Senate Republicans Keep John Thune as Leader. A Push to Delay the Vote Failed, 31 to 15.

Hours after House Republicans chose a new fighter to lead them, Senate Republicans went the other way. They kept the man they already had. Sen. John Thune of South Dakota was reelected leader of the Senate Republican conference on Tuesday, holding the job he has had since Mitch McConnell stepped aside in January 2025.

Thune ran unopposed and kept his post by acclamation, meaning no head-to-head vote was needed, according to Axios. But getting there took most of the day. Republicans met behind closed doors three separate times, and a group of senators tried to push the whole election back at least a week. That effort failed 31 to 15, Axios reported.

Thune will lead a smaller team next year. Democrats won at least 54 Senate seats in last week’s midterms, Fox News reported, and that number could still grow depending on the final counts in Mississippi and Alaska. Republicans lost at least seven seats, according to the Associated Press, which also noted Thune “was always expected to prevail, as he is popular with his GOP colleagues.”

Ron Johnson’s walkout threat

The pushback was led by Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. On Monday he sent a letter to Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who chairs the Republican conference, asking to delay the vote until members could hear from the candidates about “what our strategy will be to counter the emboldened Democrats.”

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

Senate Republican rules allow a delay to be considered if five senators sign on. Johnson got them: Sens. Rick Scott of Florida, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Ted Budd of North Carolina and Mike Lee of Utah. Johnson had also warned he would not take part in a quick vote. “If you hold the election, I’ll leave the room,” he said Monday, as reported by The Hill.

Johnson was clear that his fight was about how the party moves forward, not about a rival for the top job. He never put forward an alternative to Thune. “After the stunning defeat, you just can’t continue on business as usual,” he said. “That kind of defeat demands change.” Asked whether he wanted the job himself, he answered with a question: “That’s part of the problem. Would you want it?”

The family argument in public

Two of the party’s best-known conservatives refused to pledge their votes ahead of time. Scott, who has run for leader twice before, most recently against Thune, said he wanted to know what the party is trying to accomplish before picking anyone. “The first step is, one, what do we want to accomplish?” he told Fox News Digital. On Tuesday he added, “I think we have to acknowledge the voters are not happy. We have to start listening to voters.” He did not run.

Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri went further and named what he thinks went wrong. Republicans, he argued, ran on a record that hurt them with working families. “When you cut Medicaid, but you fund data centers, when you cut rural hospital funding, but you fund Planned Parenthood, when you let the cost of healthcare for working people go through the roof, but you can’t do anything for them on other issues of affordability, from fertilizer to gas,” Hawley said, “Yeah you know what? The public doesn’t like that very much.”

That is the real argument inside the Senate GOP right now, and it did not end with Tuesday’s vote. It is less about who holds the title and more about what the party fights for over the next two years. The critics did win one thing. Punchbowl News reported that they would get the meeting they asked for to talk through what went wrong at the polls.

Thune, for his part, never pretended the outcome was certain. The night before, asked if he had his conference’s support, he said: “That’s the hope. You never know right until they vote.”

Same team, one new face

The rest of the Senate Republican leadership stays almost exactly as it is, according to Axios. Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming remains whip, the No. 2 job that counts votes. Cotton stays conference chair. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia remains policy chair, and Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma stays vice chair.

The one change is at the party’s Senate campaign arm. Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio will take over as chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, replacing Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina. That job matters more than its name suggests. Moreno will be the one recruiting candidates and raising money for 2028, when Republicans will try to win the Senate back.

The contrast with the House was hard to miss. House Republicans voted 106 to 73 earlier in the day to replace their old leadership with Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, a brawler who made his name taking on Democrats in hearings. Senate Republicans chose steadiness and kept an experienced hand who knows the chamber’s rules cold.

Both will now spend the next two years of President Trump’s term in the minority, with Democrats running both chambers starting in January. Thune still has a few weeks as majority leader before then, and Republicans plan to use them. After that, his job changes from setting the Senate’s agenda to stopping the parts of the Democrats’ agenda his party opposes, while keeping a restless conference in one piece.