Ex-McCarthy Aide Writes Book on Speaker Elections, Predicts Republicans Net Eight House Seats Through Redistricting

The Book

John Leganski was in the room. As Kevin McCarthy's floor director and later deputy chief of staff, he watched the 2023 Speaker election unfold — the first multi-ballot Speaker election in a century and the longest since the Civil War, according to Leganski's account in a Breitbart News Saturday interview.

Now he's written a book about it: Glory, Grief, and the Gavel: An Inside Guide to Running for Speaker of the House. The publication date was not confirmed in the Breitbart interview.

Leganski's pitch for why the Speaker's race deserves a book is straightforward. The U.S. has had 56 Speakers compared to 47 presidencies, but almost all the political literature focuses on the White House. The Speaker's election gets almost no serious scholarship despite being, in his words, "the most fascinating election in American politics."

You need 218 votes to hold the third-highest office in the country. Every one of those votes is cast by a fellow member of your own party, in public, on the House floor. There's no secret ballot, no primary electorate, no general public. It's 218 individual relationships, and every defection is personal.

What the 2023 Fight Actually Looked Like

Leganski describes two Speaker runs he was part of: a 2015 campaign where McCarthy ran and came up short, and the 2023 campaign where he eventually prevailed. He describes "all the back-and-forth with our members during that week" as central to the story he wants to tell.

The Breitbart interview did not address the subsequent end of McCarthy's speakership. The book may cover it; the interview simply didn't go there.

The 2026 Prediction

When host Matthew Boyle asked for advice to current Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Leganski pivoted to electoral forecasting.

"I think Republicans are going to hold the House and defy history," Leganski told Breitbart. His reasoning centers on redistricting. "My estimates show that we can net eight seats from re-districting alone."

He acknowledged the process has been contentious — "messy in some areas" with what he called "member on member violence" in Republican conference fights over maps. But he argues the net result favors Republicans going into the 2026 midterms.

Leganski is aware he is framing his outlook as defying history. Whether redistricting gains can fully offset the traditional midterm drag is a legitimate empirical question, and his eight-seat estimate is his own projection, not a figure sourced to an independent analyst or mapping organization.

His broader advice to Republican leadership: trust your candidates and fully fund them. Don't cede ground to Democrats anywhere on the map.

What's Still Unanswered

The single source here — a Breitbart promotional interview for Leganski's own book — has an obvious limitation. Leganski is selling something, and Breitbart is a friendly venue. The interview does not include any pushback on his redistricting math, no independent cartographer or elections analyst weighing in on the eight-seat figure, and no examination of Democratic redistricting offsets in other states.

The book itself, once published, will be the more substantive test of whether Leganski's insider account adds something to the public's understanding of House power that the presidential-obsessed political press corps has largely ignored.