Jonathan Bernstein

The political stakes couldn’t be higher in the coming year, with both the presidency and control of Congress up in the air. And the courts will be involved more than usual, with former President Donald Trump under four separate indictments, at least some of which could head to trial in 2024. If that isn’t enough, the Supreme Court could rule on whether Trump is even eligible for the 2024 ballot.

But there are a number of political matters that have received less attention, even though they, too, could influence the nation’s trajectory. Here are five I’ll be watching.. 

Will House Republicans finally get their government shutdown(s)?

No, the threat hasn’t gone away, and just because the House of Representatives backed down and allowed temporary spending extensions to go through twice doesn’t mean they’ll do it again when those temporary bills expire, some on Jan. 19 and the remainder on Feb. 2.

The first short-term spending fix was the event that produced a successful revolt against then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and the second one has sparked quite a bit of criticism of for-the-moment Speaker Mike Johnson. It isn’t clear how Johnson will handle the upcoming deadlines, especially since the House has failed to make any progress since the last one. Right now Johnson’s public stance is that there will be no more short-term extensions, while Senate Democrats and Republicans are ruling out putting all spending on autopilot for the rest of the year. Something will have to give or we’re headed for a shutdown.

And that’s not all! The current fight is over fiscal 2024, which started back on Oct. 1. But even if that is resolved, fiscal 2025 begins next Oct. 1 — five weeks before Election Day. In the past, that’s never been a real problem because if Congress hadn’t negotiated full-year spending bills it would just punt with a short-term measure. But those Congresses didn’t have the strikingly dysfunctional House that this one has.

How much pressure will be put on Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to retire?

I was wrong; I thought this would be a big story in 2023, but it was not. But with Sotomayor turning 70 in June, President Joe Biden’s re-election chances widely perceived to be 50/50 at best and Republicans probably favored to gain a Senate majority, I expect more Democrats to speak up and urge the oldest Democrat on the court to step down based on a fear that if she dies in office she would be replaced by a Republican.

Judges from both parties have retired strategically, but at the Supreme Court level Democrats have not been as rigorous about it as Republicans such as Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy were. Most notably, Ruth Bader Ginsburg decided to remain in office beyond Barack Obama’s presidency. When she died in 2020 Donald Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to replace her — giving Republicans a key vote to undo much of what Ginsburg had accomplished on the court. Sotomayor is much younger than Ginsburg was (83) when Trump became president, but there is no way of knowing how long the next run of Republican presidents (and Senate majorities) would last. Indeed, there already has been some pressure on liberals on lower courts to leave while Biden could replace them, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some think Justice Elena Kagan, who is only 63, also should retire.

And of course if Sotomayor does retire at the end of this Supreme Court term in June, her replacement’s confirmation will be a major story this summer just as the general election is approaching.

Where is the Republican Party headed?

Election observers will focus this spring and summer on key Republican primaries in contested Senate seats such as Ohio, Montana, and Michigan; they know that Republicans over the last decade have cost themselves seats in the Senate and elsewhere by nominating terrible candidates, so whether they will do that again is an obvious big story.

But somewhat under the radar are the rest of the party’s primaries — especially in safe Republican seats. After all, that’s where most of a party’s elected officials come from. And it makes a huge difference, as we’ve seen in the U.S. House this year, who the party nominates and what they care about. Extremists such as Texas’s Chip Roy and Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene don’t usually cost their party an election if they are nominated. They win, and change what the party does in office.

Of course, the same is true in the Democratic Party, where the “progressive” faction squares off against mainstream liberals in many primaries. But because the progressives have been more pragmatic in office than the radical Republicans, it’s not quite as big a deal if they win a handful of seats.

What’s happening lower on the ballot?

As important as federal elections always are, there are thousands of other elections scheduled in the U.S. for 2024, and those are important, both for their direct effects and on how they can set the agenda for the political parties. Two types are worth paying special attention to. School board elections, always important, have captured much more attention recently with aggressive attempts by Republicans to change policy at that level and also to use school-based controversies to win broader support; Democrats responded in 2023 with fairly effective counter-mobilization. Since school board elections happen all year, what happens in the first half of 2024 will influence whether some education hot-button issues will be prominent in November elections.

The same is true for criminal justice issues. Both police reformers and hard-line sheriffs and district attorneys elected in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020 are back on the ballot this year, as are attorneys general in 10 states. It’s too early to know yet what ballot measures might be added, but we can expect at least some of those, too. In both cases, these local and statewide elections may mean far more to the day-to-day lives of Americans than whatever happens in the federal government.

Will violence disrupt elections in 2024?

The good news is that off-year elections in 2022 and 2023 generally went very smoothly. The bad news is that Donald Trump may be back on the ballot in 2024, and we’re already seeing the effects. There was violence around the fringes of his campaign in 2020 — recall that Trump supporters forced a Biden campaign bus off a Texas highway, for example — and there were quite a few threats of violence. And of course all of that only increased after the election, culminating in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, which Trump and other Republicans still celebrate even now.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has been ordered to pay nearly $150 million to two election workers he falsely accused of rigging the election against Trump, but it’s hard to say whether the punishment will deter others from spreading lies. Threats directed against election workers could disrupt the fair administration of elections. Threats against candidates, campaigns, and voters raise the costs of participation, and the reality of violence is worse. Although violence is hardly unprecedented in US election history, it’s a sad state of affairs. It’s always possible that 2020 will turn out to have been the peak of the problem, but so far the evidence points in the other direction.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.