Elon Musk and MAGA have no chance in the race for Senate GOP frontrunner

• MAGA influencers, including Elon Musk, tried to pressure Republican senators to vote for Rick Scott.
• Instead, they chose Sen. John Thune, a longtime senator and occasional Trump critic.
• This is probably mainly due to the fact that the vote was carried out secretly.

Elon Musk helped get Donald Trump elected president, and he is poised to play a key role in the president-elect’s next administration.

This week, however, it became clear that his influence, and the influence of the broader online MAGA right, is not felt as strongly behind closed doors on Capitol Hill.

On Wednesday morning, Republican senators and senators-elect elected the current second-highest-ranking Republican, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, as the next Senate Majority Leader.

Musk and other Trump allies had thrown their support behind Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who has long portrayed himself as an opponent of the Republican establishment and is trying to capitalize on his position as a staunch Trump loyalist.

Scott received just 13 votes, just three more than he won when he challenged Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell for the top job after the 2022 midterm elections. After Scott was eliminated in the first round of voting, Thune defeated his nearest challenger, Senator John Cornyn of Texas, by a 29-24 margin.

It wasn’t for lack of trying from Scott’s allies, including Musk, who waged a days-long social media campaign to get Republican senators to rally behind the Florida senator.

Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a Scott supporter, told reporters on Tuesday that Musk’s support was “huge” and that the billionaire businessman and other conservative figures “recognize that we need a change here in terms of how Congress operates.”

If the race were judged solely by online chatter, Scott might have been in the lead. In fact, Scott was the leader on betting site Polymarket for most of Sunday and Monday.

A secret vote protected senators from public pressure

There is one main reason the pressure campaign didn’t work: the vote was held in secret and away from the public.

Very few senators announced their votes in advance, and many still have not, making it difficult for MAGA activists to target those who voted for anyone other than Scott.

“It is completely unacceptable that we are using secret votes to elect a Senate majority leader,” said Charlie Kirk, the founder and CEO of Turning Point USA. “They’re afraid of you.”

The pressure campaign quickly became heated. Musk said Thune was the “Democrats’ first choice,” while Tucker Carlson called Cornyn an “angry liberal.” Critics have dug up both senators’ years of anti-Trump posts and comments, including Thune’s call for Trump to withdraw from the race in 2016.

The online campaign apparently angered some senators who felt they were being pressured on an issue that should be left to the judgment of senators, not the public.

“They are trying to bully us. That’s not how these elections work,” said one Republican senator told anonymously Punchbowl news.

Scott’s supporters, meanwhile, hoped that a public campaign would blunt the impact of the secret vote. And some rejected the idea that public pressure was unfavorable.

“I hope voters come forward. There’s nothing wrong with that, nobody should be offended by it,” Johnson said before the vote. “If I were a voter, I would say, ‘I want to know exactly how you’re going to vote.'”

After Scott lost, the reaction online was somewhat muted. Musk congratulated Thune, while the Florida senator issued a statement saying he would “do everything possible to ensure that John Thune can successfully implement President Trump’s agenda.”

The phrase “McConnell 2.0” spread quickly after the vote

“I think Rick Scott would have gotten a lot fewer votes if we hadn’t conducted a public pressure campaign,” conservative media personality Benny Johnson said on his show after the vote. “They thought they were going to sneak in this leadership vote in the dark of night. The pressure is on now, and John Thune had better bow to MAGA for his existence.”