House Majority Whip Tom Emmer said the secret to being an effective whip lies in finding the right balance between being personable and intentional.
“It’s part social and it’s part strategic,” Emmer told NOTUS’ Reese Gorman on the latest episode of the On NOTUS podcast. “The social part is you got to get to know everybody. I like people, I like to figure out what makes them tick, what is their motivation — that’s always been fun for me. The other part of it is strategic: What are we trying to accomplish?”
“We’re doing the art of the possible,” Emmer said.
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Emmer, 64, said he never could’ve imagined himself as the third-highest-ranking Republican in the conference when he started his career in politics with a run for the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2004.
“Now I must say, what I really envisioned is I just want to be a good teammate,” Emmer said. “I want to be the teammate that you rely on when you need something, I want to be the teammate that you trust, and I think everything that I’ve done since I came to Congress is all about that.”
Emmer’s job is to understand how each of the conference’s 220 Republicans will vote on any given piece of legislation. House Speaker Mike Johnson can only lose three members on any party-line vote, and several members of the conference have had a strained relationship with leadership throughout the second Trump administration.
Regardless of how closely aligned a member is with leadership or the Trump administration, Emmer takes a different approach with all of them, he said.
“There are some that will communicate differently than others; some are very aggressive, some are very passive, but you’ve got to respect each and every one of them,” Emmer said. “You can’t assume just because someone is not as aggressive as another member, that their opinion isn’t just as important, because they might tell you to go pound sand if you don’t talk to them.”
Emmer said he’s “never” been recruited to run for office and described his first campaign as one he “had to go earn.”
“The campaign part was interesting because I didn’t know how to do it,” Emmer recalled. “I just did a bunch of palm cards, I would take my kids who would be old enough to walk with me and go door-to-door.”
The ideal candidate, Emmer said, must have an it factor about them.
“I can tell within the first five minutes if this is somebody that should be running for office. It’s just a weird thing,” Emmer said. “Whatever it is, you got to have it. And you know when someone doesn’t have it and you can tell when somebody might have it.”
In each weekly episode of On NOTUS, host Reese Gorman sits down with lawmakers to talk about what inspired them to come to Washington. You can download or listen here.
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