Although McCarthy’s rise to the top job in the House has been so far thwarted, there has been a consistent band of supporters behind him despite the drama.

However, claims on social media suggest that—in contrast to the relatively few fellow Republican members disapproving of him—the GOP’s actual voter base is far less enamored with the party leader.

The Claim

Tweets posted on January 5, 2023, claim that while Kevin McCarthy has majority support from the Republican conference in the House, more than half of GOP voters don’t want him as speaker.

Twitter user Catturd2, whose tweet on the topic received more than 45,000 engagements, stated “90% of the Republican Congress want McCarthy as Speaker. Well over 50% of Republican voters don’t want McCarthy as Speaker. And yet, they arrogantly pretend to represent us.”

Another post, by former Newsmax correspondent Emerald Robinson, said, “What’s happening in Congress is easy to understand: twenty conservative congressmen are trying to force the GOP to represent its actual voters. Meanwhile, the uniparty swamp wants Kevin McCarthy.”

The Facts

Kevin McCarthy’s rocky start to 2023 suggests that he might have trouble handling his caucus should he become speaker, with historically low polling and a groundswell of dissatisfaction already showing before any legislative work has even begun.

However, the figures quoted on social media, if correct, would imply that the frustration with McCarthy cuts somewhat deeper than just a few renegade representatives.

While not stated explicitly in the tweet, the data the claims are most likely based on comes from a Rasmussen poll conducted this week that asked 900 U.S. “likely voters” whether McCarthy should be elected speaker.

Its data, shared with Newsweek, shows that just 48 percent of the subsection of respondents who identified as Republican thought McCarthy should be chosen as speaker. Twenty-nine percent of respondents disagreed, while 23 percent said they didn’t know.

The same response corresponded with one of the other poll’s measures, “Ideology,” with only 47 percent of people saying they were “Conservative” approving of McCarthy for the role.

Results on similar metrics from late 2022 don’t fall too far from these, suggesting that Republican voters have not exactly embraced McCarthy, even as he emerged as a clear favorite to become the next speaker.

As reported by FiveThirtyEight, a late November 2022 national poll by Deseret News/HarrisX found that Republican voters were evenly split on whether he should remain as party leader (and thus, by extension, the House majority’s pick for speaker), with only 33 percent agreeing he should continue. Another poll the same month by The Economist/YouGov slightly improved on the numbers, with 39 percent saying he should remain leader.

Further, the YouGov poll found just 45 percent of Republicans viewed him favorably, similar to the Rasmussen results on whether he should be made speaker.

One caveat here is the sample size: Rasmussen spoke to about 300 GOP voters (33 percent of the stated 900 respondents). We don’t know how well these people might represent GOP voters more broadly and, arguably, closed questions might have missed out on other important details relevant to those opinions.

Additionally, if the tweet by Catturd2, stating that more than half of GOP voters didn’t want McCarthy as speaker, was based on the Rasmussen results, it may be deemed misleading. While only 48 percent said they approved of him becoming speaker, of the remaining respondents, 23 percent gave no clear answer.

A lack of response doesn’t necessarily mean that all of those voters “don’t want” McCarthy as speaker, so the “well over 50 percent” claim is inaccurate.

Nonetheless, the most recent numbers and data recorded even before the House voting began, might give some food for thought to Republicans assessing their options as the race for the speaker’s chair drags on.

Newsweek reached out to McCarthy for comment.

The Ruling

Misleading.

It appears that this claim is based on one recent poll, in which less than half of 300 likely GOP voters said that they approved McCarthy for the role of speaker.

Other polling regarding his popularity conducted in November 2022 also suggested that he has struggled to find broad appeal among Republican voters.

However, if the claims made on Twitter that more than half of GOP voters do not want him as speaker are based on the most recent poll, then those claims are misleading. Only 29 percent of respondents from the most recent survey data explicitly opposed McCarthy’s candidacy, while about one-quarter of those polled could not provide a yes or no answer.

Newsweek Fact Check has not found any other recent polling, focused around the specific topic of selecting the speaker, that would have shown opposition to McCarthy among the GOP faithful at anywhere close to 50 percent.

FACT CHECK BY Newsweek’s Fact Check team