Potential replacements for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell didn’t immediately step up after the Kentucky lawmaker made the surprise announcement that he’d be stepping away from his GOP leadership position.
But, that doesn’t mean the GOP conference is concerned about whether they’ll be able to select a quality replacement for McConnell come November.
On Tuesday, one of the prospective leading candidates to replace McConnell — Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming — said he was focused on winning the race for the number two Republican in Congress’ upper chamber, as the whip.
In speaking to Fox News Digital, Barrasso said that “time will tell” how many Republicans might join the race to replace McConnell, who has served as the leader of the GOP in the Senate for a while now.
One person who’s definitely running the position is Senator John Cornyn of Texas. A day after McConnell surprisingly announced his resignation, Cornyn said in a statement:
“I am asking my Republican colleagues to give me the opportunity to succeed Leader McConnell.”
Another candidate is Senator John Thune of South Dakota, who serves as the Republican whip. He said on Monday that he was hoping to lead the Republican conference going forward.
As he told Keloland.com:
“I hope to be [the GOP leader], and I’m going to do everything I can to convince my colleagues.”
For his part, McConnell declined to say who he might like to be his successor in the position. Other leading Republicans in the Senate, such as Thom Tillis of North Carolina, believe there are already “two excellent candidates” for the position.
As such, he said:
“We’re not going to make a bad decision.”
Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan agreed, saying:
“We’ve got a great group of senators who are running for these leadership positions.”
Another senator who could become a candidate is Rick Scott of Florida. A major reason for that speculation is that Scott tried to unseat McConnell back in 2022 and has been able to gain support from some of the anti-establishment GOPers in the Senate.
However, it seemed that he put water on the possibility of him running for the position when he issued a statement after McConnell made his announcement in which he said:
“This is an opportunity to refocus our efforts on solving the significant challenges facing our country and actually reflect the aspirations of voters.”
He also confirmed that, on Monday, he met with presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump to talk about him potentially making a bid for the position. As Scott said of that meeting:
“I talked to him about the fact that I might run for leader, and if I did that, we would have the opportunity together to change the direction of this country for the better.”
How the GOP handles the replacement of McConnell could go a long way in saying how stable the party as a whole is, especially considering the debacle that the Republican Party has been through with leadership in the House over the last year.
