The South Dakota senator who became majority leader after the last election spent two years telling the country he was delivering for the president. The record shows something else. He kept the chamber technically in session with short pro forma meetings that blocked recess appointments. He never found the votes or the will to pass the election integrity bill the president called his top priority. He left dozens of judicial and executive nominees hanging. When the midterms arrived, the party that controlled both the White House and the Senate lost both chambers. Some of that loss belongs to the man who ran the Senate.
John Thune got exactly what he wanted last night.
He has been an abject failure as Majority Leader.
He can’t be allowed to be the Minority Leader.
@SenateGOP https://t.co/qEqBGf7CG7
— Kentucky Girl (@Kentuckygirl1) November 4, 2026
The Appointments That Never Happened
From the start the president made clear he wanted the option of recess appointments. He said any candidate for majority leader had to accept them. The new leader said the idea was “on the table.” Then he used the oldest Senate trick to take it off. During recesses the chamber held brief pro forma sessions every few days. Those sessions kept the Senate from being officially adjourned long enough for the president to install nominees without a vote. The House would have had to agree to a longer break, and some Republican senators openly opposed the shortcut for Cabinet posts. The leader never forced the issue. By the summer of 2025 more than 140 nominations sat waiting. The Senate confirmed some through the ordinary process and later changed rules to batch lower-level nominees. It never cleared the full backlog. Several U.S. attorney posts stayed empty or filled by acting officials. Judges moved slower than the president wanted. The leader later said the Senate had been “on a mission” to put the president’s people in place. The numbers showed the mission was incomplete.
The Election Bill That Died
The House passed the election integrity measure more than once. It required proof of citizenship to register and photo identification to vote. The president called it essential before the midterms. In the Senate it failed repeatedly. Cloture votes drew 48 or 52 or 53 Republican votes. That is short of the 60 needed under the current rules. A handful of Republican senators voted no each time. The leader said the votes were not there. He refused to change the filibuster or force a talking filibuster that would have kept Democrats on the floor for days. He scheduled other business instead. A narrower photo-identification bill also failed to clear the 60-vote bar before the August recess. The leader’s defenders note that Democrats blocked every version and that some of his own members would not support the full package. That is true. It is also true that he never tested the outer edge of what a determined majority leader can do when the president and the base treat the bill as non-negotiable. The midterms arrived without it.
@LeaderJohnThune Thune singlehandedly caused our elections to continue to be compromised for years to come.
There may never be a real national election in mylifetime.
All we wanted was some basic election security.
John Thune is a failure.— Sullidave (@0sullidave0) November 4, 2026
What He Did Pass and What He Did Not
The Senate confirmed an attorney general and some other Cabinet officers. It moved a funding bill and later changed confirmation rules so groups of lower-level nominees could advance together. Those are real accomplishments. They do not erase the larger pattern. The leader spent months negotiating with the minority for smaller packages while the president’s priority list sat. He protected the filibuster on the grounds that Republicans would need it later. That calculation looked different after the election. The same procedural caution that slowed the president’s agenda left the party with fewer judges, fewer prosecutors, and no new federal rules on voter identification when voters went to the polls.
We didn’t lose because of gas prices or the Iran war. We lost because Thune and Senate leadership refused to make DOGE real and refused to pass voter ID. We sent them to Washington to do exactly those two things. They didn’t. Everything else on your list is downstream of that failure. If the people we put in power won’t fight for the basics that got them there, 2028 won’t be any better. The new fight starts by holding our own accountable.
— Mao (@MaoLopez1313) November 4, 2026
How Much of the Loss Is His
Midterm losses usually belong first to the president. Voters punished the party in power over prices, the war in the Middle East, and the ordinary exhaustion that follows two years of unified government. The leader did not create those problems. He also did not use the majority he held to deliver the concrete items the president and his voters said they wanted. He kept the Senate from adjourning in a way that would have let the president fill jobs by recess appointment. He treated the election bill as something that required Democratic votes rather than something a majority should force. Those choices did not cost every Senate seat. They did leave the party with fewer tools in place and fewer accomplishments to point to when the campaign turned ugly. A leader who moves the president’s agenda gets some credit when the party wins and some blame when it loses. This one now sits in the minority again. The record of what he chose not to do is part of the reason.
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