The Official 2025 Political Winners and Losers List

Who has and hasn't benefited from Donald Trump's first year back in office.

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

At the start of this year, we were promised that we lived in a completely new political order. Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election was less than two months in the rearview mirror, and it was understood across the spectrum to be a truly decisive political event—one that heralded the end of a decade of inconclusive partisan warfare and the start of a new age of Trumpist conservatism. Now, as the first full year of the Trump administration comes to a close, it is abundantly clear that we do not live in this world. If it ever existed at all, it was thoroughly squandered, strangled in the cradle by a class of incompetents who were always far less smart and far less popular than they thought. In spite of all of the immense hype, this new Trump administration has found itself in the same exact position as the first one at the same point in time: deeply unpopular, controlled by neocons, and on track to lose control of the federal government less than two years after gaining it.

In short, we’ve seen a lot of expectations upended very thoroughly in a very short span of time. A great many politicians and public figures who had anticipated a year of political stability were suddenly forced to move on their feet, and some were far better than others at adapting to the new state of affairs. To best summarize the countless ups and downs we have seen over the past year, I have decided to reprise a format that I last used in 2023: a list of the five biggest winners and five biggest losers in American politics over the past year, with the #1 loser receiving the 2025 Ron DeSantis Award for Political Failure.

But before we begin, I want to cover some old bases. At the end of last year, I neglected to write a yearly winners and losers list, as the clear reality of the election results appeared to make such an analysis largely redundant. Today, I will declare what I imagine all of you could have guessed: that the winner of the 2024 Ron DeSantis Award for Political Failure was then-President Joe Biden. Between starting off the year as an incumbent arguably favored to win re-election and ending it with a President-elect Trump and an unenviable status as the first presumptive nominee to ever be kicked off their own ticket, our 46th president set an entirely new standard for political humiliation—a standard that, for as hard as it may be to believe, some unfortunate souls came quite close to meeting this year. As for who these people might be, who stands out as the worst of them all, and who has profited the most from their failures, simply read on.

Winner #1: California Governor Gavin Newsom

After Kamala Harris’ loss last year, every single Democrat in the country was given a once-in-a-generation opportunity to compete in an open playing field. For the first time in the entire 21st century—yes, seriously—the Democratic Party did not have either an incumbent president or an all-consuming establishment-backed supercandidate sucking all the air out of the room in the immediate aftermath of an election. The stage really was set for any liberal with any ambition to try to make an early mark, and no small number of them tried. Yet the only one of them to see any truly meaningful success so far is California’s 40th governor, who has pulled off one of the largest early polling jumps in the history of modern presidential primaries.

It’s not hard to pin down the reason for this. Ever since the Biden administration went down in flames, liberals have been desperate for anything resembling a leader, and Newsom has slotted himself quite nicely into that role. What makes his success in this so truly remarkable is it is not because he was the first or only Democrat in the country that recognized that liberals wanted their leaders to staunchly oppose Trump. Countless Democratic politicians had recognized that from day one; Newsom was actually quite late to the party in that regard. But while liberal voters have been thoroughly unresponsive to Tim Walz calling Elon Musk a dipshit or even J.B. Pritzker daring Trump to arrest him, they’ve given rapt attention to Newsom’s acts of resistance against the administration.

If all of this were simply the result of Newsom getting a lot of exposure, it would be one thing, and it would still be quite easy to write off his success. What makes Newsom’s surge stand out—and what could make it truly relevant in the long haul—is that it came primarily as a result of tangible wins against Trump. Countless Democrats, including him, may have spent the past year talking about how much they hate Trump, but he’s been the only one to land a real, undeniable blow on him since the inauguration by means of Prop 50. That’s real, it stands out, and it appears as if it’s something that liberal voters are highly privileging. Even if Newsom’s countless flaws end up bringing him down and he never even ends up making it to the primary three years, it’s all going to be in spite of the success he saw in 2025—the points he put on the board when hardly anyone else could even make it to the basket. There’s no way to leave him off this list.

Loser #1: Elon Musk

AP Photo | Jeffrey Phelps