The surprising group of Republicans who kept Jim Jordan from becoming House speaker

There’s little that unites the 25 House Republicans who denied Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) the speakership on Friday.

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 of the Republicans who blocked Jordan from becoming speaker was anger with the way he and his team tried to browbeat them into supporting him.

Many of the 55 House Republicans who opposed Jordan in a closed-door meeting last week coordinated with each other to try to ensure that Jordan lost more support on each successive ballot.

The plan worked: Jordan lost 20 Republican votes on Tuesday, 22 on Wednesday and 25 on Friday. House Republicans then voted later on Friday by secret ballot behind closed doors to rescind the conference’s nomination from Jordan.

Here are five different ways of looking at the unusual coalition of Republicans who denied Jordan the speakership.

9 hail from districts Biden won in 2020

Most of the Republicans who voted against Jordan on Friday represent solidly Republican districts and had no reason to fear that supporting Jordan would threaten their reelections (although voting against Jordan could hurt them in their primaries).

But nine 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 three times for former Republican congressman Lee Zeldin instead of Jordan — by nearly 15 points. He also won the swing district in New York City’s northern suburbs held by Rep. Michael Lawler (R-N.Y.) — who voted for Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the ousted speaker, twice before switching his allegiance to Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) — by more than 10 points.

The three Republicans who voted against Jordan on Friday after supporting him on the first two ballots — Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), Thomas H. Kean (N.J.) and Marcus J. Molinaro (N.Y.) — all represent districts Biden won. So do Reps. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Ore.), Don Bacon (R-Neb.), Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.) and Jen A. Kiggans (R-Va.), who refused to back Jordan on all three ballots.

All of them are freshmen except Bacon and Fitzpatrick.

Not all of them are equally vulnerable next year, though.

The Cook Political Report ranks Chavez-DeRemer’s, D’Esposito’s, Kean’s, Lawler’s and Molinaro’s races as toss-ups. Kiggans’s and Bacon’s races lean Republican, while Fitzpatrick’s and LaLota’s are considered “likely Republican.”

7 might dislike 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 refused to support him on all three ballots.

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 Steve Womack (Ark.). All of them represent safe districts except for Rutherford, whose district the Cook Political Report considers a toss-up because of the uncertainty created by an ongoing redistricting lawsuit.

While each appropriator had his or her own reasons for not backing Jordan — Diaz-Balart and Gonzales, for instance, are longtime allies of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), who was forced to drop out of the speaker race after some of Jordan’s allies wouldn’t support him — most of them are institutionalists who were likely put off by Jordan’s confrontational approach to cutting federal spending over the years.

11 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.

Nearly half of the Republicans who voted against Jordan on Friday are members: Reps. Andrew R. Garbarino (R-N.Y.) and John James (R-Mich.) as well as Bacon, Chavez-DeRemer, D’Esposito, Fitzpatrick, Gonzales, Kean, LaLota, Lawler and Molinaro.

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 on Friday: 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 25 who refused to back Jordan on Friday did so: Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), Diaz-Balart, Giménez and Rutherford.

A dozen other Jordan opponents — Reps. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) and Drew Ferguson (R-Ga.), as well as Bacon, Buck, Fitzpatrick, 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, Kean, Kiggans, LaLota, Lawler and Molinaro weren’t in Congress.

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 him, 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.