Florida Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna publicly called on Senator Ron Johnson to run for Senate minority leader, a step that would put him in direct opposition to Sen. John Thune.

Luna wrote on X Saturday evening that she was calling on Johnson to seek the post “on behalf of America”.

The appeal comes as the party digests a decisive electoral setback in the midterms that saw both chambers of Congress slip from Republican control. Democrats captured at least seven previously Republican-held Senate seats, including those held by Susan Collins in Maine, John Husted in Ohio, and Roger Marshall in Kansas, along with open or contested seats in Iowa, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina. With races in Alaska and Mississippi still unresolved, Democrats are positioned to hold a majority of at least 54 seats, and possibly as many as 56, when the new Congress convenes. House Speaker Mike Johnson has already indicated he will step away from leadership.

Thune, who has served as majority leader since succeeding Mitch McConnell, had said before the election that he intended to seek another term as the top Republican regardless of the outcome. His office confirmed he is running for minority leader. As of this publication, he faces no publicly announced challenger, though that could change should Sen. Johnson toss his hat in the ring.

Leadership elections are set for Tuesday, November 10, by secret ballot of the Republican conference. Johnson, the Budget Committee chairman, has led an effort to postpone that vote. In a letter to Conference Chairman Tom Cotton, he and supporting colleagues described moving straight to leadership elections after a “stunning defeat” as political malpractice. They called for a broader conference discussion first so members could evaluate what went wrong and hear from potential leaders about a more collaborative approach going forward. Sen. Johnson has obtained at least five signatures—enough under conference rules to force a meeting—including those of John Kennedy, Rick Scott, and Mike Lee. He has framed the request as necessary reflection rather than a direct attack on Thune, pointing to the historically longer gap between elections and leadership votes in earlier decades.

The minority leader position is the top elected role for Senate Republicans when they are out of power. Chosen by secret ballot for a two-year term, the leader serves as the conference’s chief spokesperson and strategist. Without control of the floor schedule, which rests with the majority leader (expected to be Chuck Schumer for the Democrats), the minority leader coordinates opposition tactics, manages the party’s floor operations, negotiates with the majority on must-pass legislation and nominations, deploys procedural tools to slow or shape debate, and handles messaging and internal cohesion. A challenge to Thune would require a formal candidacy, quiet campaigning among the remaining Republican senators, and a majority in the closed-door vote. No senator has yet taken that step.

Reporting from multiple outlets has described growing frustration with Thune among some conservatives over his resistance to eliminating, or altering, the filibuster and his handling of the SAVE America Act, priorities strongly pushed for by President Trump and his allies. Rep. Luna, a strong ally to the president, has previously criticized Thune on those same issues.

Several senators viewed as more moderate lost their competitive midterm races, removing or endangering figures such as Maine Senator Susan Collins, the longtime Appropriations chair, that were considered more closely aligned with Thune's institutional wing of the party. Collins, for example, gave a nomination speech on behalf of Thune when he first ran for party leadership in 2008 and was a likely vote in support of Thune keeping his position. With many GOP senators out of office, from retirement or otherwise, the question arises of whether Thune has the votes to keep his role as the chamber's top Republican.

Johnson has not announced a bid of his own. In comments made around the time of McConnell’s departure he left the door open to the idea, and more recently he has been quoted questioning who would want the difficult minority-leader job. Luna’s endorsement underscores pressure from the party’s right flank for a more proactive posture in the Senate for the next two years, even as the minority, as they are the final of Trump's term.

Whether the delay succeeds, whether a challenger emerges, and whether Thune has the votes will be settled by the conference in the coming days. For now, he remains the frontrunner by default, but the scale of the losses and the public calls for a different approach have made the routine leadership vote a contested one.