WASHINGTON – Rep. Tom Emmer campaigned for and raised a lot of political cash for Republican candidates, but those efforts may not be of much help as he tries to hold on to his GOP leadership job.

That’s because most of the Republican challengers, and some of the incumbents, Emmer tried to help lost their races and won’t be in Congress to back him.

Emmer is the House Majority Whip. But the House GOP is required to elect new leaders for the next Congress, where the party will be in the minority. And Emmer has attracted a challenge from Rep. August Pfluger of Texas.

As a member of the House GOP leadership, Emmer was proud of the money he raised for his GOP colleagues – in large part to cement his position as a Republican leader.

Fact Brief: Did Rep. Tom Emmer once say Somalis were among the fastest-assimilating immigrant groups?

In a release last month, Emmer said he had raised a total of $52 million in all of his campaign accounts, donating more than $22 million to GOP candidates and party committees.

“This election is between common sense and crazy,” Emmer said in that release.

Helping GOP candidates get elected should buy a lot of goodwill. But the midterm has changed all of that.

The Emmer Majority Builders PAC, a joint fundraising committee, donated to 39 Republican candidates, mostly challengers, who lost their races in the devastating midterm for the GOP. Instead, as many as 50 new House Democrats will now give their party a very strong majority in the U.S. House.

Only six Republicans who benefitted from Emmer’s PAC won, all of them incumbents, and five others were in races whose results are too close to call yet. One of those unsettled races is that of Rep. Brad Finstad, R-1^st District, who is several hundred votes behind Democrat Jake Johnson.

Emmer’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

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The Emmer Majority Builder’s PAC, established at the end of 2023, raised more than $24 million in this cycle and spent most of that money, about $19 million, on contributions to candidates and the Republican Party. The PAC receives a lot of its funding from the cryptocurrency industry.

Emmer’s fundraising machine also includes his personal campaign committee and a leadership PAC called the Electing Majority Making Effective Republicans (EMMER) PAC .

But the Emmer Majority Builder’s PAC, as a joint fundraising committee, allowed Emmer to efficiently funnel a lot more money to candidates. That’s because donors can write large checks to the committee and the money is shared between two or more candidates or party committees.

‘A winning culture’ 

The new Republicans elected to Congress, and there are few of them, and GOP incumbents who survived the blue massacre will choose by secret ballot on Tuesday between Emmer and Pfluger.

In letters to their colleagues, the competitors presented different visions of the future of the House GOP.

Emmer urged fellow House Republicans to stay the course and said the party needed to change when he took over the reins of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) in 2019.

“We needed to install a winning culture,” Emmer said in his letter. “In 2020, we were expected to lose up to 24 seats. We fought tooth and nail, and gained a historic 15 seats, nearly flipping the House in a presidential year. In 2022, we finished the job. We’ve taken on the tough fights as a team and won. We must return to that same mindset to retake the majority in two years.”

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Emmer also said “we are down, but not out” and “success will feel different in the minority – and often less satisfying – but will require no less support and unity in our conference.”

Pfluger, meanwhile, is the outgoing head of the Republican Study Committee, a group of House conservatives that is very influential.  

In his letter to colleagues, the Texas lawmaker called for a sweeping out of Emmer and the other House Republican leaders who are also being challenged. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., took himself out of contention for any leadership position after the midterm.   

“We need fresh ideas and a leadership team committed to rebuilding a culture with a clear game plan to win in 2028,” Pfluger wrote. “I’m running for Republican Whip because I believe that I am capable and can be trusted to implement the changes this team needs.”

Tim Lindberg, a University of Minnesota Morris political science professor, said the surviving House Republicans are “shell-shocked” and will be in “uncharted territory” because most of them have been in the majority, or in a minority in a closely divided Congress, since they were first elected.

“This is something very new for all but a few Republicans in Congress,” Lindberg said of the upcoming Democratic dominance of the U.S. House.

He also said it’s likely GOP lawmakers will reject existing leadership and strip Emmer of his leadership job.

“I’d be shocked if it’s not the case,” Lindberg said.

Perhaps more than any other member of the House leadership, Emmer parroted President Donald Trump’s positions. He echoed the president, whose unpopularity has led to the Republican Party’s defeat.

Emmer blamed Minnesota Democrats for fraud scandals, accused the Somali community of wrongdoing, attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-5^th District – a very vocal Trump critic – and repeatedly called Democratic candidates “communists.”

But Lindberg said nearly all House Republicans, to some extent or another, have been loyal to Trump – though perhaps not as forcefully or vocally as Emmer – “and there’s no real sense in the Republican Party of what non-MAGA leadership looks like.”

“It’s not clear that the people who will take him down have a working strategy or winning message,” Lindberg said.

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