Why the math in Washington makes compromise the only path forward. 

As of Friday afternoon, the Associated Press has called 255 House races for Democrats, with 11 still undecided, which puts the party on track for its largest House majority since 2008. In the most recent shocker in the Senate, Scott Colom beat Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi, giving Democrats at least 55 seats, and Mary Peltola leads Senator Dan Sullivan in Alaska with votes still being counted.  

For all that, Democrats will have a hard time passing a single bill without Republican help. Most legislation needs 60 votes to get through the Senate, and anything that reaches President Trump’s desk needs his signature or a two-thirds vote in both chambers to override his veto. Democrats do not have the numbers for either one. 

First, in the Senate, with 55 or 56 seats, Democrats would need at least four Republicans to end debate on most bills, and five if Sullivan holds on in Alaska. Senator Chuck Schumer has told colleagues he plans to use budget reconciliation next year to move some bills with a simple majority, but reconciliation only covers taxes, spending and the debt limit.  

What’s more, those bills still need the president’s signature. 

President Trump has been open about what he plans to do with them. Days before the election, he told the New York Post’s Pod Force One podcast, “I guess I’ll become Mr. Veto.” On election night he posted a picture of a red cap with VETO printed across the front. Three days after the election, he named Stephen Miller, the hardliner behind the administration’s immigration crackdown, as White House chief of staff. Overriding him takes 290 votes in the House and 67 in the Senate when every member votes. Based on the races called so far, as many as 35 House Republicans and 11 or 12 Senate Republicans would have to vote against a president of their own party. 

All that being said, Democrats will chair every committee, issue subpoenas, run oversight hearings and decide which of Trump’s nominees the Senate confirms. Senate Republicans are racing to confirm 23 of Trump’s judicial nominees before Democrats take over on January 3, along with nearly 100 executive branch nominees still awaiting votes. Any left over in January will need a Democratic Senate to confirm them. And encouragingly, Trump told CBS News he expects the two sides to end up negotiating anyway: “Historically, you veto for a couple of months, and then they come and say, ‘We’ve got to make a deal.'” If he is right, the people making those deals will be the members in each party who already have working relationships on the other side. 

Democrats added to both wings of their caucus last week, with the far-left Democratic Socialists of America gaining multiple new seats. But most of the seats that gave Democrats the majority came from far more competitive places. Before Mississippi was called, Democrats had flipped Senate seats in North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Kansas, Iowa and Maine, mostly with campaigns about the cost of living and corruption. In the House, the Blue Dog Coalition, the party’s most moderate caucus, said on November 5 that 14 of its candidates were leading in Republican districts. Democrats also won seats Trump carried in 2024, including Virginia’s 2nd District, where Elaine Luria beat Representative Jen Kiggans.  

That matters because of the math. Any Democrat can vote for a bill that passes the House on party lines. The members who can get Republicans to sign on in the Senate, or bring a bill close to something the president will sign, mostly come from districts and states where voters split their tickets, and there are many more of them in the Democratic caucus than there were two weeks ago. 

Republicans have their own version of this problem. House Republicans picked Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a founding chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, to lead them in the minority, which suggests they plan to fight the new majority on most things. Any override will need Republicans willing to break with Jordan and with Trump on a specific vote. The last time that happened was January 1, 2021, when the Senate voted 81 to 13 and the House voted 322 to 87 to override Trump’s veto of the annual defense bill. It was the only successful override of his first term.  

In the meantime, the current Congress still has to fund the government. The stopgap law passed in September runs out on December 11, and Republicans hold both chambers until January. Some Democrats have talked about using the funding bill to cut off money for the war in Iran. If the two sides cannot agree, a shutdown that starts in December would carry into the new Congress, as it did the last time Democrats won the House in a midterm. That shutdown began on December 22, 2018, and lasted 35 days, ending three weeks after the new majority was sworn in. 

Democrats won the right to set the agenda in Washington, and they will use it. How much of that agenda becomes law over the next two years will come down to how many members in each party are willing to work with the other one, and the Democratic side of the 120th Congress will have more of them than the last.