As Donald Trump gears up for the first State of the Union address of his second term, he’s seen a slight uptick in Republican opposition amid his sagging poll numbers and nationwide concerns over the health of the economy.
But in 2025, Trump compiled a record of party support that stands apart from his predecessors and even from his own first term, as his nominations were confirmed at a record pace and GOP leaders muscled through the signature piece of his policy agenda.
On votes on which he took a position, Trump had the support of 96 percent of Senate Republicans and 95 percent of House Republicans, according to CQ Roll Call’s annual vote studies. The Senate figure tied the Republican high in the chamber set in 2017, Trump’s first year in the White House. The House percentage broke the previous record for Republican presidential support in the chamber, 93 percent, also set in 2017.
Of 53 Republican senators, a record 44 of them sided with the president on every one of the votes they cast, with 77 GOP House members doing likewise. Senate Majority Leader John Thune isn’t among the 44 because of a single vote he cast against Trump’s position purely as a procedural move.
“Voters overwhelmingly elected Republicans to make America safer, stronger, and more prosperous. Working with President Trump, that’s what we’ve achieved,” Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the chamber’s No. 2 Republican who voted 100 percent with Trump, said in a statement.
Overall, on the strength of such support, Trump’s position prevailed in 290 of the 305 votes on which his preference was clearly known (95.1 percent), the highest number of successful presidential support victories on record. (The next closest is the 255 wins claimed by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965).
The 305 presidential position votes also represented the highest annual total since 306 such votes were cast in 1979.
[Methodology: Why some key votes don’t have presidential positions]
His loyal opposition
Senate Democrats, meanwhile, set a record in 2025 by opposing Trump on 88 percent of votes on which he took a position, according to CQ Roll Call’s vote studies. As he began his second term, Trump didn’t see much of a “honeymoon period” when opposition senators have traditionally given deference to the president on early nominations.
The previous Senate record of opposition faced by a president was 76 percent set by Republicans against Joe Biden in 2023. The prior Democratic high had been 65 percent in opposition to George H.W. Bush in 1992.
Four members of the Senate Democratic Caucus supported Trump’s position more than 20 percent of the time: Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman (27.3 percent); New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen (25 percent) and Maggie Hassan (22.7 percent); and Maine independent Angus King (21.6 percent).
House Democrats, on average, opposed Trump at an 88 percent clip in 2025, their third-highest rate in the study.
Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, who received a pardon from the president last year, was his most ardent Democratic supporter in the chamber, checking in at 66.3 percent. All told, four House Democrats voted along with the president’s position more than half the time. The others were Washington’s Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Maine’s Jared Golden and North Carolina’s Don Davis.
All four represent battleground districts that Trump carried in 2024. While Golden is retiring this year, the other three are seeking reelection, with Cuellar’s and Davis’ districts becoming more Republican thanks to mid-decade redistricting.
On the Republican side, the senator who deviated from Trump’s position the most was Kentucky’s Rand Paul, though he did so just 10.6 percent of the time. He was followed by a pair of GOP moderates: Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski (9.5 percent) and Maine’s Susan Collins (5.3 percent), who faces a tough reelection race this year in a state won by Kamala Harris in 2024.
In the House, Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick led the way among Republicans bucking the president, voting against Trump’s position 32.9 percent of the time. Democrats are again targeting Fitzpatrick’s suburban Philadelphia district this cycle, though the congressman has won reelection before in tough years for his party.
The only other House Republicans who opposed Trump more than 10 percent of the time were Nebraska’s Don Bacon (11.3 percent) and Kentucky’s Thomas Massie, who emerged as a persistent thorn to the president last year and voted counter to his position 22.4 percent of the time. Trump has already endorsed a primary challenger to Massie.
“Of the 17 votes you’ve flagged, eight were spending bills that worsen the national debt, two were votes on war which Rep. Massie opposes, one was whether Congress should vote on the tariffs, and four violated the 10th amendment and states’ rights,” a spokesman for Massie said after reviewing the votes identified by CQ Roll Call.
A confirmation machine
A visible expression of Trump’s fast-paced first year was the sheer volume of nominations that cleared the Senate in 2025. Despite several contentious picks, the Senate gave Trump a nearly perfect record on confirmation roll call votes: 170 successful votes out of 171. The 170 successes represent the highest annual total in CQ Roll Call vote studies history.
Senators voted 59 times to confirm Trump’s nominees in his first 100 days. In 2017, it took them 248 days — more than eight months — to hit the same total.
Despite the elevated pace, Republicans in early September decided to invoke yet another “nuclear option” — this time, to allow for the bundled consideration of nearly all executive nominees into en bloc slates and invoke cloture on multiple nominees with a single vote.
Senate Republicans successfully used the parliamentary shortcut to confirm 253 nominees in just three votes, bringing the year’s total to 420 confirmed picks. The one confirmation vote that fell short was a cloture vote on an 88-nomination bloc that drew only 43 votes.
The new precedent on nominees was the latest in a now decade-plus trend of the majority party in the Senate seeking to make it easier to confirm nominations when a president of the same party is in the White House. That led to higher levels of partisanship on nomination votes, but still just a total of five nominations fell short over the next dozen years.
Of the 420 nominees confirmed in 2025, only 32 crossed the 60-vote threshold that would have been required to overcome procedural hurdles just over a decade earlier.
Legislative success
Following his surprising election in 2016, Trump arrived in Washington eager to dictate broad policies but largely took a hands-off approach to the details of legislating.
His second term has been different.
Trump weighed in on legislation 134 times in 2025. In contrast, over the first two years of his first administration, he made his position explicitly known just 105 times.
Of the 80 House votes on legislation that had a clear presidential position attached, Trump was successful on 76 of them (95 percent) despite the GOP’s narrow majority in the chamber.
His four defeats were on a series of amendments to the fiscal 2026 Energy-Water appropriations bill, where his proposed cuts to four regional federal-state partnerships that fund infrastructure projects were rejected.
On the Senate side, Trump’s legislative success wasn’t as overwhelming as it was with nominations, but he was still victorious on 44 of 54 votes on which he took a position (82 percent). The 44 wins was the highest since Barack Obama had 46 winning Senate votes in his first year in office. But Trump had six fewer members in his party’s Senate majority.
“President Trump has worked with Congress to deliver on key campaign promises and provide major wins for the American people, including: the biggest tax cut in history for working families, no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime, no taxes on social security, border security funding, the HALT Fentanyl Act, the Laken Riley Act, the GENIUS Act, and more,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement.
The two biggest legislative challenges in Trump’s first year back both ended in wins for the president.
Republicans were able to push through his signature tax and spending package, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, losing just two GOP lawmakers in the House and three in the Senate. Republicans also passed a multibillion-dollar rescissions package, clawing back previously appropriated spending they deemed wasteful, including foreign aid and public broadcasting.
The second came in the fall, when Senate Democrats’ refusal to help advance an appropriations package unless COVID-era health care subsidies were extended led to what became the longest government shutdown on record at 43 days.
Eight Senate Democratic Caucus members — Fetterman, Shaheen, Hassan, King, Illinois’ Richard J. Durbin, Virginia’s Tim Kaine and Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen — eventually agreed to vote with Republicans to reopen the government.
Complete Vote Studies scores for all members of Congress in 2025: House | Senate
The post Vote Studies 2025: Republicans power Trump to record success appeared first on Roll Call.
