Senate Republican calls for delayed leadership election

Sen. Dave McCormick (Pa.), a more moderate Republican from a key battleground state, is endorsing a call by conservative Senate GOP colleagues to delay the party’s leadership elections scheduled for Tuesday .

“As I’ve shared with Leader Thune, I don’t believe we should move to leadership elections until we have digested and debated the lessons of the midterms and how to move forward,” McCormick wrote late Sunday in a statement. “We need leadership in place fast, but Tuesday is too soon.”

“I know it’s been the practice to go straight to leadership elections in recent years, but we should not rush it,” he added.

The Pennsylvania Republican called last week’s midterm election “the worst election result” for Republicans “in decades.”

“We need a discussion about what went wrong, how we fix it, what we stand for, and how our agenda must focus on the concerns of the American people,” he wrote online.

Senate Budget Committee Chair Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) last week collected the signatures he needed for a letter he plans to send Monday to Senate Republican Conference Chair Tom Cotton (Ark.) demanding a conference meeting to discuss pausing the leadership election.

“We need to have serious discussions within our conference as to what we can do to improve the outcome in 2028,” Johnson and his colleagues wrote.

“Holding leadership elections without engaging in a robust discussion and evaluation of how those running for leadership intend to lead would be political malpractice,” they continued. “It is certainly not the way leadership elections should be conducted in the world’s most deliberative body.”

Johnson wants the Republican conference to “have a fulsome conference discussion and delay holding any leadership elections until we all have a chance to hear from leadership candidates as to what type of collaborative conference governing model we should adopt.”

He also noted Republicans senators need to map out their “strategy” to “counter the emboldened Democrats.”

Senate Steering Committee Chair Mike Lee (R-Utah) has also called for postponing the Republican leadership election.

“We have no business holding Senate Republican leadership elections until: 1) we’ve had ample opportunity to discuss what happened on Tuesday, and 2) we know who’s going to be in our conference,” Lee posted on the social platform X last week.

Senate conservatives attempted to postpone GOP leadership elections after the 2022 midterm election and the 2024 presidential election but failed to convince a majority of their Republican colleagues to do so.

The Senate GOP conference is planning to meet Tuesday morning, and Johnson, McCormick and Lee will have a chance to pitch the caucus on the possibility of halting the contest.

If they don’t get enough support, the senators will cast their ballots for the new leadership team for the next Congress later in the morning.

As of now, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) doesn’t face a challenger and is expected to easily be reelected.