Whatever the outcome of Tuesday’s vote to select the new House speaker, Republicans seem prepared to continue the hard-edged tactics that the majority of voters in swing states rejected in the midterm elections held last November.
Conservatives’ steadfast opposition to House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy has put the party in danger of triggering only the second speakership election since the Civil War and the first to go beyond a single ballot since 1923. But even if McCarthy finally succeeds, the GOP’s conservative vanguard’s display of strength has given it significant influence over the party’s legislative and investigative agenda. And that can strengthen the perception of extremism that cost Republicans the midterm elections, particularly in the crucial swing states that will probably determine the outcome of the next presidential election, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona.
Whoever Republicans ultimately select as speaker “will be subject to the whims and the never-ending leveraging of a small group of members who want to wield power,” said former GOP Rep. Charlie Dent, a CNN political commentator. “You’re going to have this group on the far right that is going to continue to push the leadership to go further right on issues.”
The vote on Tuesday might bring about the kind of drama typical of the House in the 19th century but has since vanished. According to the office of the House historian, the House failed to elect a speaker on the first ballot 13 times before the Civil War, when party allegiances were less rigid. The most difficult conflicts occurred around ten years before the Civil War, as the pre-existing party system broke down under the weight of the North and South’s mounting war and the newly established Republican Party replaced the Whigs as the Democrats’ main rival at the time. During that turbulent decade, one speakership election took 133 ballots (and two months of voting) to settle; the final speaker choice made before the Civil War started required 44 votes.
Since then, only one election had required more than one ballot, which occurred in 1923 when Republicans needed nine votes to pick their speaker despite having a slim majority comparable to their lead this year. The second difficulty was that a small group of left-leaning progressive Republicans first opposed conservative incumbent Speaker Frederick Gillett.
McCarthy is currently up against opposition from the hard-right wing of his caucus, who have vowed not to vote for him, at least on the first ballot. Even if conservatives initially opposed McCarthy, many in the party establishment still thought he would prevail in the end, mainly because no candidate was expected to garner more support from the entire party.
“I think he prevails because there is no other candidate with his experience and fundraising ability, and at the end of the day, the party base will close ranks because nothing happens until you have a Speaker: No investigations… nothing,” former GOP Rep. Tom Davis, who served as chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, wrote me in an email. “And the vast majority of the Conference is loyal to him.”
Regardless of whether McCarthy wins the election, it’s evident from the trouble he had winning the votes that whoever the GOP chooses as speaker would be treading on very thin ice and under constant threat of uprising from an aggressive conservative wing. That recipe finally caused the two previous GOP speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan, to depart early. According to Davis, McCarthy “is in a tough spot, as was Boehner and Ryan,” Davis notes. Dent believes a Speaker McCarthy would face an even more precarious situation than those two predecessors because “there are more of the ultra-MAGA types than they were then” while the party’s overall margin in the House “is smaller.”
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McCarthy (or whoever the GOP ultimately selects) seems incredibly unlikely to exercise much restraint on the party’s militant conservative vanguard while operating under such a tight leash. He has already shown respect for the party’s more conservative members in several ways. McCarthy has pledged to reinstate the committee assignments that Democrats removed from Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar after they embraced violent imagery and rhetoric. (In particular, Greene has emerged as McCarthy’s most important supporter as he attempts to win over enough conservative lawmakers to secure the speakership.) McCarthy is said to have also promised to dramatically reduce the votes needed to force the speaker’s ouster at any time.
The treatment of January 6, 2021, rioters and other conservative priorities will be brought to light due to McCarthy’s robust investigative agenda against the Biden government. According to The Wall Street Journal, McCarthy has reportedly agreed to formal requests for a panel that will undertake extensive investigations into the alleged politicization of the Justice Department and FBI. The meeting will operate under the Judiciary Committee as the “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” according to the Journal. According to McCarthy, Alejandro Mayorkas, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, might be impeached.
Like Davis, Dent is convinced that a thorough investigation will lead to valuable findings, including those that unavoidably make the Biden administration uncomfortable. Dent recognizes that the hearings might backfire on Republicans if they come out as harsh or preoccupied with complaints from the far-right and conspiracy theories. The way you conduct yourself and your tone count, according to Dent. There are many topics that they will wish to address but that [the public] won’t find appealing. The speaker will frequently have to act as a mediator in these conflicts.
