Speaker Johnson concedes House majority in election victory speech

This was a team effort, it really was. Now look, I just want to tell you what we faced, some real odds here, okay? From the first day of this election, we knew that to keep the House and sustain our majority, we would have to defy more than a century of midterm history, okay? It's only happened twice in 90 years that a sitting president has picked up or held seats for his party in that first two-year cycle, and there's a lot of reasons for it. It's very, very difficult to overcome, and it looks like history will be kept tonight. All right. We went on offense early, we launched one of the most dynamic political operations in the history of Congress, I promise you that. We made our case in terms of language of common sense. We said this is a contrast election between common sense and crazy, and I will maintain that that is exactly what it was. And I said from day one that I was going to leave everything on the field in this endeavor, and I'm proud to say that's exactly what we did. They gave me the stats tonight. In this two-year cycle, I led... Almost 500 individual campaign events across 36 states. I broke every fundraising record there's ever been, by God's grace, and because of the help of a lot of people in this room, we raised more than $526 million direct and super PAC funds for this cycle. So listen to this, and I'm telling you, because you're friends and family, and you've all been a big part of this, and since becoming Speaker, I can't believe what I'm about to tell you, I've raised more than $870 million, which makes me, I think, the largest fundraiser in the history of the Republican Party, except for Donald J. Trump. You're up. And I've also traveled, listen to this, I've also traveled enough campaign miles to circle the globe more than 14 times, okay? I know, right? I know. Oh! I adopted a long time ago the motto of John Quincy Adams, one of our great, the sixth president, one of our great leaders in the history. And he said, duty is ours, results are God's. And that's a family motto of all of ours, and we take it seriously. And I've tried my best every single day as speaker and as the campaign leader here to fulfill our duty. And I know before the Lord we have an honest heart for that. Now, look, we're going to continue to watch the results as they come in across the country tonight. It'll be a long night. You know, they haven't even closed the polls in some states out there in the West. We have a giant war room behind you. You don't even know what's going on. There's like 20 people in there with screens and metrics. It looks like the situation room. We're watching every race. I'm reaching out to all my candidates and incumbents and encouraging them, the ones that won, and encouraging the ones that didn't tonight. And that's just part of the deal. But they've all worked so hard. They've overcome expectations, so many of them. They all left it all in the field and ran through the tape.