House Speaker Mike Johnson draws on faith as he fights to hold the Republican majority

Speaker Mike Johnson says he believes Republicans will hold on to their House majority on Election Day and defy a surge of Democratic momentum in the final stretch of the midterm campaign

BANGOR, Maine -- Ever the optimist, Speaker Mike Johnson said he believes Republicans will hold on to their U.S. House majority, defying a surge of Democratic momentum in the final stretch of the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.

It's the crowds he says he’s seeing as he crosses the country campaigning for GOP candidates. The caliber of recruits and incumbents he calls workhorses, not show horses. And the nearly half a billion he has raised for House Republicans.

“We run to win, and that’s biblical: You run to win," he told The Associated Press during a campaign stop in Maine.

The speaker of the House is one of the most consequential elected officials in the United States, second in line of succession to the president. While Johnson quipped to Fox News recently that he may return to his hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana, to start a lawn care business if Republicans lose power on Nov. 3, he fully expects to buck an American midterm tradition that often sees the president’s party dumped in Congress.

It can be said that Johnson, who has drawn so close to President Donald Trump that he routinely fields 1 a.m. calls — they spoke the night before as Trump rallied in Alaska — walks on the sunny side of the street. That's despite voter frustration over high prices and the Iran war , and his own challenge of leading one of narrowest House majorities in modern times.

In his three years as speaker, Johnson has pushed past the doubters and naysayers, holding his thread-thin GOP majority together to deliver Trump's agenda. He notably led passage of the big tax breaks and social service cuts bill. Most days he does not have a single vote to spare.

“So many times everybody had written off, there was no way he was going to be able to pull off a particular vote,” said Republican Rep. Mark Harris of North Carolina, who joined the speaker on the campaign swing. “Yet he always seems to pull out the win in the end."

In the interview, Johnson did not speak brashly about expanding the House majority on Election Day, as he has in the past. But on track to visit more than 20 states and 40 congressional districts though November, he said the political mood reminds him of the 2024 election that swept Republicans to control of Congress and the White House.

“It’s not going to be a giant majority,” he said. “But I genuinely believe that we will have a working majority.”

Johnson first fell into the speaker’s job almost by accident , a desperate choice by his GOP colleagues after a contingent of renegade Republicans ousted his predecessor, -then-Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., in 2023.

Johnson had been a lower-level member of House leadership, but distinguished himself before the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by organizing support for Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud in the election that he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

In the time since, Johnson has secured proximity to Trump's power.