What McCarthy chose not to say is just as revealing as what he did say. The scandals surrounding incoming GOP Rep. George Santos of New York (whom Greene has vehemently defended) and the revelations in the January 6 committee’s final report that several members of the GOP caucus were directly involved in then-President Donald Trump’s effort to rig the 2020 election have eluded him completely. (The committee singled out Jim Jordan, the new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, as having “a significant role in President Trump’s efforts.”)
Democrats believe that all of these early indicators ensure that the House GOP’s most ardent members will be front and center in defining the party over the next two years, regardless of whether McCarthy wins the speakership or whether conservatives (in a less likely scenario) succeed in installing an alternative to his right.
“In some ways, win or lose [for McCarthy], it doesn’t matter,” says Leslie Dach, a senior adviser to the Congressional Integrity Project, a Democratic-aligned group established to respond to the future House investigations of the Biden administration. “I think the die on the next two years has been cast by giving these people the power and the podium.”
Dach and other Democrats believe that the GOP’s image as the party of Trump will be reinforced by the House majority precisely when more party strategists, donors, and elected officials are urging Republicans to move beyond him. By ensuring that hardline Trump allies like Jordan and Greene will be prominent and giving them the authority to pursue conservative grievances like the claim that the FBI has been “weaponized” against the right.
“The real show will be these empowered, extreme MAGA types,” Dach insists. “Every day they are on a committee, every day they are on television is a bad day for the entire Republican Party.”
In some ways, McCarthy’s early deference to the right reflects the balance of power within his caucus. In reality, the vast majority of House Republicans are from “Trump country,” or regions outside of the nation’s leading cities where the former president performed well in the 2020 election. Three-fourths of the House Republicans, or 170 in all, are seated in seats that Trump won by at least ten percentage points in the previous election.
McCarthy, however, is causing issues for the 18 House Republicans who won districts that supported Biden in 2020 by caving to the aggressive and culture war tactics that those members prefer. More than half of those dwell in only New York and California, areas where Democrats will likely fare better than Republicans in the 2024 presidential election in terms of turnout.
McCarthy (or whoever wins the speakership) also disregards the overt opposition to the right’s agenda that surfaced in the most hotly contested swing states in November. Democrats defeated every Trump-backed gubernatorial and US Senate candidate in November in the five states that decided the 2020 election by switching from Trump to Biden: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, despite widespread discontent with the economy and President Joe Biden’s performance. (The only Republicans who prevailed in these elections in those states were incumbents with personalities distinct from Trump, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, and Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson.)
Former AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer observes that since Trump assumed office, the GOP has collectively lost significant ground in seven states.
“When he made his inauguration speech [in 2017], there was only one Democratic governor in those five states, only four Democratic Senators, no speaker of the state assembly or majority leader in the senate in those states,” says Podhorzer, now chairman of the board of the Analyst Institute, a consortium of liberal groups. “In a month, four of the five states will have Democratic governors, 9 of the 10 Senators are Democrats, and three of the state legislative chambers are led by Democrats.” Since 2016, he adds, Democrats in those places “have done nothing but win because those states are not going to elect MAGA” Republicans.
In a recent analysis, Podhorzer concluded that the midterm election showed opposition to Trump-style politics in a wide range of competitive states. According to Podhorzer’s calculations, Democrats largely matched or even exceeded their 2020 margins in the crucial House, Senate, and gubernatorial races across the 15 states, with the most competitive statewide races featuring candidates identified with a Trump-style agenda. This was a remarkable performance for the party in power during the first midterm election. The party, however, had the typical midterm reversals in the other states.
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Depending on where you lived and whether the new bubble of Democratic voters felt they had to turn out to defeat MAGA once more, two midterm elections took place at the same time, according to Podhorzer.
“It was two midterms happening at the same time – depending on whether you were in a place where that new bubble of Democratic voters believed they had to come out to beat MAGA again,” Podhorzer argued.
In areas where they are currently dominant, Republicans are unlikely to face many difficulties. In the midterm elections, Republicans, as I’ve written, essentially solidified their control over America’s red-leaning regions, quickly holding state legislatures and governorships in many of the states (such as Florida, Texas, Iowa, and Tennessee) that over the previous two years had pursued the most avowedly conservative agendas.
But the significant role already played by the right in the newly elected Republican House runs the risk of further associating the party with the policies that turned off so many people in the crucial swing states that the GOP needs to retake to regain the White House in two years. McCarthy’s win might swiftly turn out to be a Pyrrhic one for the GOP if he only succeeds in becoming speaker by unleashing the most aggressive voices in his caucus.
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