Senate Republicans kept John Thune as their leader on November 10 even though 15 of them, by The Hill’s count, voted to delay the decision. The vote settles who will lead the party into the minority. It also caps a year in which the SAVE America Act failed in the Senate four times and Thune would not change the filibuster rules to pass it.
Sen. John Thune of South Dakota will lead Senate Republicans into the 120th Congress. The conference re-elected him “by acclamation” on Tuesday, November 10, a Senate GOP aide told The Hill. The vote came at the end of an all-day meeting in the Old Senate Chamber that was supposed to take a few hours. Nobody ran against him. The rest of the leadership team also kept their posts: Whip John Barrasso of Wyoming, Conference Chair Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Vice Chair James Lankford of Oklahoma and Policy Committee Chair Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio was chosen to run the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Roll Call reported.
The vote was less smooth than that list makes it sound. Fifteen Republican senators voted to put off Thune’s re-election, The Hill reported, which is about a third of the next Senate GOP conference. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin led the effort and walked out of the room once voting began, the Associated Press reported. Republicans lost at least seven Senate seats on November 3. Democrats will control both chambers when the new Congress meets in January.
What most coverage leaves out
Most reports described a disappointed party that chose stability. That is accurate as far as it goes. What it skips is what the rebels actually wanted. They had no rival candidate. “That’s part of our problem, who would want the job?” Johnson told reporters. Their demand was for a plan for the lame-duck session, and the SAVE America Act sat near the top of it.
According to The Hill, Johnson, Steering Committee Chair Rick Scott of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah pressed Thune to bring a budget reconciliation package to the floor before January and use it to carry the SAVE America Act. Reconciliation bills need only a simple majority. Scott’s letter to colleagues listed passing the bill among the conference’s priorities for the lame duck, Roll Call reported. The resolution the conference adopted promised to use the “54 days” left with a Republican majority to confirm nominees, pass core priorities and try to pass a reconciliation bill before January 3.
Thune agreed to “make every effort” to advance a budget resolution and a reconciliation bill to fund the Defense Department, GOP sources told The Hill. In the accounts RSN reviewed, he made no public promise to put the SAVE America Act into that bill.
Background: what the SAVE America Act does
SAVE stands for Safeguard American Voter Eligibility. The bill would require people to show documents proving U.S. citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, when they register to vote in federal elections. It would require photo ID to cast a ballot. And it would make every state send its voter list to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) verification tool, NPR reported. RSN has covered problems with that DHS database in a separate court case.
An earlier version, the SAVE Act (H.R. 22), passed the House 220 to 208 in April 2025. The broader SAVE America Act passed the House 218 to 213 on February 11, 2026. Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas was the only Democrat to vote for it. In the Senate, the bill was brought up through the House message on S. 1383, a procedural vehicle that let leaders skip committee.
President Trump called it his top priority. “Congress should unite and enact this common-sense, country-saving legislation right now and it should be before anything else happens,” he said in his State of the Union address, as quoted by NPR.
The record: four failed Senate votes
Critics sometimes say Thune never let the SAVE Act come to a vote. Senate floor records show it did get votes, and each one failed. The official Senate Daily Press floor log and contemporary reporting show the following:
- March 26, 2026. A motion to end debate (cloture) on Sen. Jon Husted’s photo-ID amendment to the SAVE America Act vehicle failed 53 to 47. Sixty votes were needed. (Senate Daily Press, March 26)
- June 4, 2026. During the overnight “vote-a-rama” on the immigration enforcement reconciliation bill (S. 2), Sen. Lindsey Graham offered the SAVE Act of 2026 as an amendment. The motion to waive the Budget Act for it failed 48 to 50. Four Republicans voted no: Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski and Thom Tillis. (Senate Daily Press, June 4)
- Early June 5, 2026. A narrower amendment from Sen. Mike Lee, “to ensure only U.S. citizens vote in Federal elections and to require voters to provide voter ID,” failed 50 to 49 on the same 60-vote waiver test. McConnell, Murkowski and Tillis voted no. (Same source)
- August 8, 2026. Before the August recess, Republicans gave up on a reconciliation bill that included SAVE America provisions and held a vote on a stand-alone Husted voter-ID measure instead. It fell eight votes short, The Daily Signal reported. “Tragically, the Save America vote on the voter ID component failed,” Lee said. “Not a single Democrat joined us.”
Some outlets count more votes than this, depending on whether procedural motions are included. RSN lists only the four we could tie to a floor log or a named report.
Deep dive: the filibuster decision
Some Republicans, Lee among them, wanted to abolish the legislative filibuster or get around it with a “talking filibuster” that would force Democrats to hold the floor, so the bill could pass with a simple majority. Thune refused, and that refusal “frustrated Trump and enraged some in the president’s political base,” the AP wrote this week.
Thune explained his reasoning to reporters. “It’s about the votes. It’s about the math,” he said, as NPR reported in June. “And I’m — for better or worse — I’m the one who has to be the clear-eyed realist about what we can achieve here.”
The June roll calls back up part of that argument. RSN analysis: The Graham amendment lost 48 to 50, so it would have failed even on a simple-majority vote, because four Republicans voted no. The narrower Lee amendment drew 50 votes to 49, with Sen. Michael Bennet not voting, which would have been enough on a simple-majority vote. Those were Budget Act waiver votes inside reconciliation, a separate 60-vote rule that ending the filibuster would not have removed. Still, the numbers show how thin the Republican margin was on the substance of the bill, apart from procedure.
