to 212 in the outgoing assembly, however, is not expected be expanded, and the appointment of several Republican representatives in the future administration (Elise Stefanik, Matt Gaetz and Michael Waltz) will further reduce it, while waiting for them to be replaced.
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This control maintained over the Chamber is in addition to the shift in the Senate obtained on November 5. By losing four senatorial seats in states won by Donald Trump (Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, West Virginia), the Democrats recorded the biggest defeat since 2014. It could have been even more bitter if their candidates had not not won in four key states won by the Republican (Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin), which partly puts the scale of his victory into perspective.
End of a long reign
The main thing, however, for Donald Trump, cannot be reduced to this arithmetic. The Republican majority in the Senate is accompanied by the end of the long reign of the man who was their leader for seventeen years, Mitch McConnell, 82, who had notoriously bad relations with the former businessman. The latter tried to take advantage of this erasure by trying to influence the choice of his successor, but in vain, since Mr. McConnell's right-hand man, John Thune, won on Wednesday.
The Republican Party owes a lot to the octogenarian senator. The latter had made the most of the counter-power available to the Senate against the Democratic administration of Barack Obama. By developing a strategy of systematic obstruction against the nominations of federal judges under the latter's mandate. Then by removing the filibuster (granting blocking power to the minority in the absence of a 60-vote majority to override it) for the confirmation of Supreme Court justices, which previously required fielding consensus nominees.
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