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Recently there have been attempts to brand the White House as the “People’s House,” which seems completely false since the president is elected by the complicated Electoral College and not directly by voters.

It is the House of Representatives that is closest to the American people and represents their will most directly.

The final House of Representatives race of the 2024 election has been decided – by less than 200 votes! – We can say with certainty that little will change in Congress, as well as the political divide in the USA.

The same electorate that returned Donald Trump to the White House with just under 50% of the vote — a decision that could have major implications for American life as he takes control of the federal bureaucracy — also produced the most divided House of Representatives since the beginning the Great Depression, with the Republicans having a narrow majority.

That means if the president-elect and his Republican allies can’t find a way to work together across the aisle, they’ll have to rely on full agreement among House Republicans. In either case, they will likely have difficulty making lasting changes in American law.

The last contested House of Representatives will be won by Adam Gray, a Democratic pick-up in California’s Central Valley.

The movement in this year’s House elections looked like this:

Democrats gained nine seats and lost eight.

Republicans gained eight seats and lost nine.

When the new Congress takes the oath of office on January 3, the Republican balance of power would be 220 to 215 for the Democrats, but up to three Republican seats are likely to be open later in the month. Former Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida resigned from Congress when he was briefly Trump’s nominee for attorney general. And Reps. Elise Stefanik of New York and Mike Waltz of Florida are both expected to leave Congress to join the Trump administration as the president-elect’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, respectively . of the national security advisor.

That means the actual balance, at least at the start of the two-year legislative session when all three seats are vacant at the same time, will be 217-215. Republicans need to be in lockstep to pass anything without help from Democrats, which is the party’s preference.

“Do the math; We have nothing left,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters of his historically narrow majority.

Trump, meanwhile, will use executive orders and rulemaking through the White House to ensure less permanent changes are made. But Johnson predicted he would be able to maneuver Trump’s controversial agenda through the House: “We know how to work with a small majority here; That’s our custom.”

The GOP’s slight lead next year will essentially be a continuation of the last two years, when Republicans had only a slightly larger 222-213 majority after the midterm elections. Two years before that? The Democrats had the majority by a very similar ratio of 222 to 212.

This pattern is a symptom of the country’s division, but also reflects the lack of competitive districts due to gerrymandering. Incumbents typically win re-election. In the 2024 election, only 17 of 435 seats, less than 4% of the House of Representatives, went from one party to the other. It has been 16 years since Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 since both parties had a true governing majority of more than 250 seats in the House of Representatives, which used to be relatively common.

The last time a minority in the House of Representatives had 215 or more votes was after the 1930 midterm elections, when the Republicans had 218 to the Democrats’ 216 ​​and the Farmer-Labor Party had one.

But there is an interesting footnote.

At that time there were 13 months between the election and the first day of the new Congress. During this time, 14 elected members of Congress died, including then-House Speaker Nicholas Longworth. The special election that followed gave Democrats a narrow majority.

Two years later, a wave of voters who had suffered from the Great Depression elected Franklin D. Roosevelt president and elected the Democratic Congress, which would pass the New Deal.

Look for Democrats to take advantage of every opportunity that arises in the coming Congress.

Another nearly indecisive Congress, convened at the start of U.S. involvement in World War I in 1917, followed years in which Democrats had been more comfortably in control.

Members of the House of Representatives can take office at age 25, five years earlier than senators and a decade earlier than the president. Unlike the president, members of Congress do not have to be natural-born citizens, meaning many more Americans are eligible for the job.

Representatives of the House of Representatives are elected through direct elections rather than the antiquated Electoral College, and they stand for election every two years, rather than four like the president or six like senators. They are also more representative because their districts are supposed to have relatively equal populations, unlike the Senate, where small states get the same number of votes as large states.

“Here, sir, the people govern: here they act through their immediate representatives,” Alexander Hamilton said of the House of Representatives, selling the Constitution to his fellow New Yorkers.

The country has changed greatly in the centuries since he said those words. The House of Representatives, where legislation is supposed to be made, has been plagued by gridlock and has ceded some powers to the president. But it remains the most democratic part of the American experiment. And this year it’s still divided.