Tom Emmer Does Not Deserve to Be GOP Whip

I f you had predicted what would happen on Election Night a week ago, even the most optimistic Democrats — and the most pessimistic Republicans — would have checked you into a psychiatric hospital. Republicans are headed into the fight of their lives to keep their current 50/50 Senate split in a Georgia runoff, where their candidate is the decisive underdog. As the dust settles on the final House races, the GOP appears poised to eke out one of the slimmest majorities in U.S. history, but Democrats still have a slim path to maintaining their hold on the lower chamber — and regardless, a single-digit Republican margin is a far cry from the party’s optimistic expectations going into last Tuesday.

Democrats are the first in-power party since 1934 to successfully avoid losing a single state legislative chamber during a midterm election. And the party actually made pivotal gains in state houses and senates from Minnesota and Michigan to Pennsylvania and Vermont. Blue states such as Massachusetts and Maryland traded highly popular Republican governors for Democratic ones. In purple states and districts across the country, Republican hopefuls fell short.

Republican leadership, which bears significant responsibility for this failure, deserves to face a reckoning. If the GOP does succeed in achieving a narrow House majority, the caucus is scheduled to elect its new leaders in a closed-door vote this Tuesday. Conservative calls to delay that vote are merited: As House Freedom Caucus chairman Scott Perry (R., Pa.) pointed out to the Hill last week, “We don’t even know if we have the majority or who’s in the majority. People haven’t come to Washington, D.C., because they don’t know if they’ve won their races yet.”

But if the vote is not delayed — or even if it is — House Republicans should not reward the would-be caucus leaders who failed to deliver the promised double-digit majority. And arguably no Republican is more deserving of blame for the GOP’s dismal showing in the House than Tom Emmer (R., Minn.).

Amid the red mist, Republicans have fallen upon themselves, with various warring tribes blaming their preferred culprits — Mitch McConnell’s allocation of campaign funds, Donald Trump’s endorsements and interventions, mail-in voting and ballot-harvesting, a feckless Republican establishment, a politically unappealing MAGA populist-nationalist wing, Dobbs, and so on. All of these explanations, to one degree or another, may carry a kernel of truth. But in the House, at least, the buck stops with the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), which has been chaired by Emmer since 2019. The Minnesota congressman’s responsibility to his caucus, as head of the NRCC, is to win House races. Despite widespread predictions of a red-wave election, he failed; in fact, Democrats achieved upsets in key purple districts across the country.

On Wednesday, mere hours after Election Day, Emmer officially launched his bid for House GOP whip, the third-highest-ranking leadership position in a potential Republican majority. He is widely considered to be one of the three front-runners — alongside Drew Ferguson (R., Ga.) and Jim Banks (R., Ind.) — in what has long been viewed as the most high-profile of the genuinely competitive leadership races in the caucus. (Despite the GOP’s poor showing in the midterms, Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise are still considered the likely picks for the top two spots — House speaker and majority leader, respectively.)

The NRCC chairman had been not-so-quietly campaigning for the spot for months — already a dubious move, given his preexisting commitments to heading up Republican campaign efforts — but Emmer’s official announcement comes at the very moment of his biggest failure as head of the House GOP’s campaign arm. At the very least, the vote should be delayed to allow for a more comprehensive picture of Emmer’s performance at the NRCC. But at this point, House Republicans should have seen enough: Emmer has already fallen far short in his position as chairman of the NRCC, and his shadow campaign for whip during the closing months of the campaign demonstrates a willingness to place his own interests over those of his caucus. He has not earned a promotion.

Emmer, Axios reported on the heels of the election, “was hoping to use a strong election outcome as his main selling point for becoming whip.” If he was set to take credit for a strong Republican performance, he must now own the considerably weaker one. The congressman has made numerous efforts to spin the red ripple as a success, telling the Washington Post that Republicans “should be extremely happy” with the results. At a post-midterms briefing, he argued,

For any of the naysayers, we’re happy to point out this is now the second straight cycle that House Republicans have picked up seats. . . . I always said that all I could guarantee was that we’re going to win the majority. How wide and how deep the majority was going to be was totally up to the voters.

But elections are won by persuading voters — and by turning them out in the first place. The NRCC’s job — via candidate selection, spending decisions, fundraising and messaging — is to do just that. As of July, the organization was targeting 75 Democrat-controlled House seats, with Emmer boasting that they had shattered records for the number of Republican candidates running. But none of that means much if the GOP candidates don’t win.

From the conservative perspective, Emmer was always a dubious proposition for a leadership spot. As I noted in a report on the whip race in September, he “raised eyebrows by voting to codify the right to same-sex marriage earlier this year, and was one of just nine Republicans to join House Democrats in voting to block the Trump administration’s ban on transgender soldiers in the military in 2019.” He “backed efforts to mandate sexual-orientation and gender-identity (SOGI) protections for government contractors on four different occasions, including in a 2016 vote for the ratification of a 2014 Obama executive order,” which — according to Heritage Action — “would have required federal contractors to grant biologically male employees who identify as women unfettered access to women’s lockers, showers, and bathrooms.” Despite stressing border security and immigration as top campaign issues, Emmer came under fire from border-hawk groups for the fact that “Republican congressional candidates — whose campaigns are overseen by Emmer’s NRCC — have neglected to champion that policy framework on the campaign trail.” (Emmer had previously shied away from running on the issue, suggesting that it hurt Republicans in the 2018 midterms.) And as the New York Post reported in late October, he previously served as a paid spokesman for a left-wing group seeking the abolition of the Electoral College:

The National Popular Vote campaign launched in 2006 to support efforts to overhaul the Electoral College by passing laws that commit state electors to the candidate who wins the national popular vote.

About five years after the initiative’s launch, Emmer took a job as one of the group’s paid spokespeople. . . . The initiative was overwhelmingly financed by Democratic donors, according to the conservative Capital Research Center’s Influence Watch, which notes a $1 million contribution in 2011 from the Jennifer and Jonathan Allan Soros Foundation. Jonathan Soros is the son of left-wing megadonor George Soros.

A 2011 report from a local paper featured Emmer, on the heels of his failed 2010 bid for Minnesota governor, boasting that his work with the group would “transform national politics.” That it would, but not in the direction that conservatives prefer.

It would be one thing if Emmer was the only viable candidate for whip. But Ferguson and Banks have solid and reliably conservative records, the former as chief deputy whip, the latter as chairman of the 156-member Republican Study Committee, the largest ideological caucus in Congress. Competence and fidelity to basic conservative principles should be a prerequisite for those who would ascend to the highest ranks of GOP leadership. Emmer has demonstrated neither. Going into what could be the smallest Republican majority in recent memory, the GOP whip will play a particularly pivotal role in organizing and directing the caucus. Republicans can — and should — do better than Tom Emmer.