House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Republicans are emboldened by GOP election wins that will shrink the Democratic majority to as little as a handful of votes and put him within striking distance of the speaker’s gavel after the 2022 midterm elections.
McCarthy, 55, has come a long way since 2015, when he abruptly abandoned his bid for speaker, stepping aside for Paul Ryan after Republicans failed to rally behind him ahead of a closed-door vote.
On Tuesday, McCarthy, a California Republican, was elected minority leader for a second term without a single vote of opposition after stunning GOP election wins that so far have claimed 11 House seats held by Democrats and several outstanding races favoring the GOP.
Ryan retired from Congress just as the GOP lost the majority in 2018, leaving McCarthy to rebuild with a smaller and morally deflated conference.
“I think it only strengthened me,” McCarthy said, reflecting on the House GOP’s rejection of his leadership five years ago. “Did I ever want to go through it? No. But it did strengthen me.”
McCarthy next year will lead his party with the largest House minority since World War II, including a record number of new women and minority members, but it will likely be under the presidency of Democrat Joe Biden, not his friend President Trump, who he talks to by phone every day and considers to be a contender in the race until the ballot-counting and court challenges are finished.
McCarthy said if Biden prevails, the House GOP will provide “a check and balance” to the Democratic agenda and that the razor-thin margin between the two parties will send a message to House Democrats that the GOP minority is poised to expand further in swing districts.
In addition to winning races in roughly a dozen districts held by Democrats, the GOP held on to all but three vacant seats.
The GOP even defied polls and held New Jersey’s 2nd Congressional District, where incumbent and former Democrat Jeff Van Drew’s election prospects appeared doomed after he switched to the Republican Party.
“Not only did I pick up Democrat seats, I was able to get a Democrat to register Republican and then win the election,” McCarthy said. “That’s got to be in the backs of their minds. Because a number of these Democrats, if they stay around, they are not going to win.”
McCarthy said the GOP will build on proposals to battle the coronavirus, reform police departments with new training and body cameras, help economically struggling small businesses with federal loans, reform infrastructure with a five-year plan, and end U.S. dependency on China for critical supplies.
“These are solid policy ideas,” McCarthy said. “You had a real assortment of core items that the country cares about that we actually campaigned upon, and we want to stay with that agenda we will stay and build on that.”
McCarthy said he’s improved his leadership skills by increasing his expertise on policy issues and by uniting the notoriously fractious GOP conference, which for several years was engaged in a bitter intraparty battle with its sizable conservative and populist House Freedom Caucus.
McCarthy quelled the discord by bringing the Freedom Caucus founders into the GOP leadership fold. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio is now the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, and former Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina was selected as the top GOP lawmaker on the House Oversight Committee.
Like McCarthy, both Meadows and Jordan are key allies of Trump. Meadows left Congress earlier this year to take the job of White House chief of staff, and by the time he left Congress, he was working with the GOP leadership to cut deals, rather than lobbing bombs at it.
“I said Jim, we need to put aside any differences,” McCarthy said, describing his conversation with Jordan. “It’s almost like a team of rivals. Everyone has a voice here.”
McCarthy is confident that the GOP will win more House seats in 2022 and has a real shot at regaining the majority. He credits Trump, who he said helped attract new and diverse candidates, Trump closely follows House races like a sport, McCarthy said.
Even as he is battling his own election results, Trump is tracking the handful of undecided House races and calls or writes to McCarthy to congratulate him on the GOP’s growing numbers.
“He just sent me an article yesterday on how well we did in this election and that it looks like I’ll be speaker in 2022,” McCarthy said. “And he wrote on it, ‘I agree!’”
