Republicans Got Crushed at the Polls. Then the Senate GOP Re-Elected John Thune Anyway.

By Oreo Express | November 10, 2026

Photo: Senate Majority Leader John Thune, joined by Senate Republican leaders, speaks to reporters after being re-elected GOP leader at the U.S. Capitol on Nov. 10, 2026. Still from the press briefing video via Forbes Breaking News.

Republicans just got wiped out at the ballot box. Democrats took the Senate. And what did Senate Republicans do with their first meeting since the beating? They handed the keys right back to the same guy who was driving when the car went off the cliff.

On Tuesday, Senate Republicans re-elected John Thune as their leader by acclamation. No challenger. No ballots cast against him. The rest of the leadership team came back too: John Barrasso as whip and Tom Cotton as conference chair. Same team, same playbook, new minority.

Watch the Senate GOP press briefing from November 10, 2026:

Let's be clear about how bad last week was. Democrats flipped Republican-held Senate seats in Iowa, Kansas, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas. Texas. Democrat candidates are also leading in Alaska and Mississippi, which still haven't been called. When the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, Thune will lead a minority of no more than 46 senators.

That's not a bad night. That's a message. And the Senate GOP put it in the shredder.

A handful of senators actually tried to stop it. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin led a push to delay the leadership vote until the party could figure out what went wrong. According to the New York Post, Rick Scott, Mike Lee, Ted Budd, John Kennedy, Jim Banks and Dave McCormick backed the delay. The conference voted 31-15 to plow ahead anyway, and Johnson walked out.

"I simply won't participate in business as usual," Johnson wrote on X the night before. "An election defeat of this magnitude demands change."

He's right. Even Sen. Jim Justice, who said he didn't see an alternative to Thune, admitted the obvious: "There is a legitimate argument that if we lost as badly as we lost, why would we continue on with the same leadership?"

Good question, Senator. Nobody in that room had an answer except "because."

To be fair to Johnson, he told reporters this "has never been anything against John Thune." But the base has a long list of reasons to be furious with how the Senate was run. The SAVE America Act, the election integrity bill President Trump pushed over and over, never moved, and Thune made clear it didn't have the support in his own chamber to go anywhere. His tenure also saw two record-breaking government shutdowns. Plenty of conservatives watched the Senate dither while the clock ran out on a Republican majority they may not see again for years.

Thune's response after the vote? A statement promising to keep "holding the line against Democrats' efforts to enact their far-left, liberal agenda." Holding the line with 46 seats or fewer. We'll see how that goes. That agenda is coming. Democrats just took the Senate, and they will use that majority to push the same far-left program they always do. You don't stop that by rehiring the same leadership that just lost the chamber.

President Trump stayed out of it. Asked Monday whether Thune deserved to stay, he called him a "very fine man" and said, "that's really up to the senators. I like John Thune." He also said he wished the Senate had "produced" more. That last part says everything.

Compare that to the House. House Republicans got hit just as hard, and they made a change. They picked Jim Jordan, a fighter, over Steve Scalise to lead them in the minority. Democrats are promising two years of investigations and chaos. That's the Democrat agenda with a Senate majority behind it now. Jordan knows how to fight that. The House got the message. The Senate didn't.

This is the problem with the Republican establishment in one day. Voters fire them, and they hold a closed-door meeting in the Old Senate Chamber and rehire themselves. No accountability. No new strategy. Just a press release about "holding the line."

The lame-duck session is the last window Republicans have to confirm nominees and push the President's priorities before Democrats take over in January. Rick Scott said his support depended on what plan Thune laid out for those final weeks. Watch that closely. If the Senate GOP wastes the lame duck the way it wasted the last two years, the base won't forget it in 2028.

Republicans learned nothing after the midterm losses. Absolutely nothing.

Sources:

CBS News: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/john-thune-reelected-senate-republican-leader/

New York Post: https://nypost.com/2026/11/10/us-news/senate-republicans-reelect-john-thune-as-leader-after-revolt-led-by-ron-johnson/

NBC News: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/live-blog/hegseth-massie-impeachment-2026-election-congress-ukraine-live-updates-rcna608406/rcrd123656

The Hill: https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/6211797-john-thune-senate-leader-reelected/