How the Speaker Is Elected on the First Day of a New Congress

Shortly after midnight on January 7, 2023, on the fifteenth roll call in four days, the clerk of the House finished reading the tally and Kevin McCarthy became Speaker. The chamber had spent most of a week unable to do anything else. Its members-elect had not been sworn in, so technically there were no members, only people who had won elections. There were no committees, no rules and no way to pass a bill. Late on the final night, a scuffle nearly broke out on the floor when one holdout, a Republican from Florida, answered "present" instead of voting for McCarthy and an angry colleague had to be pulled back by another. The country got a live lesson in a piece of the Constitution most people never think about: the House chooses its own Speaker, and until it does, it barely exists.

In short: The Speaker is elected by the whole House on the first day of each Congress, by a roll call in which each member-elect names a person aloud, and the winner needs a majority of those who vote for someone by name. Until a Speaker is chosen, nothing else can happen. Most years this takes one ballot; in 2023 it took fifteen, and the reasons why explain how much power a small group can hold in a narrow majority.

The one line in the Constitution

The Constitution's instruction is brief. Article I, Section 2 says that the House "shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers." That is all. It does not say how, by what margin or even that the Speaker must be a member of the House. Everything else about the process comes from the House's own precedents, built up over more than two centuries.

The most surprising consequence of that brevity is the second point. Nothing in the Constitution requires the Speaker to be a sitting member. Every Speaker in history has been one, but members have occasionally cast votes for people outside the chamber as a protest. In 2023, on the seventh ballot, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida cast his vote for Donald Trump, who was not a member. It counted as a vote for a person, which is all the rules require.

The Speaker is two things at once. He or she is the presiding officer of the whole House, a constitutional officer who signs bills, administers oaths and rules on procedure, and is second in line to the presidency after the vice president. The Speaker is also, in practice, the leader of the majority party, with enormous control over what reaches the floor. The two roles pull in different directions, and that tension is part of why the election can become a fight.

Who runs the room before there is a Speaker

The new Congress begins at noon on January 3 unless Congress has passed a law setting another day. When the members-elect gather, the Speaker of the previous Congress no longer holds office; that Congress has ended. So who calls the room to order?

The answer is the Clerk of the House, a nonpartisan officer elected by the previous House, who keeps the roll of members-elect certified by the states. The Clerk calls the House to order, conducts a quorum call to confirm that enough members-elect are present, and then presides over the election of the Speaker. The Clerk's powers in this moment are deliberately limited. The Clerk does not rule on contested questions the way a Speaker would; precedent treats the House in this period as an unorganized body whose only business is to choose its presiding officer.

It is worth spelling out how little exists at this stage. The House's committees are created by its rules and staffed by resolutions naming their members, so before a Speaker is chosen there are no committees at all, no chairs and no ranking members. The new members' offices are open and their staff are working, but nobody can introduce a bill that the House will act on, hold a hearing or schedule a vote on anything except the next roll call for Speaker. Members-elect who have not taken the oath are, in the eyes of the institution, still waiting at the door. In 2023, the chamber stayed in that condition for four days. The longer the contest runs, the more the country notices that one of its three branches has a missing piece.

Each party nominates a candidate. The nominations are usually made by the chairs of the two party conferences, in short speeches that celebrate the nominee and, often, gently mock the other side. Then comes the vote.

How the vote actually works

The Speaker election is a roll call, but not the electronic kind used for ordinary votes. The reading clerk calls the name of each member-elect in alphabetical order, and each one stands, or at least speaks from his or her seat, and says aloud the name of the person he or she is voting for. Tellers keep the count. It takes a while: with 435 members, a single ballot can run well over half an hour, and longer when members add theatrical pauses.

The rule that decides the winner is the part most people get wrong. A candidate does not need 218 votes, a majority of the full House. The winner needs a majority of the members who vote for a person by name. A member who answers "present" or does not vote at all reduces the number needed to win. If every one of 435 members votes for someone, the winner needs 218. If ten members answer "present," the total voting for a person drops to 425, and the winner needs 213. Vacant seats lower the number too.

That rule is the hidden lever in close contests. A member who refuses to vote for his party's nominee but does not want to vote for the other party's candidate can answer "present," which lowers the threshold without adding a vote to anyone's column. In January 2023 the final ballot was won that way: several of McCarthy's last holdouts voted "present" rather than for him, which brought the threshold down to a number he could reach.

If no one wins a majority, the clerk simply starts another roll call. There is no runoff, no elimination of the lowest candidate and no time limit. The House can repeat the process as many times as it takes, and it can adjourn between ballots to let the factions negotiate, which is what happened over those four days in 2023.

Fifteen ballots, and why it happened

Before 2023, the last time the House needed more than one ballot to choose a Speaker was in 1923, when Frederick Gillett of Massachusetts was elected on the ninth. A century passed without a repeat. The record belongs to the 1850s, when the slavery crisis split the parties: in the winter of 1855 and 1856, the House took 133 ballots over about two months before electing Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts, and only after adopting a special rule allowing a plurality to win. In 1859 and 1860, it took 44 ballots to elect William Pennington of New Jersey.

