Republicans Just Lost Big—So Why Are They Choosing Jim Jordan?

Just seven days removed from a midterm election that the American public sent a very clear message to Donald Trump and Republicans that they did not like how Republicans and the president were going about their business. The Republican Party has doubled down again on hardcore MAGA politics. Let's go to Fox News, who announced this news on Tuesday afternoon. And this was in the race to be the House Minority Leader between Jim Jordan from Ohio and Steve Scalise from Louisiana. Here we go. All right, Tommy, stand by for a moment. A bit of breaking news here for our viewers. Jim Jordan, Congressman Jim Jordan, has now been elected by Republicans to serve as the new Minority Leader in the forthcoming Congress that will take its seat in January. The contest was, as we've been talking about all afternoon long, between Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise, and it appears that Jordan has now officially backed up a vote to take the helm. Tommy, what? Okay, so that's the news. Jim Jordan wins the race to be the next speaker of, or that leader of the Republican Party, the minority party going into the 120th Congress. Two things that are hilarious about the video. One, why did the anchor say January so weird? And second, Tommy Lahren was on and had to get interrupted, which is hilarious. Okay, I want to tell you what this means and why it's in keeping with Donald Trump getting rid of Susie Wiles and putting Stephen Miller in as his chief of staff right after the election and why that is bad news for the Republican Party writ large. Before I do all of that. I want to ask you to subscribe independent, authentic here every single day, breaking down the big news you need to know. All right, so let's get to the vote. This was again between Jim Jordan, Ohio. It's seen as the kind of more hardcore MAGA choice. And Steve Scalise, who is the current number two in the House Republican leadership, who is also MAGA, but a little bit more on the pragmatic side. The reason this job is open is because, number one, Republicans lost the majority in the House in the 2026 elections. And number two, the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, has said he will not run for minority leader. OK, so it's a two person race. Jim Jordan got 106 votes in the House Republican Conference to Steve Scalise's 73. Now, you do the math. That adds up to 179 people who voted. Republicans currently control 218 seats, which means that 39 people did not vote or show up, maybe both. And the reality of the situation is that while this is the lame duck Congress, and this is still the group, the Congress in its current composition, not its composition that will happen in January, the reality is if you lost your election and you're a moderate or, you know, and you sort of are annoyed, you're not going to show up, right? The truth is the people who show up to this are people who won another term and people are sort of hardcore believers, right? And the reality is those 39 people probably one that would be Scalise voters. And if they were, he would have won, but they didn't show up. And I think that's important because remember. Right now, Democrats, I have gained, this is NBC numbers I'm using. They've gained 39 seats. They've won 41 Republican seats. They've lost two of their own. So net 39, there are 17 house races that are uncalled right now. NBC has it at 259 D, 176 R are the expectation is that Democrats are going to go into the low mid two sixties when all is said and done two 64, two 65, two 66. But a lot of those people. You know, the Republican Party just got hugely demoralized. Right. And so this is the hardcore of the hardcore who show up and vote. And that group tends to be more Jordan MAGA Trump friendly than more pragmatic and mainstream friendly. So quickly on Jim Jordan, member of Congress from Ohio. Um, he, uh, he actually has lost a bunch of races for leadership. So in 2018, after the 2018 election, um, Jordan ran for minority leader. Uh, against Kevin McCarthy, he lost one 59 to 43 the next. So that was November, 2018, the next month, December, 2018, he lost the judiciary, the chance to be the judiciary committee ranking member to the, the, the senior Republican on the judiciary committee to a guy named Doug Collins from Georgia. He got swamped in that race too. He spent two years as the oversight committee chair, 2018 to 2020, largely defending Donald Donald Trump in public, on television, from, you know. allegations about Russian involvement in the election, the Ukraine phone call, the impeachment, those sorts of things. In 2020, Doug Collins, who's the chair of the Judiciary Committee, ran for the U.S. Senate. He lost. Jordan stepped in and then took on the Judiciary Committee role where he has used he has been since as a very high profile defender of Donald Trump. Now, in 2023, you'll remember Kevin McCarthy got ousted as speaker. Jordan was one of the people, who ran To try to replace, uh, McCarthy. Jordan had Donald Trump's endorsement. Again, he is a hardcore MAGA guy. He founded the House Freedom Caucus, the sort of hardcore MAGA group within the House. Jordan was the founder of that group. So three times Jordan tried to win the speakership in a simple majority vote on the House floor, and three times he lost. He eventually pulled his name, and that's how we got Mike Johnson. So what does it all mean? Well, as I said, this is the second example in the week Since the election of. The Republican base and Republicans in charge doubling down on what I would say is a failed political philosophy, judging by the 2026 election. So remember, Donald Trump moved out Susie Wiles a few days after the election last week and put in Stephen Miller, who is a absolute hardliner on immigration and many other things. Totally MAGA. He has already adopted this, you know, the vote was stolen in 2026 mantra that Trump is now rolling out. So that is clearly a doubling down. Jordan over Scalise is similarly a doubling down on MAGA, sort of hardcore MAGA, true believers only. Some of this makes sense, right? The Republican majority, minority, excuse me, is, you know, right now they have 176 seats. Democrats are going to be at their highest ebb in like. decades by the time all the House votes get counted, which means Republicans will be at their lowest ebb in decades. So Jim Jordan, in many ways, is the right fit for a smaller conference. The people who are left in the Republican House, House Republicans, are, tend to be people who represent overwhelmingly Trump districts, hardcore MAGA, hardcore base, because they didn't get washed away by the tsunami, whereas so many people who held Trump plus six, Trump plus eight, even Trump plus 12 districts did. It's a smaller, more cohesive, more MAGA group, and Jordan is a better fit for that than is Scalise, in the same way that overseeing a smaller party is probably a better fit for an ideologue like Miller in Donald Trump's last two years than someone who tried to get along with people in Susie Wiles. Here's the problem. If you're a Republican, you are doubling down on something that the American public rejected outright. I mean, this this past election, which was one week ago today, I know it feels like longer, but this past this last election was clearly a repudiation of Donald Trump and the political policies and philosophy he represented, as well as a punishment to Republicans in the House and Senate who went along. Republicans are going to lose 40-plus seats in the House. They are going to lose nine seats in the Senate. These are historically large losses. This is a 1974 post-Watergate-like midterm election. And what are Republicans doing after it? They are doubling down on the same policies, the same tone that lost them the election seven days ago. I understand why it's happening. Smaller group, more conservative, more cohesive, more MAGA. We know from the 2026 election that Democrats won independence overwhelmingly over Republicans. There was plenty of Republican defections of people who didn't feel like they fit in the MAGA coalition. That doubling down on MAGA will not work for the Republican Party heading into 2028, whether that's the presidential race, Senate races, or House races. And at least in the week after the election of the 2026 midterms, that looks like exactly. What they're doing. That's why Jim Jordan matters. It matters in the context of Stephen Miller in the context of the 2026 midterms. And I think it's Republicans going in exactly the opposite direction that voters indicated they want them to head in the 2026 midterms. All right, that's it for me. 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