Mike Johnson Won’t Seek House GOP Leader Post After Midterm Losses
House Speaker Mike Johnson will step aside as Republican leader after Democrats won the House, setting up a race between Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan.
Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, will not try to stay on as his party’s leader in the new Congress, stepping aside a day after Democrats won control of the chamber in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Johnson told his staff on a call Wednesday morning, according to CBS News and NBC News, and the Associated Press confirmed it through two people familiar with his decision. His exit opens a contest to lead House Republicans in the minority, and two veteran lawmakers have already entered it.
What happened
NBC News reported that four sources on Wednesday’s call confirmed Johnson’s decision, which Punchbowl News, a Capitol Hill news outlet, reported first. CBS News cited a source familiar with the matter. The AP’s sources spoke on condition of anonymity.
The move comes after what CBS News called “extensive losses” for Republicans in House races. The network projected that Democrats will take over the House in January with a wide majority. The AP said Republicans were “trounced” and noted that Johnson had predicted his party would buck the historical pattern of the president’s party losing seats in midterm elections.
Johnson himself was reelected Tuesday in his Shreveport-area district in Louisiana. The AP and NBC News said he is expected to remain in the House as a rank-and-file member. NBC News added that it is not clear whether he will serve the full two-year term or leave early, as some former speakers have done. Speaking in Shreveport on Tuesday night, Johnson said it had been “the honor of my life to serve as the 56th speaker of the House,” CBS News reported.
His decision is a change from earlier signals. CBS News reported that Johnson told the network in October that he planned to remain party leader even if Republicans lost the House. In an Oct. 8 interview with Fox News, he said he did not know what his next chapter would be if the party lost the majority, and joked that he might go home to Shreveport and start a lawn business.
The race to replace him
The contest is shaping up as a rematch from 2023. Two Republicans have moved to succeed Johnson as the party’s top House leader:
- Steve Scalise, the House majority leader and a fellow Louisiana Republican described by NBC News as a close Johnson ally. His office said he planned to announce his bid on Wednesday. The AP said Scalise has cultivated the party’s conservative wing, especially lawmakers focused on business and energy.
- Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee and a staunch defender of President Donald Trump, according to NBC News. The AP said hard-right members, including some from the House Freedom Caucus, a bloc of hard-line conservatives, have favored him.
In a two-page letter to colleagues obtained by CBS News, Jordan called Election Day “a staggering day for our Conference” and said Republicans need a response to an “emboldened and energetic Democrat majority.” Jordan, a former chairman of the House Oversight Committee, described himself as “battle-tested on the oversight front” as Democrats prepare investigations of the Trump administration. “I know the Democrats’ playbook,” he wrote.
A GOP aide told CBS News that Republicans plan to hold leadership elections on Tuesday, Nov. 10, one week after Election Day. A second race is also forming. NBC News reported that Rep. August Pfluger of Texas, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, the largest conservative caucus in Congress, will challenge Majority Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota for the whip post, which becomes the No. 2 leadership job in the minority.
Background
Johnson was a little-known lawmaker when Republicans elected him speaker in October 2023, after weeks of turmoil that followed the historic removal of then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California. CBS News noted that Johnson was the party’s fourth nominee for the post, after Emmer, Scalise and Jordan each failed to unite the conference’s factions. The AP described him as an “accidental speaker” chosen as a consensus pick. Republicans reelected him speaker in 2025.
He led one of the narrowest House majorities in modern history, the AP said, and grew close to Trump, speaking with him almost daily. Under his leadership, the House passed the Republican package of tax breaks and cuts to social programs that Trump signed into law. The AP also reported that he kept lawmakers from voting on an effort to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth by sending the House home, and that before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol he rallied support for Trump’s claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, claims that courts rejected.
What comes next
With Democrats taking the majority, the speaker’s gavel is expected to pass to their side when the new Congress convenes. The AP reported that Democrats are preparing to nominate Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader, for speaker, a vote expected to be among the first of the new Congress on Jan. 3, 2027. If elected, Jeffries would become second in line to the presidency.
For Republicans, next week’s vote will determine who leads them into a period of divided government, with Democrats expected to use their new committee powers to investigate the administration and the GOP aiming, as its candidates say, to win back the majority.
