Why the speaker vote should still worry Mike Johnson

Republican Mike Johnson won the barest of victories on Friday, Jan. 3, when 218 U.S. House representatives voted to re-up his term as speaker to start the 119th Congress. While Johnson was officially reelected on the first ballot, his win was not without drama: Three of the chamber's most right-wing members — Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Ralph Norman of South Carolina and Keith Self of Texas — initially voted against him, and seven others temporarily withheld their votes using a weird procedural trick while Johnson bartered for votes on and off the House floor. But those seven all voted for Johnson in the end, and Norman and Self changed their votes to Johnson at the last minute too, after receiving calls from President-elect Donald Trump mid-golf-game.

Unfortunately for Johnson, his slim victory could be a sign of things to come in his second term as speaker. His party holds a historically slim majority in the House, controlling just 219 votes out of 434 (Republican Matt Gaetz resigned from his seat after Trump unsuccessfully nominated him for attorney general). Any defection over the most trivial procedural or legislative matters could block the party's agenda.

But Johnson is also in trouble because many of the key votes ostensibly for him look more like votes for the Republican agenda in spite of him. After the vote, leaders of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of about three dozen right-wing, anti-establishment legislators, published a list of demands for Johnson and indicated they only voted for him to make sure they could approve Trump's agenda in a timely manner. And since only nine Republicans are needed to introduce a motion to vacate the speakership,* the Freedom Caucus implicitly holds the fate of Johnson's job in its hands.

In fact, the vote for Johnson looks eerily similar to the one in favor of former Rep. Kevin McCarthy to be speaker in 2023, taken just months before he was kicked out of that office (events that led to Johnson originally winning the gavel). If we look at estimates of how liberal or conservative and anti-/pro-establishment each representative is (using something called a DW-NOMINATE score, which estimates legislator ideology by analyzing congressional voting records), we can see that the representatives who initially opposed or withheld support for Johnson are all clustered in lower-right part of the chart. That's the part of the chart that represents the most conservative, anti-establishment group of legislators.

This is exactly the faction of legislators that made McCarthy's job as speaker so hard, and where the votes to oust him came from in 2023. That suggests that Johnson hasn't fundamentally changed the dynamic in Congress; anti-establishment conservatives remain skeptical of their party's leadership, and they've already shown once before that they're willing to topple a speaker. (Actually, twice — this same faction precipitated the resignation of former Speaker John Boehner in 2015 by threatening him with a motion to vacate as well.)

While this group has for now set aside its differences with leadership to send a positive signal about the party's agenda, it's not likely to go away quietly when actual legislation materializes. For now, Republicans in Congress have put their party's best interests over process and ideology. How long can Johnson — and Trump — keep them striking that balance?

Footnotes

*Granted, this is eight more than were necessary last Congress, when just a single Republican could introduce a motion to vacate. This is how former Speaker Kevin McCarthy lost his job.