Speakers of the House: Elections, 1913-2019
Released: 2019-01-04T00:00:00

Regular and Special Elections of the Speaker

The traditional practice of the House is to elect a Speaker by roll call vote upon first convening after a general election of Representatives. Customarily, the conference of each major party in the House selects a candidate whose name is formally placed in nomination before the roll call. A Member may vote for one of these nominated candidates or for another individual. In the great majority of cases, Members vote for the candidate nominated by their own party conferences, since the outcome of this vote in effect establishes which party has the majority and therefore will organize the House.

Table 1 presents data on the votes cast for candidates for Speaker of the House of Representatives in each Congress from 1913 (63 rd Congress) through 2019 (116 th Congress). It shows the votes cast for the nominees of the two major parties, other candidates nominated from the floor, and individuals not formally nominated.

Included in the table are not only the elections held regularly at the outset of each Congress but also those held during the course of a Congress as a result of the death or resignation of a sitting Speaker. Such elections have occurred five times during the period examined:

in 1936 (74 th Congress) upon the death of Speaker Joseph Byrns; in 1940 (76 th Congress) upon the death of Speaker William Bankhead; in 1962 (87 th Congress) upon the death of Speaker Sam Rayburn; in 1989 (101 st Congress) upon the resignation of Speaker Jim Wright; and in 2015 (114 th Congress) upon the resignation of Speaker John Boehner.

On the two earlier occasions among these five, the election was by resolution rather than by roll call vote. On the more recent three, the same procedure was followed as at the start of a Congress.

Size of the House and Majority Required to Elect

The data presented here cover the period during which the permanent size of the House has been set at 435 Members. This period corresponds to that since the admission of Arizona and New Mexico as the 47 th and 48 th states in 1912. The actual size of the House was 436, and then 437, for a brief period between the admission of Alaska and Hawaii (in 1958 and 1959) and the reapportionment of Representatives following the 1960 census.

By practice of the House going back to its earliest days, an absolute majority of the Members present and voting is required in order to elect a Speaker. A majority of the full membership of the House (218, in a House of 435) is not required. Precedents emphasize that the requirement is for a majority of "the total number of votes cast for a person by name." A candidate for Speaker may receive a majority of the votes cast, and be elected, while failing to obtain a majority of the full membership because some Members either are not present to vote or instead answer "present" rather than voting for a candidate. During the period examined, this kind of result has occurred five times:

in 1917 (65 th Congress), "Champ" Clark was elected with 217 votes; in 1923 (68 th Congress), Frederick Gillett was elected with 215 votes; in 1943 (78 th Congress), Sam Rayburn was elected with 217 votes; in 1997 (105 th Congress), Newt Gingrich was elected with 216 votes; and in 2015 (114 th Congress), John Boehner was elected with 216 votes.

In addition, in 1931 (72 nd Congress), the candidate of the new Democratic majority, John Nance Garner (later Vice President), received 218 votes, a bare majority of the membership. The table does not take into account the number of vacancies existing in the House at the time of the election; it therefore cannot show whether any Speaker may have been elected lacking a majority of the then qualified membership of the House.

If no candidate obtains the requisite majority, the roll call is repeated. On these subsequent ballots, Members may still vote for any individual; no restrictions have ever been imposed, such as that the lowest candidate on each ballot must drop out, or that no new candidate may enter. Because of the predominance of the two established national parties during the period examined, only once in the period did the House fail to elect on the first roll call. In 1923 (68 th Congress), in a closely divided House, both major party nominees initially failed to gain a majority because of votes cast for other candidates by Members from the Progressive Party or from the "progressive" wing of the Republican Party. Many of these Members agreed to vote for the Republican candidate only on the ninth ballot, after the Republican leadership had agreed to accept a number of procedural reforms these Members favored. Thus the Republican was ultimately elected, although (as noted earlier) still with less than a majority of the full membership.

Third and Additional Candidates

In the first portion of the period covered by Table 1 , it was common for candidates other than those of the two major parties to receive votes. Such action occurred in 11 of the 16 Congresses (63 rd -78 th ) that convened from 1913 through 1943. On 7 of those 11 occasions, candidates other than those of the two major parties were formally nominated. These events reflect chiefly the influence in Congress, during those three decades, of the progressive movement. The additional nominations were offered in the name of that movement, and the votes cast for Members other than the major party nominees also generally represent an expression of progressive sentiments.

During this period, the occurrence of additional nominations (displayed in the table) reflects changing views of Members identifying themselves as "progressives" about whether to constitute themselves in the House as a separate Progressive Party caucus or as a wing of the Republican Party. So does the pattern of shifts in the party labels by which these nominees and others receiving votes chose to designate themselves. The last formal Progressive Party nominee appeared in 1937 (75 th Congress). After defeats in the following election, the only two remaining Members representing the Progressive Party were reduced to voting for each other for Speaker, and beginning in 1947 (80 th Congress), the last standard-bearer of the tendency accepted the Republican label. The demise of this movement in the House represented the final stage in the establishment of a two-party system at the national level.

From 1945 through 1995 (79 th -104 th Congresses), only the official nominees of the two major parties received votes for Speaker. This pattern, in other words, persisted from the end of World War II and the advent of the "modern Congress" until after the Republicans had regained the majority in the 104 th Congress (1995-1996) after four decades as the minority party. During this period, the presumption became firmly established that a Member's vote for Speaker will reliably reflect his or her party membership.

The opening of the 105 th Congress in 1997, accordingly, marked the first time since 1943 that anyone other than the two major party candidates received votes for Speaker. In 10 of the 13 speakership elections since then (1997-2019), at least one Member has voted for a candidate other than ones formally nominated by the major party conferences. Early in this period, votes cast for other candidates seem to have usually reflected specific circumstances and events, but in the most recent instances, some of them may be regarded as reflecting action by identifiable political factions or groupings. During this period, only in the initial election of 2015 have the names of any candidates other than those of the party conferences been formally placed in nomination.

The ballots in 1997, 2013, 2015 (both instances), and 2019 were also notable because votes were cast for candidates who were not Members of the House at the time. In the initial election in 2015, two of the votes cast were for sitting Members of the Senate; in 2019, one such ballot was cast. Although the Constitution does not require the Speaker (or any other officer of either chamber) to be a Member, the Speaker has always been so; it is not known that any votes for individuals other than Members to be Speaker had ever previously been cast in the history of the House.

Notably, in 2001, a Member who bore the designation of one major party voted for the nominee of the other. Although the table below does not indicate the party affiliation of the Members voting for each candidate, examination of other available records confirms that no such action had occurred at least for the previous half century.