After a few Republicans were pushing to delay leadership elections in the GOP Senate, South Dakota Senator John Thune won the uncontested vote on Tuesday to become Minority Leader in a chamber facing potentially a 56-seat Democrat majority.
During several hours of contentious back and forth behind closed doors, primarily from Ron Johnson, Thune seemed to silence the critics.
Darline Graham, who lost her temporary Senate seat to Annie Andrews, also voiced her displeasure with Thune, arguing she had nothing to run on with affordability issues drowning her chances.
From Punchbowl News:
“There’s a lot of blamecasting, and people want accountability, and we should have to answer the hard questions,” Thune told us in an exclusive interview Tuesday night. “But I also felt like there was kind of this — I don’t want to say scapegoating — but my question was… ‘Okay, tell me, what would you have done differently?’”
Thune added there was no significant response, and Ron Johnson later suggested that Thune had been “unfairly attacked” by the MAGA base.
Thune admitted that independent voters cast the losing ballots on issues that proved fatal, including tariffs, Iran, and corruption.
Thune didn’t cross the line to criticize Trump himself, but said there were just too many issues in this year’s races that were “outside of our candidates’ control,” from the Iran war to tariffs, which Trump initiated without Congress.
Thune, 65, will have to decide whether to run again for another term in 2028, saying today it’s “his expectation.”
“I hope we have a good experience… trying to get back in the majority. And if it looks like that’s on the horizon, then that would be a factor,” Thune added. “Now, maybe it takes a while.”