Not yet — and not unless Senate Republicans vote to change their own schedule. The leadership elections are still set for Tuesday, November 10, at 9 a.m. in the Old Senate Chamber, but Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has now gathered the five signatures needed to force a meeting of the full Republican conference on whether to postpone them, The Hill reported on Friday. That meeting is the one door a delay can walk through: Johnson's petition compels the conversation, not the postponement itself.
Johnson, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, plans to send his letter on Monday, November 9, to Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, the chairman of the Republican Conference. In it, he calls holding the closed-door elections so soon after what he terms a stunning defeat "political malpractice," and he intends to keep collecting signatures through the weekend beyond the five he already has. On a radio program, Johnson said the party should first take stock of what went wrong on Tuesday, when Democrats took control of both the Senate and the House, and he rejected the idea of simply re-electing the current leadership team by acclamation.
"We have no business holding Senate Republican leadership elections until we've had ample opportunity to discuss what happened on Tuesday, and we know who's going to be in our conference." — Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, announcing on X that he would sign Johnson's letter
The mechanics matter, because they decide how real this push is. Under the conference's own rules, a written request signed by five or more Republican senators requires Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, who chairs the Republican Policy Committee, to call a meeting of the full conference. Only at that meeting can senators vote to move Tuesday's secret-ballot elections — the vote at which Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota is seeking another term as Republican leader, this time as minority leader. No Republican has publicly announced a challenge to Thune, Rick Scott of Florida, who ran against him in 2024, is not running again, and Majority Whip John Barrasso of Wyoming is also seeking to stay on, so even a delayed election is still expected to end with Thune on top.
The stakes are about accountability more than arithmetic. Lee's second condition points at a genuine unknown: two Senate races, in Alaska and Mississippi, were still uncalled on Friday, so Republicans do not yet know the final membership of the conference that would be choosing its leader. A delay would also give conservatives pressing for a reckoning — over the lost majority and over priorities like the SAVE America Act, which passed the House three times and died in the Senate — a forum they currently do not have; Punchbowl News reported there will not even be an after-action meeting about Tuesday's results before the vote, and that the caucus has little appetite for a debate over Thune's future. Set against that, Thune's team can point to a Wednesday call with President Trump that a Senate aide described as a good working relationship, even as Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz publicly questioned whether Thune should remain leader. Johnson has run this play before — Senate Republicans defeated a similar delay effort he led in 2022, and conservatives sought another postponement in 2024 — which is why the push is being read as an uphill fight and a signal of discontent rather than a likely change of date.
Johnson himself has put the choice in the plainest terms, saying of the scheduled vote, "We need to delay that," and calling it "unacceptable" for the conference to simply wave the current team through after the defeat the party just took.