Jim Jordan's never-before-tried strategy to become House speaker
Jordan is using conservative media to pressure other conservatives into supporting his leadership bid.
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Republican Jim Jordan gained momentum toward becoming the next speaker of the House on Monday, helped along by a strategy that has never before been used to win a leadership post in Congress.
In a position usually decided behind closed doors, the Ohio congressman has instead invited public pressure on Republican lawmakers from right-wing media figures.
It is “the threat of the conservative media ecosystem coming crashing down on them,” Brendan Buck, who was a top adviser to former Speaker Paul Ryan, told Yahoo News.
Trepidation about that threat seemed on Monday to have helped Jordan get to the verge of winning the speakership in a vote scheduled for Tuesday.
Conservative media to the rescue
Jordan did not appear all that formidable on an initial closed-door vote on Friday of last week, winning only 124 Republican votes out of 221.
To win the speakership, he or someone else needs 217 Republicans to vote for them, since they do not want Democratic support and likely could not get it if they did. That means only four Republicans need to support someone else to sink Jordan’s bid.
A total of 55 House Republicans voted against Jordan on the secret ballot, and several members vowed they would never support the rabble-rousing Fox News regular, who has led the charge for former President Donald Trump on conservative media for years.
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But Jordan allies and right-wing media figures immediately began to put public pressure on the holdouts. They published the office phone numbers of Jordan opponents and urged their social media followers to deluge them with phone calls.
Some of the same Republicans who worked with Democrats to oust previous Speaker Kevin McCarthy — such as Rep. Matt Gaetz — went on right-wing TV networks like Newsmax to argue that now was the time for GOP unity.
A producer for Sean Hannity, the Fox News personality, reportedly sent notes to House Republicans pressuring them to vote for Jordan.
“I think they’re sitting there thinking through what would happen if they did actually block [Jordan],” Buck told Yahoo News.
By Monday afternoon, several Republicans who’d said late last week they would never vote for Jordan had publicly backed him, saying they’d received assurances that their priorities — such as defense spending and passing a budget — would be prioritized.
How we got here
Jordan told reporters that “it’s not about pressuring anybody,” but he also acknowledged that the only way to get to 217 votes is to hold a vote in public on the House floor. A public vote would do the very thing Jordan shrugged off: immense public pressure on the few Republicans still opposed to him.
The outside pressure strategy is new in congressional leadership elections but reflects a trend that has been years in the making. Still, it was not utilized for McCarthy, or for his deputy who initially sought to replace him, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise.
That’s because neither McCarthy nor Scalise is beloved by Fox News or right-wing media as Jordan is. McCarthy and Scalise came up through traditional politics, in which most lawmakers believed that the job of Congress was to pass laws through a bipartisan process.
But compromise is anathema to right-wing media, and many members of Congress now consider their job to be “a prominent platform for performative outrage, where you can articulate your voters’ frustrations with elite power and show them that you are working to disrupt the uses of that power,” according to Yuval Levin, director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
Why it matters
Jordan, meanwhile, has been fighting against Republican leadership for most of his 16 years in Congress. He fueled a rise to stardom on right-wing media during the 2019 impeachment of Donald Trump, and has continued to court conservative pundits during his time as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee this year.
He has used hearings and investigative power to advance a story that right-wing media loves to tell: that big tech and Democrats have censored Republicans.
His ascent to vying for leadership of the House marks a turning point. Just as many rank-and-file members of Congress are chosen by a tiny minority of voters who participate in primaries and block more moderate candidates from the fall elections, the speaker of the House is on the verge of being chosen by a small minority of the most hard-line members of the Republican Party.
To put it bluntly, a small number of hard-liners in Congress are on the verge of exploiting procedural rules in Congress and then using public pressure from right-wing media to elect a House speaker who is more partisan than any Republican leader in modern memory.
What remains to be seen is how Jordan will navigate the unique challenges of leading a party, which is more complicated than anything he’s done. But one thing is more clear than ever: He has built a powerful weapon in his ability to leverage right-wing media, and that will remain in his pocket for the foreseeable future.
