Representative Jim Jordan, the hard-line Republican from Ohio, was battling on Wednesday to pick up the votes to become speaker, a day after a bloc of 20 G.O.P. holdouts handed him a defeat that raised questions about his ability to win the gavel.
Mr. Jordan called for a second vote around 11 a.m. on Wednesday, hoping that he would be able to show he has the momentum on the House floor to win the majority he needs to be elected. A few Republicans who opposed him on Tuesday said they would relent and back Mr. Jordan on the second ballot.
But other mainstream Republicans vowed to continue opposing Mr. Jordan, skeptical of his history as a right-wing rabble-rouser and furious with the way he and his backers refused to line up behind Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the party’s No. 2, who first won the party’s speaker nomination last week only to withdraw because he lacked the hard-liners’ support.
As the infighting rages on, the House remains leaderless with wars raging in the Middle East and Ukraine, while Congress must act or watch the government shut down in mid-November.
The chaos in the House has renewed discussions to empower Representative Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina — the temporary speaker whose role is primarily to hold an election for a speaker — to carry out the chamber’s work until the conflict could be resolved. Should Mr. Jordan fail again, Republicans were discussing holding a vote to temporarily empower Mr. McHenry, possibly until Jan. 3, so the House could pass legislation even without an elected speaker.
Still, Mr. Jordan evinced confidence on Wednesday morning that he would prevail, telling reporters outside his office on Capitol Hill that the first vote — in which he drew 200 Republican votes — showed that he had been able to unite most of his party.
“I’ve proven I can get the most conservative members of the conference to the more moderate members of the conference; the whole cross-section,” Mr. Jordan said. “It’s important that we get the last few.”
But Mr. Jordan’s loss on Tuesday underscored the seemingly intractable divisions among Republicans as well as the near-impossible political math that led to the ouster of Kevin McCarthy as speaker two weeks ago and which have so far thwarted the party’s attempts to choose a successor.
Republicans control the House with only four votes to spare, which has allowed a small hard-right minority to flex its muscles repeatedly. The refusal of some mainstream party members to go along with Mr. Jordan was an unusual show of force from a group that more commonly seeks compromise and conciliation.
“I will not be pressured or intimidated,” vowed Representative Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida, an Appropriations Committee member who voted for Mr. Scalise on Tuesday. He added, “I voted for the guy who won the election.”
Mr. Jordan's allies unleashed a pressure campaign over the weekend on lawmakers who refused to back the Ohio Republican or were publicly undecided, in the hopes that a deluge of calls and messages on social media from conservative voters and media personalities would cow them into voting for Mr. Jordan. It won him a few votes, but appeared to have mostly backfired, instead infuriating the holdouts. In an effort to assuage them, Mr. Jordan wrote on social media on Tuesday night: “We must stop attacking each other and come together. There’s too much at stake.”
Many of the holdouts represent districts that President Biden won in 2020 who have tried to establish more moderate credentials and are keen to avoid associating themselves with a lawmakers as conservative as Mr. Jordan. Others are veteran members of the powerful Appropriations Committee, who are deeply distrustful of Mr. Jordan’s approach to spending and the types of cuts he has endorsed.
The chaos in the House has renewed discussions to empower Representative Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina — the temporary speaker whose role is primarily to hold an election for a speaker — to carry out the chamber’s work until the conflict could be resolved. Lawmakers have grown increasingly worried about the impact of operating without an elected speaker, including that Congress might not be able to act to support Israel as it wages war against Hamas.
Mr. Jordan told reporters on Wednesday morning that he supported holding a vote to temporarily empower Mr. McHenry so the House could function normally while Republicans try to elect a speaker. “People are talking about this resolution,” Mr. Jordan said. “I told leadership: ‘Call the question. Let’s find out.’”
Mr. Jordan, the combative co-founder of the House Freedom Caucus and a close ally of former President Donald J. Trump, fell 17 votes short on Tuesday. But the fact that 200 Republicans — including many of those more mainstream members — voted to give him the job second in line to the presidency showed how far the G.O.P. has lurched to the right. Mr. Jordan, 59, helped Mr. Trump try to overturn the 2020 election and has used his power in Congress to defend the former president.
Hearing from multiple lawmakers and staff that the resolution being discussed to empower McHenry as temporary speaker would run through Jan. 3. That would give the House time to deal with some of the most pressing crises, including a mid-November government shutdown, as well as funding for wars raging in Israel and Ukraine.
Representative Nick LaLota, Republican of New York, said going into the chamber that he’d vote again for Lee Zeldin for speaker. Zeldin, who won a few votes on Tuesday from New Yorkers opposing Jordan, is a fellow Long Islander, a former House member and a failed gubernatorial candidate.
