John Thune announced Wednesday that he will run for Senate minority leader.
Minority leader. Let that word sit there. Two days ago he was majority leader, and the reason he isn’t anymore is the cycle he just presided over — the worst Republican midterm in better than sixty years. His response to that record is to seek a promotion to the demotion.
The institutionalist’s case for Thune was always that he knows the chamber, respects the rules, and gets things done quietly. Fine. What did the quiet get us?
It got us the death of the Save America Act. That bill — proof of citizenship to register to vote, the one Trump initiative Republicans could have delivered that voters across every demographic actually wanted — needed a floor vote and a leader willing to spend capital. Thune’s explanation was that roughly two dozen Republican senators wouldn’t vote to nuke the legislative filibuster for it.
Name them. That was the entire job. Majority leaders have committee chairman gavels to hand out and gavels to take away, committee assignments to grant and withhold, floor time to allocate, bills to park in the desk drawer. Mitch McConnell understood this and was hated for it, but he produced results. Harry Reid understood it. Chuck Schumer understands it. Thune apparently believed his role was to count votes and report the total, like a man reading a weather forecast rather than someone who could change the weather.
? @LarryOConnor RIPS John Thune and Senate Republicans for asking voters to keep their majority while giving them little to vote for:
“You’ve got the leadership right now. Do something with it.”
“Republican senators didn’t have a whole lot to show when they went back to their states. That’s just the truth.”
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) November 4, 2026
And now, the SAVE America Act is gone – likely for good. All of the sake of ‘preserving the institution of the Senate’ or something.
He is going to find out what his ‘principles’ bought him. Democrats will blow up the filibuster next session the moment it inconveniences them by ten minutes. Thune preserved a Senate tradition that his opponents regard as a speed bump, and he gave up the one piece of election-integrity law that might have outlived him in order to do it.
Then there was the DHS funding fight, dragged out through the fall, giving Republicans nothing to point to and Democrats something to run against. Larry O’Connor put it plainly: Republican senators went home to their states without much to show. That’s not a messaging problem. That’s an accurate description.
Thune’s own statement after the wipeout is worth reading for what it reveals. It is a list of things that prevented bad outcomes — stopped the largest tax hike, confirmed the Cabinet quickly, put judges on benches. Those are real. They are also, nearly without exception, things that required Republicans to show up and vote the way they were already going to vote. The affirmative agenda, the stuff requiring a leader to break something to get it, isn’t in the statement, because it isn’t there.
He also promises that Senate Republicans won’t stand idly by while the socialist wing unwinds everything.
Sir. Standing idly by is the thing you are best at. It is the documented core competency.
Twenty-two months from now there’s another election, and the party needs someone in that chair who treats procedure as a tool rather than a religion. There are several such senators. Thune is not among them, and his willingness to ask for the job again after this is the clearest evidence yet that he has no idea what just happened.