Immigration enforcement: where Thune delivered
The SAVE Act fight has drawn more attention than Thune’s record on enforcement money. The same overnight session that killed the Graham amendment ended with the Senate passing S. 2, the fiscal 2026 reconciliation bill, by 52 to 47 at 4:51 a.m. on June 5. No Democrat voted for it, and Murkowski was the only Republican to vote no. The bill would give DHS about $70 billion more for immigration enforcement, nearly all of it for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol, to fund the deportation effort for the next three years, CNBC reported.
Thune used reconciliation, the same tool conservatives now want for the SAVE Act, to move that money through the Senate without Democratic votes. The difference is that spending fits easily under the Senate’s rules for reconciliation bills, which are largely limited to spending and revenue. Rules for voter registration are a harder fit, as the failed 60-vote waivers in June showed.
Cassidy and Cornyn: the primaries before the general
Two senior Republican senators had already lost their bids for renomination before November. Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana finished third in Louisiana’s newly closed Republican primary on May 16, according to the AP, as reported by NPR. Trump-endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow and state Treasurer John Fleming moved on to a June 27 runoff. Cassidy, one of seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump in 2021, conceded: “You don’t pout, you don’t whine, you don’t claim that the election was stolen.”
Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who ran against Thune for leader in 2024, lost the May 26 runoff to Attorney General Ken Paxton, roughly 64 percent to 36 percent in unofficial returns. Paxton then lost the general election to Democrat James Talarico. On the day before the leadership vote, Cornyn blamed voter anger over “corruption” in part. “Corruption was an issue not only at the local level or the state level but also at the national level, too,” he told reporters, according to The Hill.
RSN analysis: Both primaries removed senators Trump wanted gone. In Texas, the challenger who beat the incumbent then lost the seat to a Democrat. That tension, between a base that wants confrontation and a Senate map that rewards caution, is the same one that ran through Tuesday’s leadership meeting.
The case for and against Thune
His critics. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who backed the delay, said: “I just think that we’ve got a lot of things that we’ve got to think through, and I think that to just rush into this and just ratify all of the same leadership, what message does that send?” He added: “If you don’t think after losing seven Senate seats minimum that we need to change course, I don’t know what planet you’re on.” Scott said: “We need a plan to get the Republican agenda done.” Sen. Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania, a moderate, also favored waiting, The Hill reported.
His defenders. Lankford said there was “widespread support” for Thune and called the post “a pretty complicated role to be able to manage.” He added: “No one wants that job.” Sen. Jim Justice of West Virginia said current leadership “didn’t cause this problem to happen.” Thune pointed to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and asked colleagues, “what would you have me do differently?” He blamed the losses on things “out of our control”: “If you believe the exit polls, it was the war, it was the economy, it was inflation, it was fuel prices, and I think that’s what the election was about.” Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky made a similar point to Roll Call, citing gas prices, the war in Iran and the cost of living.
Opponents of the bill. Democrats and voting-rights groups say the SAVE America Act would block eligible citizens who cannot easily get the documents it requires. NPR cited research finding that millions of Americans lack easy access to those documents, and experts it quoted say noncitizen voting has been found only in very small numbers. Supporters answer that proof of citizenship at registration is a basic safeguard, an argument RSN published in 2016 in a piece on registration fraud in Virginia and Colorado. Neither claim settles how many illegal ballots, if any, were cast in 2026.
What it means next
RSN analysis: Unless a reconciliation bill passes before January 3, the SAVE America Act is finished for this Congress. From January, Democrats will set the Senate agenda, and the filibuster Thune refused to give up will become the minority’s main defense against Democratic bills. That includes any federal elections overhaul of the kind Democrats tried in 2021 and 2022. Republicans who were angry that Thune protected the 60-vote rule may soon find it very useful.
Two Senate races, in Alaska and Mississippi, were still uncalled when the leadership vote took place and could reduce Republican numbers further, the AP noted. RSN reported on the late count in Mississippi’s Senate race this week.
What is established, disputed and not established
Established: Thune was re-elected Senate Republican leader without opposition on November 10, 2026, by acclamation or voice vote. The SAVE America Act passed the House 218 to 213 on February 11, 2026. Senate floor records show failed SAVE-related votes on March 26 (53 to 47 on cloture) and June 4 to 5 (48 to 50 and 50 to 49 on Budget Act waivers). The Senate passed a roughly $70 billion immigration enforcement reconciliation bill 52 to 47 on June 5. Cassidy lost his primary on May 16, and Cornyn lost his runoff on May 26.
Disputed: How many senators really opposed Thune. The Hill counted 15 votes to delay, while Roll Call described a core group of five led by Johnson. It is also disputed whether the midterm losses were caused by Senate leadership, by the war and prices, or by the president’s standing.
Not established: Whether a lame-duck reconciliation bill will include any SAVE America provisions, or whether the Senate parliamentarian would allow them. Whether the House gave final approval to the June immigration enforcement bill and the president signed it; RSN could not confirm its final status from the sources reviewed. The exact August 8 roll call tally, which RSN could not find in an official Senate record.
Sources: The Hill (Nov. 10); AP via PBS NewsHour (Nov. 10); Roll Call (Nov. 10); Senate Daily Press, March 26; Senate Daily Press, June 4 and 5; NPR (June 4); CNBC (June 5); The Daily Signal (Aug. 8); The Daily Signal (Feb. 11); Deseret News (Feb. 3); Congress.gov, H.R. 22; NPR via Alabama Public Radio (May 16); KSAT (May 26).
Featured image: The Old Senate Chamber, U.S. Capitol, where Senate Republicans held their leadership election. Photo: Architect of the Capitol, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
How this article was made: Right Side News researched and drafted this article with the help of AI tools. Sources are linked so readers can check them. Spot an error? Tell us in the comments and we will correct it.
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