LaLota reiterated that he needed “some darn good clarity” from Jordan on things Hurricane Sandy funding and keeping the government funded in order to potentially fall in line.
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Representative Tom Emmer, the Republican whip, dismissed the idea of empowering McHenry.
“A democratic coalition government is a nonstarter,” he tells reporters. “We’re going to get Jim done today.”
Jordan indicates he will support a vote on a proposal to empower McHenry as temporary speaker if he doesn’t prevail. He tells reporters: “People are talking about this resolution. I told leadership: ‘Call the question. Let’s find out.’”
That doesn’t mean he will stop his campaign for the gavel. If that proposal passes, it means Jordan will most likely try to grind it out as McHenry, in a temporary post, gets the House moving and business back to usual.
As he left the office of the Republican whip, one G.O.P. lawmaker who opposed Jordan, Representative Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida, tells reporters it’s increasingly unlikely Jordan will prevail as mainstream conservatives stand strong against him.
“I think it gets more and more difficult for him every day.”
“I think the strategy of trying to threaten people” hurt Jordan, he added. “That was an unfortunate strategy that has backfired dramatically.”
Kevin Williams and
Six members of the Champaign County Preservation Alliance were touring the picturesque downtown in Urbana, the central Ohio town where Representative Jim Jordan has made his mark as a state champion wrestler, a lawyer, and now a member of Congress.
As they watched his bid to finally end the tortured efforts to choose a new House speaker by seizing the gavel, the figure he casts nationally is much the uncompromising same as back home in the heavily gerrymandered, largely Republican district that snakes and loops through hundreds of miles of mainly small towns and farmland.
Amanda McDaniel, a member of the preservation alliance, is rooting for Jordan’s speaker bid — seeing in him the same principles she holds.
“He shares the same conservative values that I do,” said Ms. McDaniel, a 60-year-old retiree.
She said she was not troubled by criticism of Mr. Jordan, both as a politician and not: his failure to pass any legislation in the House as well as claims, which he denies, that he turned a blind eye to sexual abuse by a team physician as an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State.
Like other supporters, she is comfortable with the populist outsider that Mr. Jordan has been since his days in the Ohio General Assembly some three decades ago.
It is not an approach that builds consensus — a previous Republican speaker to brand him a “legislative terrorist” — even as he has steadily parlayed it into political success.
“I really hope he does not become speaker,” said Katie Porter, 30, another member of the alliance, who called him too divisive. Ms. Porter added that she disagreed with Mr. Jordan’s hard-line opposition to abortion and believed he now spends too much time in Washington, where he helped establish the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus.
Mr. Jordan embraced right-wing populism long before the Tea Party or Donald Trump made into a national force. In the early 2000s, Mr. Jordan drew grimaces from Republican leaders of the legislature for opposing a sales-tax increase that even party stalwarts agreed was needed to close a budget gap. But when budget problems prompted the state in 2003 to close the Lima Correctional Facility, a state prison in Mr. Jordan’s State Senate district, he railed against the resulting job losses — without mentioning that he had voted against the state budget that would have kept the prison open.
“Jim wasn’t known for consensus-building and legislation-passing,” said Brian Seaver, who inherited Mr. Jordan’s seat in the Ohio House of Representatives when Mr. Jordan ascended to the State Senate in 2000. “He wasn’t known as a collaborator. He was going to push his belief system, first and foremost.”
At the Urbana Brewing Company on Tuesday, patrons gave Mr. Jordan passing marks. Eric Forson, 50, said that when he wrote to his elected representatives during the 2013 government shutdown, Mr. Jordan was the only one who responded.
“He met me at a coffee shop in town, and we talked, I thought that was really nice,” Mr. Forson said.
Most people in Urbana have a Jim Jordan story, often suggesting that he isn’t as strident in person as he is in public. “If you interact with him in person, he’s not like he is on TV,” said Missy Esch, a 55-year-old retiree.
Ms. Esch and her husband, Mike, 57 were both hopeful that Mr. Jordan would drum up the votes needed to take the speaker role on Wednesday.
“If not him, who else? Mike Esch said. “They need to elect someone. As an American, this is embarrassing.”
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Jim Jordan is hoping to pick up votes at this 11 a.m. vote, but a key ally — Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus — is trying to roll back expectations. “Just so there’s no surprises: Jordan will likely have FEWER votes today than yesterday — as I expected,” Perry wrote just now on social media. “This is the fight — which Jim Jordan represents — to end the status quo, and it ain’t easy.”
