Republicans start 2025 with the smallest House majority since 1931

Last Friday, we got a first look at how the closely-divided U.S. House of Representatives may have to operate in 2025. Republican Rep. Mike Johnson held onto the speakership by the skin of his teeth: He needed support from all but one sitting member of the House Republican Conference to win the absolute slimmest of victories.

The GOP is going to have to get used to this reality: House Republicans begin the 119th Congress with just about the narrowest majority that any party has had since the House expanded to 435 seats after the 1910 census. Wrangling the Republican conference and maintaining party unity will be critical for Johnson, President-elect Donald Trump and other party leaders to have the necessary working majority to achieve their legislative plans. Plus, that could get even harder in the next few months, as Trump is expected to tap at least two more House Republicans as he continues filling out his Cabinet.

At the moment, Republicans have 219 sitting members, just one more seat than the minimum 218 necessary to pass legislation in the 434-member House, where Democrats hold 215 seats and there's one vacancy (due to the resignation of former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz). Tellingly, Johnson won the speakership on the first ballot with exactly 218 votes, leaving him no room to spare. In fact, it initially looked like Johnson was two votes short of that threshold, and the House held the vote open for about two hours so that Johnson could parley with a couple of holdouts who eventually switched their votes to him. As a result, Johnson became the first speaker candidate in the past 112 years to win without a single vote beyond the bare minimum needed for a majority.

That said, close speaker elections have become commonplace in recent years: six of the 10 narrowest wins since the House expanded to 435 seats happened in the past 12 years. Johnson knows about this firsthand: In October 2023, Johnson won the speakership with five votes to spare on the fourth ballot after the leadership post came open following the maneuvering of a small cadre of hard-right Republicans to oust then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy from office. McCarthy himself had only won the speakership in January 2023 with just one vote to spare, and after no small amount of maneuvering — that victory came after a modern record of 15 ballots, with six House Republicans voting "present" on the final ballot, lowering the number of votes McCarthy needed to reach a majority (he won 216 votes while needing 215).

Internal strife has played a role in the other recent highly-contested speaker elections, too. In January 2013, Republicans held 233 seats, but Speaker John Boehner encountered difficulty thanks to 10 House Republicans who voted for other candidates or "present." Two years later, Republicans had a bigger majority (246 seats), but opposition to Boehner more than doubled, to 25. The constant pushback against Boehner eventually prompted him to leave office in October 2015. Some Democrats, meanwhile, opposed Rep. Nancy Pelosi's return to the speakership after her party won back the House in the 2018 midterms, with 15 Democrats voting against her.

As these examples illustrate, disagreements within the majority party have regularly complicated recent speaker elections — this despite living in an era of greater division between the parties, with Republicans having moved further to the right and Democrats to the left. And as the first vote taken in each new congress, the dynamics of a contentious speaker vote could very well give us some clues to the road ahead for the new majority party.

Now, the good news for Johnson is that Trump's influence clearly compelled some Johnson critics in his party's right-most flank to stay in line to a greater extent than we might have expected. During the roll call vote for speaker, seven Republicans initially didn't answer and three voted for other candidates. But Trump brought the holdouts home for Johnson using both olive branches and arrows. Two of the three who voted for other candidates — Reps. Ralph Norman of South Carolina and Keith Self of Texas — switched their votes to Johnson after receiving phone calls from Trump. As for those who initially withheld their votes, the move seemed mostly symbolic in the wake of Trump's endorsement of Johnson. For example, Texas Rep. Chip Roy, one of Johnson's sternest intraparty critics, had already reluctantly agreed to vote for Johnson after Trump told the Texan that he wouldn't attack Roy on social media as he did last month when Roy opposed Trump's proposal to raise the debt ceiling.

Nevertheless, just because Johnson has Trump's backing now doesn't mean he will keep it. Johnson faces the difficult task of advancing Trump-backed legislation addressing border security, immigration, taxes and energy — which Trump has pushed to happen in one, or perhaps two, large bills — and which would require Johnson to maintain almost complete Republican support at every point in the process.

Even with Trump's seemingly unifying presence among House Republicans, the potential for intraparty discord to trip up the GOP is especially outsized right now because of how slim their majority is. In fact, Republicans' current 219-seat majority is the narrowest House majority held by either party in nearly a century, giving them just one more seat than the 218 votes necessary to pass a measure if all 434 sitting members vote.

Plus, the math may get even harder for Johnson right after Trump takes office on Jan. 20. Around that time, Florida Rep. Mike Waltz will resign to become Trump's national security adviser, while New York Rep. Elise Stefanik looks on track to secure Senate confirmation as the country's next ambassador to the U.N. With those two leaving office, House Republicans will hold just a 217-to-215 seat edge for at least a couple of months, meaning that Johnson won't be able to lose a single Republican on any measure, assuming every sitting member casts a vote and all Democrats are opposed. The picture should improve slightly for the GOP as they will likely win the three vacant or soon-to-be vacant seats in spring special elections to return to a 220-seat majority — but all of this is sure to be a thorn in Johnson's side as he navigates the start of Trump's new presidency.

That reality is in part a result of our current era of highly competitive elections, which have often produced a House where the majority party holds just a small advantage, making any intraparty disunity all the more impactful. The 119th Congress actually marks the third straight time the House has opened with the majority party holding 222 or fewer seats, which is the first time three consecutive congresses have been this closely divided since the House expanded to 435 seats in 1913.

Of course, the House has been narrowly divided in the past. Most recently, Republicans began the 106th and 107th congresses with 222 or fewer seats around the turn of the millennium. But contrary to the intraparty discord we've seen in the last handful of speaker elections, Republican Rep. Dennis Hastert won the speakership with little GOP opposition in both of those cases (albeit the first time after the party's initial speaker nominee, Bob Livingston, withdrew and resigned).

And beyond that, you have to go back nearly a century to find a majority party holding an edge on par with — or even slimmer — than the one Republicans have to start the 119th Congress. Although Democrats made huge gains in the November 1930 midterms amid the start of the Great Depression, it looked like Republicans would just hold onto a majority. But because the 72nd Congress didn't hold its first session until December 1931, vacancies and special elections in the interim produced a 219-to-214 seat Democratic majority that elected Rep. John Nance Garner as speaker.

Going even further back, the 65th Congress (which opened in April 1917) was the last time neither major party held an outright majority on its own: House Democrats lost their outright majority in the 1916 election, falling to 213 seats, but they retained control of the chamber over the 214-seat GOP thanks to cooperation from five third-party House members (three Progressives, a Prohibitionist, and a Socialist).

It remains to be seen just how much intraparty factionalism and the GOP's slim majority will affect Republican efforts to implement Trump's plans. But there's little question that the incredibly narrow GOP edge in the House leaves the party little room for error.