6 top winners and losers who emerged in politics in 2024

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. 

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.

"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. 

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

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."

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.

"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

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, 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 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.