Mike Johnson steps aside from House Republican leadership after midterm losses

Democrats prepare to nominate Jeffries for speaker on Jan. 3, 2027

House Speaker Mike Johnson will step aside from Republican Party leadership after the GOP’s midterm losses, declining to seek support to stay on as House minority leader in the new Congress, according to two people familiar with his decision on Wednesday. Johnson won reelection from his Shreveport-area district in Louisiana for an eighth term and is expected to stay in the House as a rank-and-file member when Congress convenes in January.

The decision closes a political arc that unfolded in roughly three years. Johnson, a lower-level member of House leadership who was often seen as an accidental speaker, won the gavel in 2023 after Republican colleagues ousted then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California in a first-of-its-kind coup in House history. Johnson took the job after party members could not agree on a next-in-line successor to McCarthy, and he led House Republicans through a period that included one of the slimmest majorities in modern times.

Democrats swept to the House majority in the midterm election, and Johnson’s prediction that Republicans would defy the historical pattern of punishing the president’s party in midterms did not hold. With the majority gone, the source of Johnson’s authority in the chamber went with it, leaving him without a path back to the speaker’s office.

Johnson had distinguished himself with Republican colleagues before the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by organizing support for Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden. Once in the speaker’s office, Johnson pulled closer to Trump, recounting nearly daily phone calls and chats and often offering his impressions in the president’s voice.

Johnson led passage of the Republican package of tax breaks and social services cuts that Trump signed into law. He also used the gavel to shield the president and his administration from floor votes, including a recent effort to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, by sending lawmakers home without a vote.

His departure sets up an internal Republican contest for the next party leader. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise is running for the post, according to a person familiar with his plans, and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio is expected to challenge him. House Republicans are expected to elect a leader when members-elect gather in Washington next week. The people who told The Associated Press about Johnson’s and Scalise’s decisions insisted on anonymity to disclose them.

The contest would repeat the fault lines that split the House GOP in 2023, when Scalise and Jordan both reached for the speaker’s gavel after McCarthy was forced aside and split the vote without winning majority support, and Johnson emerged as the consensus candidate. Scalise has long courted backing from the party’s conservative wing, particularly business and energy sector lawmakers. Jordan, a former wrestler who helmed the Judiciary Committee, has long been preferred by the hard right, including some from the Freedom Caucus.

Democrats are preparing to nominate House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York for speaker, a post that carries being second in line to the president. The speaker’s election is among the first votes of the new Congress, on Jan. 3, 2027.

For Johnson, the sequence runs from a Shreveport-area lawmaker who fell into the speakership in 2023 to a rank-and-file seat in the next Congress, with the gavel he won that year expected to pass to the other party.