Thune rises to the top

It took John Thune just two ballots to get the job of the new majority leader of the Senate, replacing Mitch McConnell after eighteen years of rule. Attempts to challenge him by John Cornyn and Rick Scott fell short, with the final tally of the secret ballot (where just about everyone knows how everyone else is voting) led to a 29-24 vote victory. 

The South Dakotan is a longtime member of the Republican establishment, originally recruited by the George W. Bush team to challenge the supposedly unbeatable Tom Daschle, the Democratic minority leader at the time, in what became the most expensive campaign of 2004. Thune was viewed at the time as a rising star, but things move slowly in the Senate, and the Tea Party era shifted a lot of energy away from the traditional pro-business Republicanism he espoused. Now, he faces a Senate that represents a mix of aging Bush-era politicians, Tea Party populists grown weary from multiple losing battles in their third terms and Trumpian newcomers bent on pursuing the MAGA agenda, whatever it prioritizes week by week.

The relationship between McConnell and Trump was always testy and turned extremely sour — and McConnell’s relationship with the conservative and then Trumpian base could not have been more strained. Thune will attempt to avoid these obstacles by signaling he’s a more approachable leader and will listen to the will of the conference on a number of matters — but how much that will prove to be reality as opposed to lip service is still very much in doubt.

Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk and several other very-online allies of the president-elect advocated loudly for Scott’s candidacy, with Carlson even arguing that “two of the three candidates hate Trump and what he ran on.” But the campaign seemed largely confined to shouting on X rather than anything that would actually move senators into Scott’s column; his list of endorsers included the likes of fringe figures like Laura Loomer and Kelli Ward — not exactly a show of strength.

If Thune can run a Senate that breaks with some of McConnell’s more iron-fisted approaches, it would go a long way toward restoring the capacity of these different factions to work together. Republicans are as united as they’ve been in a long time following Trump’s sweeping victory, but there are always cracks that emerge, ones that critics of the pre-Trump GOP will be watching and waiting for under a new leader who will need to prove himself in the role.