Leading the race are the ‘three Johns’ — Senate GOP whip John Thune, conference chair John Barrasso, and former whip John Cornyn.
Wyoming senator Cynthia Lummis counts herself lucky she was in the cloakroom Wednesday when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced on the Senate floor his plans to step down from his leadership post in November. To Lummis, the speech came as a “big surprise.”
“It was a poignant and nuanced speech because clearly, his over 40-year career here and his love of this institution were really on display,” she said in a brief interview Wednesday afternoon.
November may be a long way off, but the shadow race to succeed McConnell is now coming into public view after unfolding behind closed doors for months. Leading the race are the “three Johns” — Senate GOP whip John Thune of South Dakota, conference chair John Barrasso of Wyoming, and former whip John Cornyn of Texas — all of whom have spent the past year or so privately signaling to colleagues that they would be eager to fill the role when the time came for McConnell to step aside.
So what, exactly, are GOP senators looking for in a McConnell successor? It depends on whom you ask.
North Carolina senator Thom Tillis, a McConnell ally and institutionalist at heart, told reporters Wednesday that any prospective candidate who wants to scrap the filibuster should be a nonstarter. He added that anyone seeking the job must be mindful of moderate members’ priorities and be willing to “take the heat” without taking things personally — one of McConnell’s greatest leadership traits. “You got to have somebody that’s independent,” Tillis said, while taking a swipe at the outgoing leader’s biggest detractors. “The one thing that most of the people who are critics of Mitch McConnell have in common is none of them have ever led.”
More-populist members hope the next Senate GOP leader will have a closer relationship with former President Donald Trump, the likely 2024 GOP nominee with whom McConnell hasn’t spoken in three years following the storming of the U.S. Capital on January 6, 2021. Others are eager to elect a successor who will scale back the 82-year-old Kentuckian’s interventionist foreign policy and continued robust support for Ukraine amid Russia’s unprovoked invasion — a hallmark of his leadership style that has clashed with some of the more isolationist members of the conference in recent months.
“I’d love for somebody who is more concerned about the American border than they are about what’s going on 6,000 miles away,” first-term senator J. D. Vance of Ohio quipped to reporters Wednesday afternoon.
Another name to watch beyond the “three Johns” is Florida senator Rick Scott, who mounted an unsuccessful challenge to McConnell after the Senate GOP’s drubbing in the 2022 midterms, the same cycle Scott served as chairman of of Senate Republicans’ campaign arm. He declined Wednesday to rule out running against him again in November, when competition to succeed McConnell is expected to be stiff.
“This shouldn’t be personality contest,” Wisconsin GOP senator Ron Johnson, one of ten GOP senators to support Scott’s November 2022 bid against McConnell, told NR Wednesday afternoon. “This should be something grounded in: what is the conference’s mission? What are our goals? And who’s going to be committed to that mission statement, those goals and lead into more collaborative process? That’s what we need to flesh out here.”
Pressed by NR about any names he’s hearing beyond the four aforementioned potential candidates, Indiana senator Mike Braun joked that “a lot of people are ambitious in this place.”
“I want to hear who’s going to be interested in balancing the budget, picking up real legislating discussion,” said Braun, who is retiring at the end of his term to run for governor. He supported Scott amid his 2022 leadership challenge to McConnell, largely over the concern that the Senate GOP doesn’t, in his view, have a clear, forward-thinking policy agenda to contrast with Democrats. “I haven’t seen where we as a party are interested in putting forth policy alternatives to Democrats’ stuff. They end up sooner or later getting something done, and we rely on the courts to maybe take it to task — that’s playing defense.”
McConnell’s announcement comes during a tumultuous time for the GOP. In October, a hardline group of conservatives joined a united House Democratic caucus in ousting ex-speaker Kevin McCarthy from his post. The party took three full weeks to unite behind his successor, Louisiana Republican Mike Johnson, who is now facing his own pushback from the rightmost flank of his conference.
And just this week, outgoing Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel made official her long-anticipated decision to step aside as leader of the national party on March 8, when RNC members will convene in Houston to elect her successor. The RNC’s 168 members are expected to coalesce around Trump’s preferred candidates: North Carolina chairman and RNC general counsel Michael Whatley to serve as McDaniel’s successor, and the former president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, to serve as RNC co-chair.
Leading Republicans is like “herding cats,” Lummis said in an interview of McConnell, a master tactician unafraid to take flak from his adversaries. She said under McConnell’s leadership, there’s been far more decorum on the Senate side of the U.S. Capitol than the House side. “I think it’s in part a nod to senators’ respect for Senator McConnell,” she added. “And even when there are sharp disagreements behind closed doors within caucus meetings, it doesn’t spill over publicly like it does in the House.”
McConnell, for his part, joked on the Senate floor Wednesday that his time isn’t over yet. “I still have enough gas in my tank to thoroughly disappoint my critics, and I intend to do so with all the enthusiasm to which they have become accustomed.”