Raising the heat, a potential rival for speaker, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, leaped to endorse Mr. Trump for the 2024 nomination, writing, “It is time for Republicans to unite around the most popular Republican in America.”
Who Will Control Congress? Here’s When We’ll Know.
Much remains uncertain. For the second Election Day in a row, election night ended without a clear winner. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, takes a look at the state of the races for the House and Senate, and when we might know the outcome:
Even in the Senate, where control hangs in the balance, Senators Rick Scott of Florida, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Mike Lee of Utah circulated a letter asking for a delay in leadership elections, amid calls from the former president to depose Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky as the Republican leader.
“We are all disappointed that a red wave failed to materialize, and there are multiple reasons it did not,” they wrote. “We need to have serious discussions within our conference as to why and what we can do to improve our chances in 2024.”
Senator Marco Rubio, handily re-elected to his seat in Florida, seconded the call. “We need to make sure that those who want to lead us are genuinely committed to fighting for the priorities & values of the working Americans (of every background) who gave us big wins in states like #Florida,” he wrote on Twitter, quickly receiving the backing of Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming.
Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, the party’s presidential nominee in 2012, released his own prescriptions for the future, which strongly hinted that Republican losses reflected the party’s embrace of rage and recrimination over policy proposals. He counseled Republicans to work with Democrats in the coming Congress to slow inflation by curtailing spending on Medicare and Social Security, to open broader pathways to legal immigration, and to address climate change globally while increasing domestic energy production.
For many Republicans in today’s party, he acknowledged, that would be the road “less traveled.”
“The more tempting and historically more frequented road would be to pursue pointless investigations, messaging bills, threats and government shutdowns,” he wrote.
Representative Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican exiled by her party for her resolute opposition to Mr. Trump, called the midterm results “a clear victory for Team Normal,” but speaking on Friday afternoon at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, she signaled that Tuesday’s vote was “a step in the right direction.”