Kevin McCarthy: The Republican now facing one of the toughest jobs in politics

Who is Kevin McCarthy without Congress?

It is a question that has been posed a number of times over the years – or variations of it – by those charting the career of the California Republican, who has finally become the speaker of the House of Representatives after days of votes and fraught negotiations.

Most appear to have come to the conclusion that the 57-year-old lives for the trials and tribulations of Washington politics, this week messier than most, which is underpinned by relentless ambition. In a world of professional survivors, he has an obvious talent for keeping himself in front.

Given the 15 votes required to get McCarthy confirmed as speaker, critics will point to the concessions he has had to give up to the more extreme elements of the right of the Republican Party and say that his personal ambition may have taken precedence over what was good to the country. Particularly given the delay it caused to the start of the 118th Congress and the picture it painted for the rest of the world about US democracy (president Joe Biden called it "embarrassing").

However, in those moments after midnight when his speakership was confirmed, a wry smile may have crossed McCarthy's lips at the mark events will have left. Before him, Congress had voted in a speaker 127 times, on only 14 occasions had it required multiple ballots and only once since the start of the 20th century – in 1923. After nine votes, this current House had passed that – by the time the process was finished, after 15 votes, it was the most since 1859. Only four other times has it required so many ballots.

“It’s been a long week,” Republican congressman Patrick McHenry conceded at the start of his speech nominating McCarthy for the speakership during the final day of votes. “The president has called this process an embarrassment. Talking heads labelled this a chaos and a mess. And some would call it shambolic, even. But it’s called democracy.”

Despite this chaos, there is little doubt that McCarthy will see himself as the best person for the job – his ability to negotiate, and renegotiate his position is one of his strengths. Before the start of the Netflix series House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey as the cunning Frank Underwood, Spacey shadowed McCarthy for a time, to get a sense of how things worked in Washington. McCarthy later told People in 2014: “I told him I say to members, ‘You vote your district, you vote your conscience, you just don’t surprise me.’ And he stole that line for the show”.

Born in 1965, McCarthy was one of three children born to middle-class Bakersfield Democrats. His mother was a homemaker and his father was an assistant fire chief. Bakersfield is known as an industrial city dealing in agriculture and the oil industry. McCarthy would meet his future wife Judy at Bakersfield High School, showing signs of his drive. “I actually liked one of his friends, but you know, Kevin's personality wins you over, and he doesn't give up,” Judy said in 2014. The two would marry in 1992 and have two children in their 20s.

After graduating, McCarthy would win $5,000 on the state lottery in 1984, an event often cited as the beginning of his political “origin story”. McCarthy had been enrolled in community college in Bakersfield, but he dropped out, investing part of his winnings in the stock market and using the rest to open a deli. What he later said it taught him was “what all small businesspeople learn: that the work is hard, the margins are thin, and the government is too often an obstacle, not an aid, to success”. He sold the business a couple of years later he used his earnings to pay for college and business school at Cal State Bakersfield, where he joined the California Young Republicans, eventually becoming the organisation’s chair.

McCarthy would later join the office of Representative Bill Thomas, who was regarded as a serious legislator in Washington. Thomas would also mentor Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor – who would become closely associated with McCarthy. With Thomas’s endorsement, McCarthy ran for the California state assembly in 2002 and won – and later spent time as minority leader of the assembly. In 2006, McCarthy ran for Congress and won, modelling himself as being part of a “new generation for conservative leaders” alongside Ryan and Cantor. They called themselves the “Young Guns” and published a book with the same name just ahead of the 2010 midterms in which Republicans retook the House from the Democrats.

The blurb of the publication said: “These Young Guns of the House GOP – Cantor [the leader], Ryan [the thinker], and McCarthy [the strategist] – are ready to take their belief in the principles that have made America great and translate it into solutions that will make the future even better.”

McCarthy enjoyed smooth progress up the Republican ranks in the House. becoming the Republican deputy chief whip in 2009, majority whip in 2011 – the role that Spacey would shadow him doing – and majority leader by 2014 (later becoming minority leader after the Democrats took back control of the House in the wake of the 2018 midterm elections). That period was when the Tea Party movement was gaining traction within the Republicans, a grassroots effort that wanted small government and appeared to enjoy making trouble in Congress – it would be suitable practice for the rise of even more hardline members that now fill part of the GOP in the House, a change that was accelerated under former president Donald Trump.

He would align himself with Trump pretty quickly in 2016, even as some of the party establishment still had doubts. Trump would go on to call him “my Kevin”. McCarthy initially refused to denounce the president’s false claims of election fraud following the 2020 presidential election, but events on 6 January 2021 – the storming of the US Capitol – were a different matter. “I’ve had it with this guy,” he told fellow Republican leaders in a recording from a closed-door meeting, which was published by TheNew York Times.

In a speech to the House, he then argued Trump bore responsibility for the incident. “He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding,” McCarthy said. However, McCarthy voted against the then-president's impeachment, before travelling to Florida for a photo with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

His courting of Trump – who backed him as speaker – shows the influence the former president still has, but also McCarthy’s willingness to do whatever he thinks is needed to try and keep a fractured Republican Party together in the House. The concessions he has given to the so-called “never Kevins” to make sure he could become speaker – including an apparent agreement allowing a single member to call for a vote to remove the speaker, will have far-reaching consequences.

For Cantor, speaking to The New Yorker last month, it is what it is. “Think about the transformation and what has occurred in the time that he’s been in Congress,” Cantor said. “Any kind of criticism of him falls short in terms of recognising the ability to keep standing and to keep going and to keep leading in this kind of environment.”

McCarthy has also offered key committee positions to the Freedom Caucus, associated with some of those more extreme members, which has ensured there will always be the risk of disruption – or downright chaos – to the Republican agenda.

“It’s nighttime here in Washington,” McCarthy said after being voted in, “but in some ways, it’s also a new beginning – a fresh start.” It is unclear yet what direction this “fresh start” will take.