Scalise vs. Jordan: The Race to Lead House Republicans After Johnson Steps Aside

Less than a day after the midterm rout, the race to lead House Republicans was already on. On Wednesday morning, Speaker Mike Johnson told his staff he would not seek to lead the party in the minority when the new Congress convenes in January — and within hours, the two men who have wanted the job longest were running for it.

Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio both announced their bids on Wednesday, in letters to their colleagues. House Republicans will choose their next leader in a secret ballot on Tuesday, November 10, with candidates required to declare by Friday, November 6.

The job is not the one either man originally wanted. Democrats won the House on Tuesday — NBC News projected as many as 258 seats against 177 for Republicans — and the Senate too, with at least 54 seats. The winner of next Tuesday's vote will lead the minority, facing a Democratic speaker, Hakeem Jeffries, across the aisle from January 3. Johnson himself stays in the chair until then, and stays in Congress: voters in Louisiana's 4th District re-elected him with about 58 percent of the vote in a five-candidate field.

Both Scalise and Jordan have been here before. After Kevin McCarthy's ouster in 2023, both sought the speakership; neither won it, and Johnson emerged as the compromise candidate. The rematch is now fought on different ground: a conference vote, not a floor vote, decided by a simple majority of a smaller, chastened conference, in secret.

The two pitches could hardly be more different. Scalise, Johnson's No. 2, wrote to colleagues that the election result was "far worse than any of us expected" and cast himself as the man to lead Republicans back to the majority — the institutional choice, the one who knows every member and every deal. Jordan pitched himself as "battle-tested on the oversight front," the fighter who knows "the Democrats' playbook" — the choice for a conference that has just been punished at the polls and wants someone who will make the majority's life miserable.

The mood of the conference matters as much as either résumé, and the mood is raw. On the same Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance wrote that "the reason we lost is the war" — the eight-month war with Iran — and cited private polling in which ending the war and changing the relationship with Israel were among the top reasons 2024 Trump voters defected. President Trump called that assessment "largely true" while insisting he would make the same decision again. The leadership race is, among other things, the first vote on which version of that argument the party believes: the manager who steadies the ship, or the fighter who says the ship was steered wrong.

The prediction markets have it as a coin flip, leaning Jordan. Polymarket's per-candidate contracts on November 5 put Jordan at about 52 percent and Scalise at 42 percent, with conference chair Lisa McClain and Kevin Hern both in the mid-20s — a reminder that the field may not stay a two-man race past Friday's deadline, and that a split first ballot could yet produce a compromise winner neither man expects.

My read: Jordan wins, but only just. A secret ballot in a conference that has just lost everything rewards the candidate with the most organized base, and Jordan's is the Freedom Caucus and the Trump-aligned wing that never stopped believing the party's problem is fight, not management. The case for Scalise is real: personal goodwill, institutional memory, and the fact that plenty of members privately blame Jordan's brand of combat for the scale of the defeat. But the members voting on Tuesday are the survivors of a rout, and survivors usually reach for a sword before they reach for a spreadsheet.

The result lands on November 10. Whoever wins inherits a minority of about 177 seats, a Democratic speaker, and a vice president who has just told the country the war cost them the election. The job is thankless. That is why the race is worth watching: it is the first decision the party makes about what it thinks went wrong.