Several “winners” and “losers” emerged in 2024 as the year comes to a close after Republicans took control of Congress in the November election and several prominent Democrats ended up on the losing side.
WINNER – President-elect Donald Trump
Pundits in the media largely wrote Trump off after he left office and argued his political career was over in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and House impeachments. That critique intensified after he found himself facing indictments in several different jurisdictions and battling with several prominent Republicans during the GOP primary.
However, Trump weathered the political storm while surviving two assassination attempts and won back the White House in November in what many described as the greatest political comeback in American political history.
From left: VP Kamala Harris, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, VP-elect JD Vance
Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Jan. 20 for a term that will be bolstered by Republican control of the House and Senate for at least the next two years.
LOSER – VP Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz
President Biden made history this summer when he dropped out of the presidential race amid pressure from many within his own party and essentially handed the reins to his vice president despite calls to hold an open primary process.
After several months of campaigning along with a spending blitz of $1 billion, Harris ultimately failed to make the case to voters that the Biden-Harris administration policies should be continued with four years of a Harris presidency.
Harris lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College to Trump, and Republicans down the ballot secured enough seats to keep control of the House and retake control of the Senate.
2024’S MOST ANNOYING PEOPLE. LEFT AND RIGHT CAN AGREE ON AT LEAST 2
Democrat presidential nominee Vice President Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, arrive at a campaign rally in Philadelphia on Aug. 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Harris was widely criticized for her decision to select Walz as her running mate, with many political experts making the case that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was the optimal choice. Walz had been labeled by many media outlets as a personable and popular governor who brought “Midwestern charm” to the ticket but also consistently brought negative attention to the campaign with a series of gaffes and controversial statements about his past military service.
“Historically, vice presidents have little impact on a presidential candidate’s fate,” Rob Bluey, president and executive editor of the Daily Signal, told Fox News Digital last month.
“But in the case of Tim Walz, it proved to be a disastrous decision that doomed Kamala Harris from the moment she made it. Not only was Walz ill-prepared for the national spotlight and media scrutiny, but Harris passed over several better options. Given how little Americans knew about Harris or her policy positions, they were right to question her judgment on this big decision.”
WINNER – Elon Musk
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO officially threw his support behind Trump shortly after the former president survived being shot during a failed assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July.
Musk quickly became a fixture on the campaign trail and spoke at a rally at the site of the assassination attempt.
“As you can see, I am not just MAGA. I am Dark MAGA,” Musk joked at the rally in October, a nod to the Dark Brandon meme. He called the upcoming Nov. 5 election “the most important election of our lifetime.”
Over the past few months, Musk has positioned himself as a key voice in the Trump administration and has been seen at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida several times – some outlets have reported that he is living on the property – and his influence has grown to the point that liberal pundits are accusing him of being the “co-president.”
Musk, along with former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, was appointed by Trump to lead the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, which has already made waves in Washington, D.C., with elected officials on both sides of the aisle supporting the agency’s stated goal of slashing government waste.
LOSER – George Soros
2024: THE YEAR PRO-TRUMP CELEBRITIES BECAME MAINSTREAM
Left-wing billionaire and philanthropist George Soros (Jason Alden/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The Soros money machine that has propped up progressive lawmakers and district attorneys across the country suffered significant losses in blue California on election night as voters overwhelmingly rejected progressives on the issue of crime.
California voters overwhelmingly voted in favor of Prop 36 that rolled back key provisions of Proposition 47, which was advertised by Democrats in the state as progressive crime reforms that would make the state safer.
When Proposition 47 passed in 2014, it downgraded most thefts from felonies to misdemeanors if the amount stolen was under $950, “unless the defendant had prior convictions of murder, rape, certain sex offenses, or certain gun crimes.”
Progressives suffered another major loss in Los Angeles, where District Attorney George Gascón, who co-authored Prop 47 and was backed by Soros, was defeated by former federal prosecutor Nathan Hochman as crime was seen as a top issue of the election cycle.
