House Speaker Mike Johnson is relying on faith to maintain the Republican majority.

BANGOR, Maine (AP) — Ever the optimist, Speaker Mike Johnson said he believes Republicans will maintain their majority in the House of Representatives, defying rising Democratic momentum in the final stretch of the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.

These are the crowds he says he sees as he travels across the country campaigning for Republican candidates. He calls the caliber of recruits and starters workhorses, not show horses. And nearly half a billion he raised for House Republicans.

He also has faith.

“We run to win, and it’s biblical: You run to win,” he told The Associated Press during a campaign stop in Maine.

“And I believe we will.”

The Speaker of the House is one of the most consequential elected officials in the United States, second in line to the President. While Johnson recently joked on Fox News that he might return to his hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana, to start a lawn care business if Republicans lose power on Nov. 3, he hopes to buck an American midterm tradition that often sees the president’s party abandoned in Congress.

Arguably, Johnson, who has grown so close to President Donald Trump that he regularly fields calls at 1 a.m. — they spoke the night before while Trump was rallying in Alaska — is walking on the sunny side of the street. That’s despite voters’ frustration with high prices and the war in Iran, as well as his own challenge of leading one of the narrowest majorities in the House of Representatives in modern times.

During his three years as president, Johnson rose above skeptics and naysayers, maintaining his razor-thin Republican majority to implement Trump’s agenda. Notably, he led the passage of the tax relief and social service cuts bill. Most of the time, he doesn’t have a single vote to spare.

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“So many times everyone had been written off, they had no chance of getting a particular vote,” said Republican Rep. Mark Harris of North Carolina, who joined the speaker on the campaign trail. “Yet it always seems like he ends up victorious.”

In the interview, Johnson did not speak brazenly about expanding the House majority on Election Day, as he has in the past. But set to visit more than 20 states and 40 congressional districts through November, he said the political mood reminds him of the 2024 elections that brought Republicans into control of Congress and the White House.

“It’s not going to be a huge majority,” he said. “But I sincerely believe that we will have an active majority.”

Accidental Speaker Emboldens in Front of Trump

Johnson rose to the office of president almost by accident, a desperate choice by his fellow Republicans after a contingent of renegade Republicans ousted his predecessor, then-Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., in 2023.

Johnson had been a lower-level member of House leadership but distinguished himself before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by organizing support for Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud in the election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

Since then, Johnson has secured proximity to Trump’s power. He joined Trump at a UFC fight in New York and once gave the president a president’s gavel as Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” into law. It was a symbolic act, but one that critics saw as an abandonment of the authority of a co-equal branch of government.

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Most recently, Johnson abruptly sent lawmakers home rather than face a forced vote by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as lawmakers attempted to end the war in Iran, which was not authorized by Congress.

Over coffee in Bangor, after rallying around House candidate Paul LePage, a former governor, Johnson brushed aside criticism that Congress had eroded under his watch as Trump worked to amass executive power.

“It’s absolutely absurd,” Johnson said.

“We have not ceded Article 1 authority to the President,” referring to the powers set forth in the Constitution. “We used ours,” he said, to reinforce the Republican Party’s priorities in the face of Democratic opposition.

As House majority wavers, Trump’s agenda is under threat

Johnson focused the election on Democrats whom he presented as “communists.” A handful of far-left liberals, supported by the Democratic Socialists of America, are in the running.

U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader of the House of Representatives who is in line to receive the president’s gavel if his party gains power, is preparing an agenda for the first 100 days for when the new Congress meets in January, in the event of a change of control.

What Republicans will do if they retain power is less defined.

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“A lot of the projects,” Johnson said, “are along the same lines as what we’ve been doing: less taxes, less regulations.”

Trump “wants to think big for his legacy,” he said. “We have big things on the horizon that we can achieve.”

The president essentially purged the ranks of the House Republican Party of those perceived to be disloyal. Among them are Massie, who lost her primary, and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who retired early after breaking with Trump following the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Pressed on how he would keep Republicans in line, Johnson said he was preparing to change the House rules if he returned as president.

“There will be changes that will make the machines run more smoothly,” he said.

Pray for the speaker and the country

Faith has often been strong among parliamentary leaders. Two former speakers, Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich, are Catholic, as is John Boehner, who invited Pope Francis to address Congress.

Johnson, a former constitutional lawyer first elected alongside Trump in 2016, is expected to be re-elected next month.

“My faith is a major component of how I think, act and what I do,” said Johnson, who led a public prayer on the National Mall as part of the nation’s 250th anniversary.

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He drinks a lot of coffee these days, he said, keeping the Celsius temperature down, and still has 1,413 unread text messages, down slightly from the appalling figure reported a few months ago by the Wall Street Journal.

A text comes from someone praying for him.

Johnson said he is grateful for the outpouring of prayers he is receiving, for himself and for the country.

“I pray for God’s will. And I believe God’s will is that we — not the communists — be in charge of America,” Johnson said.

“And it says in the New Testament that you must run to win,” he said, citing 1 Corinthians 9:24. “It’s a biblical warning. So we will do it.”