Here's what you need to know about new Speaker Johnson

Since his elevation last week, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about Rep. Mike Johnson, the new Speaker of the House.

So, I figured I’d write out a quick Sunday post telling you what you need to know about the new Speaker.

First and foremost, the major effect of Johnson’s elevation to the Speakership is that political commentators and late night comedy hosts now have basically unlimited opportunities to make dick jokes whenever discussing politics.

This will, of course, not be the first time this has happened.

If my friend Ed is reading this, he will remember many years ago when he bought a biography of Lyndon Johnson, I think only 50 percent because he was actually interested in Lyndon Johnson and the other 50 percent because it afforded him multiple chances a day to make comments like “I’m really looking forward to spending some quality time with my Johnson on my commute home to Bedfordshire” or “God, I really cannot get over how thick my Johnson is, it’s going to take a lot of time to properly finish my Johnson off.” Thanks, Ed. You provided me with a lot of laughs during that period.

In 2016, the Republicans for Johnson-Weld group that I helped lead did what is probably the world’s lowest budget (and, obviously, the world’s most highbrow) web video focused entirely on Johnson jokes.

This is not something we pushed out hard (ha ha ha) (less funny: No budget), but it was something we used to try to get the attention of some younger voters in a couple of target states. Ad-making is most definitely not what I do (one day I’ll do a post about how that line of work is really incompatible with having OCD triggered by reviewing multiple text edits). But this was kind of fun, for something that took about 15 minutes total of my time to record, edit, upload and then get linked on a bigger politics site appealing to millennial and Gen Z Republican voters.

Anyway, I look forward to having a Speaker whose mere existence will give rise to many such jokes in the future, since I have the same approximate sense of humor and maturity as a fifteen year-old boy.

Second, and this is more important: The GOP deciding to elevate this guy might be one of the only things we’re going to do this cycle to throw a wrench in Democrats’ gears (“spanner in the works,” for the Brits reading this).

While Democrats had voluminous opposition research files sitting around on Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan, and Tom Emmer, it’s been manifestly obvious that Democrats were not looking at Johnson at all and their opposition research operation has had to kick into overdrive to figure out who the hell he is and how the hell to attack him. This feels a tad like how, in 2008 when I was at the RNC, only six of us out of fifty-some staffers between Comms, e-Campaign (don’t laugh, that’s what we called it then!) and Research thought Obama would be the nominee as of the night before the Iowa caucuses. (Quick plug for Mair Strategies: A full 1/3 of the “Obama will be the nominee” team work at this firm!). Obama won and suddenly, the other 44+ staffers were like “shit, we know nothing about this dude except he has a funny-sounding name and he’s from Hawaii but he doesn’t represent Hawaii and he doesn’t appear to be ethnically Hawaiian.”

Democrats are now a little behind the 8-ball, and they are scrambling to figure out how to attack this guy. Mostly what they’ve come up with so far as that this guy looks like a pretty hard-right dude in the mold of a Ted Cruz (he does).

Like Cruz, and (most) hardcore conservatives, Johnson threw his lot in with Trump especially in 2020, but he’s not really MAGA— he’s more hardcore Tea Party from circa 2010 or 2014. That means Democrats can’t attack him and do it effectively if they try to make him look like Trump; it also means they might be able to attack him even more effectively, including with a lot of the voters who propelled Trump to the nomination in 2016 because those people are much more moderate on social and economic policy than Ted Cruz; those same voters are also less hawkish on foreign policy. I say this as a donor to Ted Cruz: If you think people hate Donald Trump, you need to check out the unfavorables on Cruz and people who look like him. This is what Democrats will try to define Johnson as.

But Democrats are going to have to spend money doing this. Johnson is not a known quantity even to right-of-center media, or anything approaching a household name— except perhaps among Louisiana Republicans who are diehard political junkies. In a cycle when Republicans are likely going to be working with a huge cash disadvantage thanks to about 102 percent of Trump’s donations going straight into his lawyers’ pockets, this is a small boost to the GOP. It’s also nice that we dodged the bullet of Jordan as Speaker, who would have been cyanide for fundraising and probably would have resulted in a drain on NRCC coffers to cover certain Jim Jordan-specific expenses.

Expect to start seeing ads about Johnson’s Christian conservative views, if you are a non-white voter (or a rich, white, progressive “woke” voter) about his “soft replacement theory” views, and probably about how he wants to cut Social Security and Medicare (even where egregiously false, those are always fan favorites for Democrats to roll out, and they do work). You’ll also get a dash of “he voted to overturn the 2020 election,” but that attack won’t be backed up nearly as well as it would have been with Jordan as Speaker.

Third, and I think this is really interesting: The House GOP is now being run by a pair of Louisianans. This copycats what Democrats previously did when they were running the House via three (effective) Marylanders.

In the GOP case, we have Johnson and Scalise. In the old Democratic case, we had Nancy Pelosi (daughter of a big time Baltimore pol, to which she has always attributed her ability to count votes), Steny Hoyer, and for awhile, Chris Van Hollen, too.

This probably will mean something in terms of the philosophical direction of the House and (possibly) the geographic concerns that come to bear on policy (I expect energy is going to emerge as a much bigger priority issue, for example).

It might also mean more comfort with rough-and-tough politics. Louisiana isn’t, say, Utah, known for nicey-nice people where Mike Lee being somewhat critical of Evan McMullin in a Senate debate, or Mitt Romney having a bad day at the office and screaming “GOLLYGEEWILLAKERS!” at the refrigerator as he downs a gallon of chocolate milk at midnight, is about as mean as it will ever get.

To make it in Louisiana politics, you have to be capable of shivving people, and you also have to be capable of navigating a fairly corrupt political scene— largely the same as Maryland for Democratic politicians. We’ll see what this means in practice, going forward. One thing it currently means is that just like Pelosi could count votes and seemed very attuned to how normal, swing voters respond to ethics issues and had to balance both of those things at various points, we’re probably going to see some conflicts between not wanting to live up to Louisiana stereotypes and things like keeping George Santos around because the House GOP has no margin for error.

But really, let’s focus on what’s important, here: More opportunities for dick jokes.

Don’t ever let me hear you say the GOP has done nothing for you…