There’s little that unites the 22 House Republicans who voted against Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) for speaker on Wednesday.
They include some of the most moderate Republicans in the House as well as one member of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus. Some of them represent swing districts, and others hail from deep-red ones. And not all of them voted to certify the 2020 election.
Instead, what binds many Republicans who voted for ousted speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) or one of several other protest candidates instead of Jordan is anger with the way Jordan and his team have sought to cajole them into supporting him.
“This was not an organized movement,” Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), who voted for Scalise on Tuesday and Wednesday, told reporters.
The Republicans who opposed Jordan, he went on, come from across the country, with “different committee assignments, different stations in life, different tenures.”
Here are five different ways of looking at the coalition of Republicans who have denied Jordan the speakership so far and how they fit into the larger party.
6 hail from districts Biden won in 2020
Most of the Republicans who voted against Jordan on Wednesday represent solidly Republican districts and have no reason to fear that supporting Jordan would cost them votes when they run for reelection (although voting against Jordan could hurt them in their primaries).
But six of them represent districts that President Biden carried in 2020 — in some cases by big margins.
Biden won the Long Island district of Rep. Anthony D’Esposito (R-N.Y.) — who voted twice for former Republican congressman Lee Zeldin instead of Jordan — by nearly 15 points. He also won the district in New York City’s northern suburbs held by Rep. Michael Lawler (R-N.Y.), who voted for McCarthy twice, by more than 10 points.
Reps. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Ore.), Don Bacon (R-Neb.), Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.) and Jen A. Kiggans (R-Va.) also represent districts Biden won. All of them except Bacon are freshmen.
Not all of them are equally vulnerable next year, though.
The Cook Political Report ranks Chavez-DeRemer’s, D’Esposito’s and Lawler’s races as toss-ups. Kiggans’s and Bacon’s races lean Republican, while LaLota’s is considered “likely Republican.”
7 might be put off by Jordan’s approach to spending
One of the surprise votes against Jordan was House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Kay Granger (R-Tex.), a veteran lawmaker who first voted for Scalise on Tuesday.
She voted against Jordan again on Wednesday — and so did six other Republicans on her committee: Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart (Fla.), Jake Ellzey (Tex.), Tony Gonzales (Tex.), John Rutherford (Fla.), Mike Simpson (Idaho) and Womack. All of them represent safe districts except for Rutherford, whose district the Cook Political Report considers a toss-up because of an ongoing redistricting lawsuit.
While each appropriator has his or her own reasons for not backing Jordan — Diaz-Balart and Gonzales, for instance, are longtime Scalise allies — most of them are institutionalists who are likely to be put off by Jordan’s confrontational approach to cutting federal spending over the years.
8 belong to a bipartisan group of moderates
It’s tough to parse which Republicans consider themselves moderates, because some lawmakers with relatively moderate voting records don’t like the label.
But one rough proxy is membership in the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, the most moderate of the “five families” of the Republican conference.
Eight of the Republicans who voted against Jordan are members: Reps. Andrew R. Garbarino (R-N.Y.) and John James (R-Mich.) as well as Bacon, Chavez-DeRemer, D’Esposito, Gonzales, LaLota and Lawler.
Just one Republican who didn’t back Jordan, for comparison, is a member of the Freedom Caucus: Rep. Ken Buck (Colo.). (Jordan was the Freedom Caucus’s first chairman.)
5 belong to Republicans’ ‘governing wing’
The Republican Governance Group describes itself as supporting House Republicans’ “governing wing.” It’s another one of the five families. (The others are the Republican Main Street Caucus, the Republican Study Committee and the Freedom Caucus.)
Its members might not call themselves moderates, but they are more compromise-minded than much of the rest of the conference.
Five of them who aren’t in the Problem Solvers Caucus — Republicans can belong to more than one of the five families — also voted against Jordan: Reps. Carlos A. Giménez (Fla.), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (Iowa) and Pete Stauber (Minn.) as well as Diaz-Balart and Womack.
Just 4 opposed certifying the 2020 election
Two-thirds of Republicans in the House at the time objected to certifying that Biden won the 2020 election, but only four of the 22 who refused to back Jordan on Wednesday did so: Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), Diaz-Balart, Giménez and Rutherford.
Eleven other Jordan opponents — Reps. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) and Drew Ferguson (R-Ga.) as well as Bacon, Buck, Garbarino, Gonzales, Granger, Miller-Meeks, Simpson, Stauber and Womack — voted to certify Biden’s victory. Granger, who had covid at the time, did not vote, while Chavez-DeRemer, Ellzey, James, Kiggans, LaLota and Lawler weren’t in Congress at the time.
That’s significant because Jordan refused to say whether Donald Trump won the 2020 election when Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.) — who voted to certify the election — asked him about it in House Republicans’ closed-door meeting Monday, Buck told reporters afterward.
Jordan’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election in the lead-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol played “a big part” in Buck’s deliberations about whether to back Jordan, he said.
“Jim, at some point, if he’s going to lead this conference during a presidential election cycle, and particularly a presidential election year with primaries and caucuses around the country, is going to have to be strong and say, ‘Donald Trump didn’t win the election,’” Buck said Monday.
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