House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told supporters on Tuesday night that Republicans appear poised to lose the House majority to Democrats in the 2026 midterm elections.
“From the first day of this election, we knew that to keep the House and sustain our majority, we would have to defy more than a century of midterm history,” Johnson said. “It’s only happened twice in 90 years that a sitting president has picked up or held seats for his party in that first two-year cycle. There’s a lot of reasons for it. It’s very, very difficult to overcome, and it looks like history will be kept.”
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Republicans have lost several key House races in Tuesday’s midterm elections, including several seats in Florida that were redistricted to favor Republicans. Johnson told supporters that over the last two years, he led “almost 500 individual campaign events across 36 states” and “broke every fundraising record there’s ever been by God’s grace and because of the help of a lot of people in this room.”
For the 2026 cycle, Johnson raised more than $526 million to boost GOP candidates and incumbents.
Republicans’ loss of the House majority leaves Johnson’s future in GOP leadership unclear, but Johnson told supporters that it has been the “honor of my life to serve as the 56th speaker of the House, not a position we ever aspired to or expected to have.”
“Republicans will not be deterred by the outcome of one election,” Johnson said. “In fact, you know what we do? We double down. We double down. All right? We will continue pressing forward with our agenda of common sense and our vision to make America great again. And come 2028, we will take back the House, and we will finish this job.”
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A senior GOP leadership aide told the Washington Examiner that Tuesday’s election results are a “disaster” for the GOP and that the outcome is “worse than” Republicans thought it would be.
House Republicans were facing significant political and historical headwinds heading into Election Day, largely stemming from voter disapproval of the war in Iran and poor approval ratings of President Donald Trump.