LIVE: House Speaker Mike Johnson Holds News Conference on Election Results

Welcome back. It's good to be back here in the Capitol with all of our colleagues after a long and demanding campaign cycle, to be certain. Thank you, Jordan. The results were not what we hoped for and worked for, as you all know, but this is our system. I know without any shadow of a doubt that we left it all on the field. I personally raised well over half a billion dollars for this campaign cycle, and I logged enough miles campaigning for my colleagues to circle the globe over nine times. There's not much more that any of us could have done, and the people have spoken. Are we disappointed with the results? Of course we are, but we're never discouraged. That's not in our worldview. And I just want to say we made our case in plain and simple terms. The American people voted, and we're going to have a new crop of members take their seats at the start of the new year. This is our system. I was delighted to welcome all the new members on the House floor last night. Hakeem Jeffries and I met them, and we'll be doing a reception, a dinner for the new Republican freshman class, and we're very excited about this group. It's an extraordinary, talented group of people, patriots, who are willing to step forward and serve their country, and I could not be more proud of who they are. You're going to get to know them well, and you'll be duly impressed. The question facing Republicans right now is, how do we respond after getting knocked down? And the answer is to get right back up. We stand for enduring principles. We stand for and defend every day the founding principles of the greatest nation in the history of the world. And you all have heard me say over and over, it's objectively true, that we are the freest, most successful, most powerful, most benevolent nation that has ever been on the earth. But it is not guaranteed to us. Ronald Reagan used to remind us that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We do not pass it in the bloodstream, he said. It's got to be fought for and protected. And then it has to be taught and preserved and passed along to the next generation so that they too will have the same liberty and opportunity and security that we have known and sadly too many Americans have taken for granted. And so what we fight for is, you all have heard me refer to what I call the seven core principles of American conservatism, individual freedom and limited government and the rule of law and peace through strength and fiscal responsibility and free markets and human dignity. We believe in the principles that have endured, that have made us the longest lasting constitution, the envy of all governments and countries. Everyone wants to be like America, and there's a reason for that. And those principles are under assault. They're under great challenge. And I fear that in the days ahead, in the next two years of this Congress, they will be openly challenged here, perhaps even in the halls of Congress. And so we're entrusting that our team, even though we will be in the minority in the next Congress, will stand strong. and defend those principles and we look forward to doing it and and we will this is a moment of sober reflection for us as a party in terms of uh how we handle that uh we were so proud to run on our extraordinary record because as you all know and you and you you cataloged here every day in spite of having one of the smallest margins in the history of this institution and an unprecedented obstruction by democrats who brought shutdowns and the longest Longest shutdowns in U.S. history, 120 days to be complete. Even then, we delivered for the people and we brought it, you know, famously the largest tax cut for working families and middle class earners in American history. We had the biggest spending cut in U.S. history, $1.6 trillion, focusing on rooting out fraud and waste in government, making it work more efficiently and effectively for the people. We secured the border tight. That was the number one issue in 2024. And we took care of that problem. And we restored common sense. We did things like cutting burdensome, crushing regulations to allow job creators and entrepreneurs to do more of what they do and add more jobs and more opportunity for more Americans. And because of that, we're experiencing the lowest poverty rate in the history of those data points since they began in 1959. We have the lowest poverty rate in America right now. We also have the safest streets. We have the lowest violent crime rate in 126 years. Because of our policies and what we did, we've had the biggest decline. Prescription drug cost in over 60 years. You had a million jobs added in the private sector just in the last 19 months or so. And it goes on and on and on. Trump accounts for every newborn. You have the first ever nationwide school choice program codified into law. Over nearly, I think, 130 executive orders codified and signed into law. And so much more. And so we're going to double down on the things that worked when we do this reflection after an election, which both parties do. We're going to fix what doesn't, and we're going to spend the next two years fighting tooth and nail to put ourselves in the best possible position to win back Congress and preserve this grand experiment in self-governance. So I want to say the House Republican Conference is blessed with hardworking, thoughtful, talented members. They're dedicated. They're ready to stand in the gap and fight for these principles that will preserve. This grand experiment on our 250th anniversary right now that starts by setting a good example and finishing the 119th congress strong and we will do just that and I believe that America remains the last best hope on earth. That was Reagan used to remind us of that. He was quoting the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln. He said in dark days of the country that we are still the last best hope of man on earth. And we believe that we're going to continue to fight to ensure that that remains true with every fiber and R.B. So I'll take a couple questions. