WASHINGTON — Speaker Mike Johnson is beginning the hard fight for his gavel, a weekslong campaign that started Wednesday during internal House Republican leadership elections and will establish the new power centers in Congress for a Washington dominated by President-elect Donald Trump.

While Johnson expects to lead the House in a unified government, with Trump in the White House and Republicans having seized the Senate majority, the House is expected to remain narrowly split, even as House control remains undecided with final races, particularly in California, still too early to call.

Johnson has no serious challenger, but he faces dissent within his ranks, particularly from hard-right conservatives and the Freedom Caucus withholding their votes as leverage to extract promises ahead.

The speaker won a welcome endorsement Wednesday from Trump who told House Republicans in a morning meeting near the Capitol that he was with Johnson all the way, according to a person familiar with the private remarks and unauthorized to publicly discuss them.

The visit was Trump’s first back to Washington after winning the 2024 election, and Johnson heaped praise on the president-elect, calling him the “comeback king.”

It’s been a remarkable political journey for Johnson, the accidental speaker who rose as a last, best choice to replace ousted former Speaker Kevin McCarthy more than a year ago and quickly set course by positioning himself alongside Trump and leading Republicans during the elections.

As Johnson tells it, Trump is the “coach” and he is the “quarterback” as their GOP team prepares to run the plays in the new year.

Johnson has embraced Trump’s agenda of mass deportations, tax cuts, gutting the federal workforce and a more muscular U.S. image abroad. Together they have been working on what the speaker calls an “ambitious” 100-days agenda hoping to avoid what he called the mistakes of Trump’s first term when Congress was unprepared and wasted “precious time.”

The problems that come with a slim House majority and that plagued Johnson’s first year as speaker when his own ranks routinely revolted over his plans are likely to spill into the new year, with a potential fresh round of chaotic governing.

Johnson will need just a simple majority in Wednesday’s closed-door voting to win the GOP nomination to become speaker.

But he will need majority support of the full House, 218 votes, to actually take hold of the gavel Jan. 3, when the new Congress convenes and conducts the election for its speaker.

It took McCarthy some 15 rounds of voting in a weeklong election to win the gavel in 2023.

Conservatives have been discussing whether to field their own candidate as a signal to Johnson as they push their own priorities, using the same tactic they did with McCarthy to force the speaker into concessions, particularly on steeper budget cuts.

As Johnson begins the budget process for next year, including using a so-called budget reconciliation process that makes it easier in unified government to push Trump’s agenda through the House and Senate on simple majority votes, conservatives want him to load up those packages with their own policy priorities.

Johnson met with conservatives Monday for a private dinner ahead of votes.

“We’ll see what happens,” said Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, among those conservatives weighing their options.

Democrats, who lent Johnson a hand at governing multiple times in Congress — supplying the votes needed to keep the federal government funded and turn back an effort by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to bounce him from office — are unlikely to help him in the new year.

“Voters voted for them,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “Let’s see what they do.”