Follow our live updates for the House speaker vote.
Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio lost a bid to become speaker on Tuesday after 20 Republicans refused to back him, prolonging a two-week fight that has paralyzed the chamber and underscored the deep Republican divisions in the House.
The group included vulnerable Republicans from districts that President Biden won in 2020 and congressional institutionalists worried that Mr. Jordan, if elected, would demand extreme spending cuts, including to the military, potentially forcing a government shutdown.
Still others were deeply loyal to former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who was ousted by a band of right-wing rebels mostly allied with Mr. Jordan, or simply stung by the poor treatment of Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana. Republicans had nominated Mr. Scalise as Mr. McCarthy’s successor, but he dropped out after he could not consolidate enough support to win the post on the floor.
Here’s a look at the lawmakers who opposed Mr. Jordan on the first vote.
Biden-district Republicans
There are 18 Republicans in the House who represent districts Mr. Biden won in the last presidential election. Six of them voted for candidates other than Mr. Jordan:
Don Bacon of Nebraska
Lori Chavez DeRemer of Oregon
Anthony D’Esposito of New York
Jen Kiggans of Virginia
Nick LaLota of New York
Mike Lawler of New York
Institutionalists
A group of seven Republicans who serve on the Appropriations Committee, which controls federal spending, expressed concern about Mr. Jordan’s anti-spending past. Some of them feared that he would demand across-the-board funding cuts, including to the military.
Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida
Jake Ellzey of Texas
Tony Gonzales of Texas
Kay Granger of Texas, the chairwoman of the appropriations panel.
John Rutherford of Florida
Mike Simpson of Idaho
Steve Womack of Arkansas
Mr. Womack said he voted against Mr. Jordan on principle because Mr. Scalise was “kneecapped before he could win over his opponents.”
McCarthy Loyalists
Doug LaMalfa of California
The northern Californian said he would vote for Mr. Jordan on the second ballot.
John James of Michigan
Andrew Garbarino of New York
Carlos Gimenez of Florida
Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania
Wild Cards
Victoria Spartz of Indiana
Ken Buck of Colorado — Mr. Buck said there were a number of reasons he did not back Mr. Jordan, but his main sticking point was the fact that Mr. Jordan played a lead role in the attempt to overturn President Biden’s victory in the 2020 election on the floor of the House. “I don’t want someone who was involved in the activities of January 6,” he told CNN after the vote.
House Democrats rallied behind Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York as their pick for speaker of the House on Tuesday, uniting — again — around a liberal lawyer and disciplined political tactician as the face of their opposition to the Republican majority.
The vote raised a question for many watching: Could Jeffries, now the House minority leader, actually become speaker? After all, he received 212 votes, more than the 200 that the Republican nominee, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, received.
But House rules require that the speaker receive a majority of the votes cast, something neither Mr. Jeffries nor Mr. Jordan got in the first round of voting, because 20 Republicans voted for other candidates. A plurality is not enough.
It is highly improbable that any Republicans would defect and vote for Mr. Jeffries, handing the speaker’s gavel to the leader of the opposing party. That would be viewed as political treason by Republican lawmakers and voters alike.
With Republicans having trouble settling on a speaker, Mr. Jeffries has pitched a coalition government that he describes as an “enlightened arrangement.” But the idea is a long shot. Earlier this week he said “informal conversations” had occurred but did not share details.
Mr. Jeffries said Democrats would join Republicans to elect a speaker only if they agreed to change House rules to allow “governance by consensus”; in other words, allowing bills with bipartisan support to come to the floor.
Right now, the Rules Committee, which determines what legislation gets a vote, is structured so that Republicans control what bills the House considers. That leaves Democratic priorities blocked.
Mr. Jeffries is the first Black politician to lead either party in Congress. And, at 53, he represents a generational change for House Democrats after two decades under Representative Nancy Pelosi of California.
A son of civil servants who cut his teeth as a litigator at a white-shoe law firm and at CBS, Mr. Jeffries rose swiftly through the ranks of Democratic politics in New York and then Washington. Since 2013, he has represented some of the nation’s iconic Black neighborhoods in Brooklyn. During the Trump presidency, he built a national profile as a sharp-tongued critic and impeachment prosecutor, while also working with Republicans to pass criminal justice reform legislation.
He faced no easy task when he became minority leader in January: taming an ideologically diverse Democratic caucus as he tried to blunt Republican attacks on the Biden administration and win back the majority in 2024. But he has largely accomplished the first goal, keeping Democrats united on important votes as the Republican caucus fell to pieces.
Annie Karni contributed reporting.