Johnson Fights to Keep GOP Grip on House Power

House Speaker Mike Johnson has kept the narrow Republican majority together to advance President Trump’s agenda, including a bill with major tax breaks and social-service cuts that often passed without a vote to spare. Now he’s campaigning to keep control of the House as the contest turns on a handful of seats and voters voice frustration over high prices and the Iran war.

A Majority Built on Tight Votes

Johnson said Republicans would retain control in the Nov. 3 midterms, despite Democratic momentum and razor-thin margins. In Bangor, Maine, he pointed to crowds he said he’d seen on the campaign trail, GOP recruits and incumbents, and nearly half a billion dollars he had raised for House Republicans. He also invoked faith. “We run to win, and that's biblical: You run to win,” he told the Associated Press. “And I believe that we will.”

The arithmetic is narrow. Johnson said he expected a “working majority,” not “a giant majority,” and predicted Republicans could buck the pattern in which the president’s party often loses seats in midterms. He said he planned to visit more than 20 states and 40 congressional districts through November. His own reelection, the article said, was expected the following month.

A few votes can shift the balance in Congress. Johnson recently sent lawmakers home early rather than face a vote forced by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, as lawmakers tried to halt the Iran war, which Congress hadn’t authorized. Johnson rejected criticism that Congress had yielded power as Trump sought to expand executive authority. “Absolute nonsense,” he said. “We did not yield Article 1 authority to the president.” He added, “We used our own,” to advance Republican priorities over Democratic opposition.

The Cost of Keeping the Machine Moving

Republican Rep. Mark Harris of North Carolina, who joined Johnson’s campaign swing, described the speaker’s approach through a string of close calls. “So many times everybody had written off, there was no way he was going to be able to pull off a particular vote. Yet he always seems to pull out the win in the end,” Harris said. Those wins include legislation combining tax breaks with cuts to social services; the source gives no further details about who will bear those cuts.

Johnson routinely takes 1 a.m. calls from Trump. The two spoke the night before Trump rallied in Alaska. Johnson also gave Trump a speaker’s gavel as Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” into law. Critics saw the gift as surrendering the authority of a coequal branch of government.

Johnson first became speaker in 2023 after renegade Republicans ousted his predecessor, then-Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California. Before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Johnson had organized support for Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud in the election Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden. Those details stand alongside Johnson’s claim that he defended Congress’s authority.

Faith, Discipline and the Next Majority

Johnson has focused his campaign on Democrats he portrays as “communists.” A handful of far-left liberals backed by the Democratic Socialists of America were on the ballot. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader who would be in line for the speaker’s gavel if Democrats won control, was preparing a first-100-days agenda for the new Congress, which would convene in January if control changed. Johnson’s stated plans for another Republican majority: “less taxes, less regulation.” Trump, Johnson said, “wants to go big for his legacy.”

According to the article, the White House had returned to a state of disarray after relative stability over the previous two years. Trump had purged House Republicans seen as disloyal, including Massie, who lost his primary, and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who retired early after breaking with Trump over the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Asked about party discipline, Johnson said he was preparing changes to House rules if he returned as speaker: “There's going to be some changes that are going to make the machinery work smoother.”

Johnson said faith shapes “how I think and how I act and what I do.” He led a public prayer on the National Mall as part of the nation’s 250th anniversary and said he was grateful for prayers for him and the country. He also said, “I pray for God's will. And I believe God's will is for us — and not the communists — to be in charge of America.” Then he returned to the campaign’s governing claim: “This is a biblical admonition. So we will.”