House Republicans Elect Jim Jordan as Their Next Leader, and He Beat Steve Scalise 106-73

House Republicans chose Jim Jordan on Tuesday to lead them in the next Congress, and the margin, 106 votes to 73 for Steve Scalise, tells you more than the title does.

• Jordan beat Scalise 106 to 73 in a secret ballot on November 10, the Tuesday after the midterms.
• Speaker Mike Johnson told staff he would not run for the job after Republicans lost the House. Scalise had been majority leader.
• Tom Emmer kept the whip post, and Lisa McClain won conference chair.
• Democrats are projected to hold about 259 seats, the largest House majority in 35 years.

The Same Race, Four Votes, Eight Years

Start with the arithmetic, because Jordan has run for the top House Republican job before and the record is public. In November 2018 he lost the race for minority leader to Kevin McCarthy, 159 to 43, which is 21 percent of the 202 votes counted. In October 2023 he lost the secret ballot for speaker nominee to Scalise, 113 to 99, or 47 percent. Two days later he won the nomination after Scalise withdrew, then lost three floor votes and was dropped by the conference, 112 to 86. On Tuesday he took 106 of the 179 votes counted, 59 percent, from the same Scalise who beat him three years ago. The man did not change. The electorate did.

Republicans lost more than 40 House seats last week, and losses like that do not fall evenly. They land on members who hold competitive districts, so the people who voted on Tuesday were the ones who survived, and the survivors lean toward safe seats where a Freedom Caucus founder is an asset. That is our inference, since a secret ballot leaves no roll to check, but it fits the numbers: a party that dropped Jordan in 2023 gave him the job with room to spare. The Senate side of the same party went the other way on the same day: John Thune, John Barrasso and Tom Cotton were all re-elected by acclamation, though a procedural vote to proceed passed only 31 to 15 and Sen. Ron Johnson walked out of the room. One chamber kept its leaders, and the other passed over its majority leader for the Freedom Caucus founder.

What “Battle-Tested on Oversight” Means

Jordan won by selling himself as the Republican who knows how to fight Democratic investigators. In a memo to colleagues he wrote that he is “battle-tested on the oversight front and I know the Democrats’ playbook.” That is a pitch to a conference bracing for Hakeem Jeffries’s majority to open investigations of Trump’s administration, family and business ventures, with a margin that lets Jeffries lose about 40 members and still reach 218 on January 3.

So consider Jordan’s own record with the last House committee that tried to investigate him. The January 6 select committee subpoenaed him in May 2022. In December of that year it referred him and three other Republicans to the House Ethics Committee, citing their refusal to comply with its subpoenas, and his spokesperson called the referral “just another partisan and political stunt.”

We think that is the whole point. A man who ignored a House subpoena is now the face of a party that will spend two years explaining why subpoenas from the other side are illegitimate, and “battle-tested” is accurate only if the battle is against being investigated. The conference could have chosen Scalise, or a member with no Ethics referral on his record. It chose Jordan in the same week Sen. David McCormick, a Republican, called the midterms “the worst election result in decades.” We called him a threat to democracy when he lost his bid for speaker in 2023, and nothing about Tuesday changes that view.

Jordan has the job. Democrats have the majority and, from January 3, the subpoenas. We will learn what “battle-tested” means when the first one arrives.