Last night, Democrats claimed the majority in the House of Representatives, and Republicans were able to keep a stronghold over the Senate, making some minor gains. The new Congress is still taking shape, with leadership elections to be held next week and a few more months before the next congressional term truly begins.

All bills introduced this past Congress will be killed once January rolls around, so the new Congress will be starting from a blank slate. With power divided in Congress, lawmakers will be forced to compromise in order to pass anything. Legislation that would regulate automated cars, set rules regarding data privacy, or even fund President Donald Trump’s Space Force would require members to reach across the aisle, forging new alliances with new priorities. It’s hard to say exactly how those priorities will shake out, but here’s our best guess about how the results of the 2018 midterm elections might change the key policies we’ve got our eye on.

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Twenty-two years ago, Congress passed what’s known as the Dickey Amendment, which technically only bans the use of federal funds for advocating gun control, but it has effectively banned studying guns, too. That’s because when Congress passed the Dickey Amendment, it simultaneously yanked the exact amount of money from the CDC that was intended for gun violence research. “So the message was clear,” says John Donohue, a law professor at Stanford University who studies gun violence. “‘If you go down this path, we’re going to punish you.’”

Then in March, Trump signed the massive Omnibus spending bill, clarifying that while federal funds can’t go to advocacy, they can indeed go to research. Even at the time, however, researchers in the field were skeptical because the permission didn’t come with money: “I think that was a smart political ploy because they knew the public was getting angry,” Donohue says. Lifting the de facto ban on gun violence research was an attempt to mollify a country still reeling from the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, just weeks before. But it was a hollow effort because with no funding, there’s no research. “So it’s a little bit of a charade,” Donohue says.

With Democrats taking back control of the House but not the Senate, Donohue doesn’t expect to see much change; Congress would need to agree to fund gun violence research. With Democrats taking only the House, he suspects that money won’t materialize. Or if it did, it would only be if the Democrats traded something the gun lobby values — like letting people from Alabama carry their guns in New York City, Donohue says. “The Democrats could say, ‘Look, we’ll give you something you like if you give us some funding of research.’ But it seems very unlikely to me.”