In another loss for Soros-backed prosecutors in the Golden State, Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price was recalled, less than two years after taking office, after backlash for her alleged soft-on-crime approach.
Oakland Democrat Mayor Sheng Thao, who faced heat from her constituents amid rising crime, was also ousted from office after her recall effort passed with 65% of the vote.
In San Francisco, where crime has been a major concern with voters, Democrat Mayor London Breed lost her re-election campaign.
“I think that this is broader than just a message from people who care about crime,” Cully Stimson, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and co-author of the book “Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers Are Destroying America’s Communities,” told Fox News Digital.
“This is a massive mandate and cry for help from the general population that we want our state back, we want our counties back, and we want our cities back and that our failed social experiments have had enough time, and they’re an absolute, abysmal failure.”
WINNER – Vice President-elect JD Vance
TRUMP’S CONVINCING 2024 VICTORY SETS HOUSE GOP UP FOR HOME FIELD ADVANTAGE IN 2026 MIDTERM ELECTIONS
Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, the vice president-elect, leaves the Senate chamber as lawmakers work on an interim spending bill at the Capitol on Dec. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
The popular narrative among left-wing pundits during the presidential election cycle was that Trump’s VP pick, Ohio GOP Sen. JD Vance, would alienate voters with a personality they deemed to be unlikable.
Contrary to that narrative, Vance solidified himself as a formidable force in conservative politics, appearing on a variety of podcasts, holding frequent press conferences and putting forward a debate performance that several polls suggested he won.
Vance held a 34% favorability rating when he joined Trump on the ticket. That number shot up over the next few months, and Real Clear Politics reported in mid-November that his favorability rating had shot up to 44%.
“I thought people would be more unnerved by JD Vance,” MSNBC host Rachel Maddow told Semafor this week.
Vance, 40, will be the third-youngest vice president in American history when he is sworn in next month. As Trump is prevented by the Constitution from seeking another term in office, Vance is already viewed as a front-runner for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination.
“We are getting four more years of Trump and then eight years of JD Vance,” Donald Trump Jr. said in October on the campaign trail.
The younger Trump, who’s a powerful ally of the vice president-elect, is extremely popular with the MAGA base.
“The vice president will be in the catbird seat, no question about it,” longtime Republican consultant Dave Carney recently told Fox News Digital.
LOSER – Democrat Senate incumbents
On their way to taking control of the Senate, Republicans successfully unseated several Democrats who had spent decades in the chamber.
Sen. Sherrod Brown had represented Ohio in the Senate since 2007 before falling in November to his Republican challenger, businessman Bernie Moreno. Brown, considered one of the most vulnerable members of the Senate heading into the election, had attempted to paint himself as a moderate to Ohio voters who ended up voting for Moreno in a state that Trump carried by 11 points.
Democrat Sen. Bob Casey, who comes from a prominent family in Pennsylvania politics, has represented the state in the Senate since 2007 and had long been considered one of the toughest incumbents to defeat until he lost to GOP challenger Dave McCormick in November.
McCormick, a 59-year-old businessman, defeated Casey by a razor-thin margin of 0.2% after riding Trump’s endorsement and dissatisfaction with the economy that Biden and Harris presided over for four years.
“We heard a common refrain. The one message we heard over and over again is we need change. The country is headed in the wrong direction. We need leadership to get our economy back on track to get this horrific inflation under control,” McCormick said after the election.
Montana Sen. Jon Tester, who also joined the Senate as a Democrat in 2007, met a similar fate in November after losing his seat to former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy.
Tester had taken up more moderate stances in recent years, openly breaking with the Biden-Harris administration on several issues throughout the years, but it was not enough to persuade voters in Montana, where Trump won by almost 20 points.
Fox News Digital’s David Rutz, Paul Steinhauser and Cortney O’Brien contributed to this report.