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There is a trend that we have seen in recent years where when the speaker loses power, they then leave Congress early. So right now, do you commit to serving out your term of the 120th Congress? Well, my plan is here, we're focused on finishing the 119th strong. We're going to do that. I'm still in charge here until early January, and we're going to do our duty. And after that, my commitment and my objective is to help my team ensure that the Republican Party has a very successful 120th Congress, and we'll see how all that develops, and that's my commitment. They know it. I decided not to run for a minority leader. Really, the only person in the modern era that decided to stick around and serve in the Speaker Emerita position was Nancy Pelosi. I just didn't feel, after a lot of prayer and reflection, I didn't feel like that was the best thing for me to do. We have a leadership election tomorrow, as you know, and we have two extraordinary guys that are running to lead the conference. I'm close to both of them, and we'll see how that shakes out. But I had, you know, three years, over three years now as Speaker of the House. Most of you all didn't know if I'd last three weeks, and that's okay. Nobody did. But we did it by a lot of patience and prayer and faith and with a great team. And I genuinely love my colleagues. I have enjoyed leading this group, and I'm really grateful we got so much done. But you could have been serving your polls. Look, with regard to the polls, that wasn't my opinion. I mean, everybody saw the polls were off. They were off all over the place. No one, none of you projected the final outcome. The polls were wildly inaccurate, and what I was reporting when I was on the campaign trail is reminding people just in the last month. You had two polling organizations, Wedgwood and SoCal Strategies, that were exposed for being completely fraudulent. They were literally making numbers up. They were publishing it as though it was authentic. It was going into the ecosystem, and it was being reported and calculated in all the major news outlets. And then you had groups like the Pew Research Center that came out and acknowledged. You can go Google it. You'll see. They said, our polling is inaccurate. We are oversampling Democrats. We are underrepresenting Republicans in the polls. And they lamented that Republicans don't participate in polls anymore. We saw that was true. I was traveling around the country. I mean, I went to over 40 states. I mean, hundreds and hundreds of campaign events. We would be in ballrooms and airplane hangars and big, big, you know, I'd have three, four hundred people and I'd say, raise your hand if you participated in a poll in the last six months. And there would be three hands out of 300. And I saw that all around the country, coast to coast. You had CNN reported the week before the election. It was on a Monday morning, they had a story, and they said that 15 out of the last 16 elections, the October generic ballot for Congress underrepresented Republicans by an average of four points. That was the average. What I was saying was not breaking news. I think everyone acknowledges the polling, there's a serious problem in the polling industry. It missed it yet again by a mile this time. And I just, we've all learned that, you know, you really can't put a lot of emphasis on that. Now, whether, the second question, whether leadership elections should be delayed. I mean, these were, these dates were published in advance and everybody knew it. I suppose if you're running for an office, you'd always want more time to do that. But the reason we can't change the date is because all this was set in stone, and we have all the new members here, and we're doing all the member orientation. And if we delayed leadership elections, that interferes in all of that. And I think the Democrat leadership elections is the following week, and they're going to do their caucus. And, you know, there's a lot of logistics that goes into all that, moving everybody around. So it's just not something that logistically we could do, but that's really all there is to it. Thank you. Do you want to speak on behalf of any of the candidates tomorrow, and do you want to see your leadership team, you obviously have some members of your current leadership team running again, do you want to see them continuing in a leadership position as Congress? Well, look, I've been speaker for three years, and what I tried to do and what I held to was a commitment to my colleagues when I came in. I saw myself as almost sort of a caretaker speaker because it was a tumultuous time, as you all remember, three years ago when I took over. And I committed to my colleagues to have. transparency in everything we do, to try to diffuse as much as possible the immense power of the Speaker's office because the Speaker has accumulated so much and I wanted to disseminate that more, spread it out among the members and have it be a member-driven organization. I committed to them integrity, no backroom deals, and part of that was that I would not go into steering meetings as we choose chairmen and other positions, that I would not go into any kind of election like that and put my thumb on the scale. And so I have been very consistent in that. I've not gone in and tried to dictate the outcome of elections because I want the body, I want the members to make those decisions themselves. So I have not done that. I'm not weighing in here on the leadership elections, and we'll see. May the best men and women win tomorrow, and I'm sure they will. We're blessed. We have an embarrassment of riches because we have extraordinary people who've stepped up. To lead in all these positions and tough, tough decisions ahead for everybody. So the last one. Yeah, last one. Well, let me let me say this. Okay. We've tabulated how many bills were actually passed because we lose track of it on any given day. In the 119th Congress, the House Republicans led in the majority. We have passed 1,000 measures of the House. Almost 700 of them are stacked up in the hopper in the Senate right now. Why? Because the Senate Democrats refused to move any legislation. They did not want to give the President and Republicans any more wins as we went into this election cycle. The question really is for the Senate. The House will work. We will stay here around the clock if necessary, push things over. We've got things pending over there right now, big things. The Farm Bill, the NDAA, you've got FISA, you have a reconciliation bill that's still sitting there. We have government funding issues. They didn't even pass a single appropriations bill in the Senate. It's been a great frustration to us. The House has been one of the most productive chambers, the most productive houses in the history of the institution, certainly in the modern era. But the Senate... Blocked it all. And so the question is, what are we going to be able to accomplish in this lame duck? We really have to ask the Senate because the House is willing and able to pass and continue to move legislation, but it hits a stone wall over there. So I'm hopeful that their leadership elections get resolved quickly and that they can move things. There's some good indication just here within the last hour, I'm told, they got the cloture to move forward on the permitting bill, which is a big, important thing. We have things like the college sports bills that are still pending. There's all sorts of really important initiatives, the Ratepayer Protection Act and all the rest. The question is for the Senate, not the House. We'll get our job done. We'll have the personnel here to get the legislation passed. And we certainly hope we can have a very, very productive lame duck and send much more to the president's desk before we have to turn the keys over in January. So we'll see how that goes. Thank you all. It's good to see you. Heads up. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. .