Headed into this election cycle, Speaker Johnson was nursing a historically thin majority. This week, the majority got one seat thinner, as Democrats won a special election in Virginia to narrow it.
This gives Johnson virtually no room for error, as anything more than two defectors will defeat a piece of legislation.
This session started as a complete and utter nightmare for Johnson.
They started off the session with a narrow 220-213 margin, which meant that Johnson had only three votes to spare in order to get any legislation passed on the House floor.
Then Trump stated to pilfer members, but the Democrats also lost a few seats to some untimely deaths.
Johnson knew he was in trouble, stating, “We have nothing to spare. But all of our members know that. We talked about that today, as we do constantly — that this is a team effort, that we’ve got to all row in the same direction.”
When Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) passed away, we knew the Dems would take that seat back once the election took place.
Connolly was in a solid blue district, and Trump had not performed particularly well there in the general election.
However, when Democrat James Walkinshaw took the seat back in a special election, winning by a 3:1 margin, it raised a red flag for me, a warning shot of sorts, that Trump is losing moderate voters in a historically bad election cycle.
Walkinshaw pushed that narrative after he secured his win, stating, “This is the beginning of the end for Donald Trump’s reckless agenda.”
Johnson is now sitting on a 219-213 edge in the House, with three seats still needing to be filled.
Once again, if he loses any more than two seats, legislation will fail. And if we are being honest about Johnson, he has not exactly rallied the troops in key moments, so, yeah, this is very concerning to me, especially with the NDAA on deck, and Democrats already loading it up with hundreds of amendments.
The concern is warranted, especially with the current beef between Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Trump, which we have already seen create some problems for Trump on the Epstein front.
Johnson and the rest of the GOP leadership are going to earn their money as they go into an election cycle that is traditionally a bloodbath for the party in power. This would not be so worrisome had Republicans capitalized on Biden’s first midterm election, but we only flipped seven seats when we were expected to flip dozens. Now, if we take a big hit, the Dems are going to have an overwhelming majority in the House, and that will be nothing but headaches for Trump for the final two years of his term. So I have but one question… why is the RNC generating little to no buzz about its 2026 candidates?