The 2023 contest had a different cause but the same mechanism. Republicans had won the House in the 2022 midterms by a narrow margin. With every Democrat voting for their own nominee, Hakeem Jeffries, McCarthy could lose only a handful of Republican votes and still win. A group of about twenty conservative Republicans refused to support him on the early ballots. Their objection was less about McCarthy personally than about how the House would be run: they wanted more power for rank-and-file members, more time to read bills, more seats for their allies on key committees and, above all, an easier way to remove the Speaker later.

Over four days, McCarthy's allies negotiated those demands one holdout at a time. The concessions included a rule allowing any single member to force a vote to remove the Speaker. Holdouts switched to McCarthy or to "present" in batches, and on the fifteenth ballot he won. The price of the gavel turned out to be the gavel itself. Nine months later, in October 2023, one of the original holdouts used that single-member rule to force a vote, and McCarthy became the first Speaker in history to be removed by a vote of the House.

The House then spent about three weeks without a Speaker. A temporary speaker pro tempore served under a rule, adopted after the September 11 attacks, that requires each Speaker to keep a secret list of members who would preside if the office became vacant. The interim officer's powers were understood to be narrow, and the House passed no legislation while Republicans went through several nominees before electing Mike Johnson of Louisiana in late October.

Why a narrow majority makes the first day dangerous

The lesson of 2023 is mostly arithmetic. In a House where the majority has a cushion of thirty seats, a rebellion of twenty members is a nuisance. In a House where the cushion is five, the same twenty members hold a veto over the majority's choice of leader, and they can demand concessions that shape the next two years. That is why the speakership fight in January 2025, when Johnson was reelected, again came down to a few Republican votes; he won on the first ballot only after holdouts switched before the tally was announced.

There is a counterweight in the rules that rarely gets used. Because the winner needs only a majority of those voting for a person, a cross-party coalition could in principle elect a Speaker: a group from the majority joining the minority behind a compromise candidate. Something like this happens in some state legislatures, where coalitions of moderates from both parties have elected presiding officers over the objections of the majority caucus. At the federal level the taboo has held. A member who votes for the other party's nominee for Speaker risks being treated as a defector for the rest of his career, and both parties enforce that norm hard.

Here's the argument about what that means. The party-line Speaker vote is the moment of maximum leverage for a small faction inside the majority, whichever party holds it. That leverage is not good or bad in itself. Factions use it to win procedural changes that can make the House more open, or to win power that makes it harder to govern. The House has never settled on a way to separate the two, and probably cannot, because the rule that protects a dissenting faction is the same rule that lets it hold the chamber hostage.

What happens right after the vote

Once a candidate wins, events move quickly and follow a set order. The Speaker-elect is escorted to the chair, and by custom the leader of the other party introduces the new Speaker and hands over the gavel. The Speaker gives a short address. The Dean of the House, the member with the longest continuous service, administers the oath of office to the Speaker. The Speaker then administers the oath to all the other members-elect at once, as they stand in the chamber with their right hands raised. Only at that moment do they become members of the House.

After that, the House elects its officers, including the Clerk, the Sergeant at Arms and the Chaplain, and adopts its rules for the new Congress. It notifies the Senate and the President that it is organized and ready to do business. If the Speaker election goes smoothly, all of this fits into a single afternoon.

Democrats won the House on November 3, 2026, and the new Congress will be sworn in on January 3, 2027. Who the Democratic caucus nominates, and how many votes that nominee receives, will be decided in the caucus and on the floor; neither should be treated as settled until the clerk reads the tally. What is settled is the procedure. The House will gather, the clerk will call the roll, and the chamber will do nothing else until someone has a majority of those voting for a person by name.

What you can do

• Watch the first day as a civics lesson. The first roll call of a new Congress is televised and archived, and it is one of the few votes where every member speaks aloud. Our topic pages on the new majority and Democrats in Congress gather coverage of the caucus votes and leadership races that lead up to it.
• Learn how your member votes with the party. A Speaker election depends on party discipline, and so does everything after it. The party unity page shows how often each Democrat votes with the party, which tells you a lot about who is likely to hold out on a close vote.
• Tell your representative what you expect from the majority. Members-elect are listening to their districts in November and December, while the caucus is choosing its leaders and writing its rules. The representative finder gives you contact details for your incoming House member.
• Follow the votes once the House is organized. After the first day, the floor action begins. The politics page tracks Congress's votes and bills, so you can see how quickly the new majority moves from choosing a Speaker to passing legislation.

The speakership election looks like a formality in most years, a long roll call that ends the way everyone expected. In 2023 it became a four-day lesson in how much power the Constitution's shortest instructions leave to the people in the room. The next time a majority is narrow, that lesson will apply again.