House Republicans’ middle is disappearing

By Sarah Ferris, Manu Raju, CNN

(CNN) — In the painful days after last week’s election disaster, Dave Joyce, a senior Republican from Ohio, delivered a warning to fellow Rep. Jim Jordan as the conservative firebrand sought his vote for party leader.

“We can’t double down on stupid,” Joyce recalled telling both Jordan and his unsuccessful challenger, Rep. Steve Scalise, ahead of this week’s leadership race.

Joyce is far from an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump. But he — and some like him — are cautioning that they do not want to see their party further embrace the MAGA agenda after one of the party’s biggest wipeouts in decades.

“What happened to us was a message, clear and very loud, that people don’t like the way we’re been moving in the wrong direction,” Joyce told CNN. “You can’t lie to people about the things that they feel. They feel it at the pump. They feel it at the grocery store. They feel it in their kids’ education, in the potential for losing their jobs to AI. And we haven’t done anything to address those.”

Joyce and other centrist Republicans are urging GOP leaders to forgo scorched-earth attacks on Democrats in place of a real agenda. But in the early, post-election soul-searching, they are in the clear minority of a party that last week elected its most conservative class of members yet.

Just days after the election, Republicans chose Jordan, Trump’s prized combatant, to lead them in the new Congress in a landslide vote against establishment-backed Scalise. Then, within hours, all but one Republican blocked a vote that would have triggered an impeachment effort against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth under fierce pressure from the White House.

Jordan allies argue he’s more than a rubber stamp for any president and note he has won the support of several more moderate Republicans. Still, lawmakers like Joyce and Rep. Mike Simpson represent the disappearing middle of a decimated Republican Party that, even days after its election drubbing, is showing no daylight between themselves and Trump.

“I think what the American people want to see is us working together to resolve problems, not when we bring up crazy shit — or crazy bills opposing stuff. We do need to address the high energy crisis and cost of living, housing,” Simpson, a Republican from Idaho, said. “Like I try to tell people, the Democrats are not the enemy. They are our opposition.”

Leaders of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that Republicans lost because they didn’t go far enough in their agenda, such as a border crackdown bill or Trump’s marquee voting bill that languished in the Senate.

“Nobody listened to us,” Rep. Scott Perry, a GOP hardliner who lost a House battleground seat in Pennsylvania, declared. “It’s not because we didn’t do enough liberal things that we had the result last Tuesday. It’s because we didn’t deliver on the things that we told America we were going to do.”

Many of those ultraconservative Republicans are now pushing for a last-gasp policy package in the final weeks that would codify some of Trump’s hardline border policies, as well as “at least $1 trillion” in spending cuts from government programs.

The future of the GOP is far from settled, with a nasty 2028 presidential primary cycle just ahead. But in a sign of how the party plans to handle Trump’s remaining two years in power, almost no one is publicly blaming the president in their election loss.

“If you look at our conference; we’re a significantly more conservative conference than what we were coming into this,” Rep. Brian Mast of Florida, a strong Jordan ally, told CNN when asked about the direction the party would take post-election.

Asked if he believed Republicans needed to moderate their political stances to win back voters next cycle, Mast replied: “Our moderation is this: the Constitution is our moderation. The Constitution should pull people in from the left and the right, and I think we do a better job of being guided by the Constitution on the right, and that will be our moderation.”

Most of the now-ousted members belonged to groups like the centrist Republican Governance Group, which lost nearly half of its roughly 50 members. Another, the Problem Solvers Caucus, lost 13 of its 19 GOP members, including its GOP co-leader.

Put another way: Of the 120 Republicans who refused to challenge the 2020 election results as Trump demanded, only about two dozen remain.

Rep. Nick LaLota, a Long Island Republican, is another centrist eager to work with Democrats next year on issues like immigration reform.

Asked what lessons Trump should take away from the election, LaLota said he agreed with Trump’s own post-election reflections in a recent “60 Minutes” interview that his deportation policy might have been “too tough” and that it was “bad messaging, maybe by me.”

LaLota, who is seeking to take over the mantle of the Republican Governance Group from Joyce, said his own tactics wouldn’t change.

“I’ll fight for my common-sense conservative values. But I’m also willing to negotiate and compromise – I don’t view those as bad words,” he said.

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CNN’s Alison Main and Ellis Kim contributed to this report.