Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Tina Nguyen.

Even though Marjorie Taylor Greene’s attempt to remove him as speaker exploded on the launchpad, there’s been barely any respite for poor Mike Johnson, who’s now being bombarded with the narrative that several Republicans are waiting in the wings to replace him, whether or not they succeed in keeping the House in November. The latest installment of the never-ending saga, below.

But first…

• Tucker’s audience shrinkage: The conservative media ecosystem has been riveted, these past few weeks, by dueling microdramas involving some of the industry’s most prominent microcelebrities. First, a proposed debate between Candace Owens and her former Daily Wire boss Ben Shapiro—on the topic of antisemitism and Israel, naturally—collapsed amid the news that the Daily Wire had placed a gag order on Owens, preventing her from openly disparaging her former employers. Then there was an even more under-the-radar Twitter fight between podcasters Tim Pool and Patrick Bet-David, over who would host a debate between an anti-vaccine comedian and… Chris Cuomo.

  Of course, what these incidents really illustrate is just how small this world can be—especially for former television personalities seeking second acts on digital platforms. Earlier this month, UnHerd, a British analogue to The Free Press, reported that Tucker Carlson’s new, Twitter/X-based media venture, Tucker Carlson Network, has seen declining viewership, from around 100 million impressions per video at launch to around 10-30 million today. No surprise there: UnHerd also cited sources in Carlson’s camp who worry he’s limiting the company’s market potential by leaning into fringe content that turns off viewers, such as his interviews with the MAGA troll “Catturd” or the QAnon shaman. (Yes, the one who raided the Capitol in the Viking hat.) Neither the audience nor the ad dollars are materializing.

  Influencer anxiety is particularly acute on Twitter/X, which Elon Musk promised to transform into a conservative-friendly, advertising- and subscription-driven video platform to rival YouTube. Alas, not even Musk’s thumb on the algorithmic scale has been enough for their content to break into the mainstream. Blue chip advertisers have fled. Many suspect that X is artificially boosting metrics in ways that are unsustainable. And the number of reported “views” on Carlson’s more recent X videos—presumably massively inflated by the uniquely generous way that Musk counts impressions—is far below the exposure he received at launch. (Carlson didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

• Turns out, you can’t buy a U.S. Senate seat: Despite spending somewhere north of $60 million to claim Cardin’s seat, David Trone lost last night to Angela Alsobrooks, a protege of Steny Hoyer. One critique of the Trone campaign was that its strength—the outrageous spending—probably saturated television and direct mail so thoroughly and for so long (he’s been spending like this for a year) that it exhausted voters, just as Alsobrooks kicked her campaign into gear.

  What Alsobrooks lacked in money, she more than made up for with institutional support. EMILY’s List backed her, along with most of the current and future Maryland congressional delegation. Alsobrooks’ closing campaign ad (known in Maryland Democratic circles as “The Avengers ad”) featured Gov. Wes Moore and future senior Sen. Chris Van Hollen, along with legions of other powerful Maryland Democratic officials, including Hoyer.

  A Maryland Democratic source who campaigned on the ground described an undeniable sense that voters wanted women candidates to win on Tuesday. (For progressive a state as Maryland is, it currently has an entirely male delegation.) To wit: April McClain Delaney won her husband John Delaney’s old 6th District, and state Sen. Sarah Elfreth defeated former U.S. Capitol policeman Harry Dunn in the 3rd District.

  The nomination puts Alsobrooks on a track to boost the Senate representation of Black women to two, with Delaware’s Lisa Blunt Rochester all-but-certain to replace retiring Sen. Tom Carper. But there are no assurances for Alsobrooks. Republican former Gov. Larry Hogan’s entrance as a candidate has turned all previous assumptions surrounding this race upside down.

• Run Kyrsten run: In other Hill news, members and staff ran the annual ACLI Capital Challenge race before work today. Per usual, Kyrsten Sinema once again claimed the title of “Fastest Woman in Congress.” But this will be the last time, given her decision to not run for re-election. Texas Democratic freshman Greg Casar was the fastest man, no surprise for a track star from Houston’s Strake Jesuit.

While being a cheerleader at Trump’s trial may keep Johnson in his good graces, his real motivation, of course, was to signal to restless lawmakers back in Washington that he can still straddle the Republican party’s increasingly multiplying factions: the mainline establishment types, dyed-in-the-wool activists among the G.O.P.’s professional class, the MAGA populists who are trying to tear those other groups down, the extremely online influencer class, and so forth. Back in Reagan’s day, the coalition was referred to as a “three-legged stool.” These days, “it’s more of a beanbag,” joked a Johnson aide. “You could sit on it a hundred different ways.”

In any case, Johnson is clearly mounting his own sort of reelection campaign. In recent weeks, I’m told, Johnson has conducted outreach to several activist groups with major muscle inside Washington: the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Tax Reform, Citizens Against Government Waste, and so forth. Even if he hasn’t delivered on their policy wish list, Johnson has already earned their trust thanks to his prior work for the Alliance for Defending Freedom and at Liberty University, marking him as a lifelong ally of the conservative activist class. “McCarthy was widely perceived as less ideologically committed than Johnson,” noted a conservative writer connected to that world. “That meant less benefit of the doubt.” (It also helps that activist social circles are small and tight-knit: Johnson apparently calls people in this crowd directly on a regular basis, to their apparent shock.)

The expedition to Columbia last month was also tactical, of course. Sure, the G.O.P. has always enjoyed some light hippie bashing, and campus protests have been a major source of engagement on Fox News. More importantly, however, it endeared Johnson to pro-Israel interest groups like AIPAC and the Republican Jewish Coalition that have begun spending against anti-Johnson lawmakers in Republican primaries. On April 30, Johnson announced that he would expand investigations into antisemitism on college campuses across multiple congressional committees—Oversight, Energy and Commerce, Science and Tech, Judiciary, Ways and Means, etcetera—with the dual goals of rooting out “woke university presidents” and, presumably, enlarging the House majority next fall.

Johnson, of course, would very much like to expand his margin in November so that he finally has some leverage over Democrats, regardless of who occupies the White House next year. Growing the House majority is a goal he’s “very optimistic” about, I’m told, especially after he survived Greene’s vote-of-no-confidence with overwhelming support from his own caucus (and just enough Democrats). But he would also like to keep his gavel so that he can enjoy that majority: Any set of changes in November—Democrats retaking the House, Republicans taking the Senate, a second Trump or Biden administration—could throw open the doors to Republicans challenging Johnson for leadership. And there are already intimations of potential rivals moving against him.

Both Punchbowl and Axios have run stories in recent weeks talking up hardliner Jim Jordan’s increasingly public angling for a leadership role of some kind, citing his sudden generosity with writing checks to incumbents and his private criticism of Johnson’s tactics. Rep. Tom Cole recently gave an interview to Politico praising Jordan’s effectiveness, newfound gravitas, and even bipartisanship on FISA renewal—perhaps countering his reputation as a bully and Tea Party bomb-thrower.

Johnson faces potential threats from the center of the party, too. It hasn’t escaped notice on Capitol Hill that Steve Scalise, another speaker contender during the 2023 leadership bakeoff, announced that his personal PAC would match every $50,000 donation that House members made to the N.R.C.C., up to a million dollars—a goal he hit within hours. That sort of generosity could certainly be seen as an attempt to flex against Johnson. And it didn’t go unnoticed by the speaker’s office, either. Immediately after Scalise’s announcement, Johnson made it known that he would transfer $4.5 million to the N.R.C.C.—his largest single transfer to the fundraising organization, and the political equivalent of dropping the mic.