Seven hours into a marathon bill markup this month, Republicans on the House finance committee seemed borderline slap-happy.
Typically mild-mannered Rep. Zach Nunn (R-Iowa) tossed a stack of amendments proposed by Democrats into a recycling bin and kicked it. Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) ripped her copies into pieces and laughed at private jokes with Nunn and Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.).
Then it was McClain’s turn to talk, and her demeanor shifted. “I want to address Ms. Pressley’s personal attack,” she said.
More than an hour earlier, when McClain was not in the room, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) had read aloud a letter from a hospice nurse who lives in McClain’s district and was worried that Republican-led Medicaid cuts would hurt her autistic son.
“The American people do not support this bill, and that includes those living in Republican districts,” Pressley had said.
McClain, turning her gaze on Pressley, read curtly from her prepared rebuttal.
“Ms. Pressley knew I was conducting other official business as the highest-ranking elected woman in the House of Representatives,” she said, and “she took advantage of an opportunity to score cheap political points.”
Seizing the chance to lean into the Trump-aligned America First playbook, McClain added snipes about “elitists from Boston” and “extreme liberal policies” sending American jobs overseas.
The episode embodied the dual personas of the House’s newly minted GOP conference chair. At times, McClain’s a personable Midwestern mom of four, far more press-friendly than her predecessor, MAGA firebrand Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.). Other times, she’s every bit the sharp-tongued party defender.
“She plays more of a good soldier propagandist than someone who’s an ideological or policy warrior,” said Michigan political strategist Jeff Timmer, a Lincoln Project adviser who has tracked her rise.
In five years, McClain has climbed from a true political neophyte to a top-tier insider with support both on the Hill and in the White House. She’s the only Republican leader in the House or Senate who began her political career in a post-Trump GOP; she didn’t mold herself to fit into the Trump wave — she was born of it. And like President Donald Trump himself, she leveraged her reputation as an outsider.
Her new leadership job gives her a key voice shaping the party’s message, and a central role defending the House GOP’s three vulnerable Michigan incumbents — not to mention the few dozen other incumbents and challengers who will determine whether Republicans keep or grow their House majority.
It’s only been five months since McClain assumed the top GOP conference role, and she won’t offer hints about what comes next. But the job has been a political launching pad for heavy hitters in the past, including former Vice President Mike Pence, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), and President Gerald Ford.
And it was notable that only she and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) flanked Trump as he spoke to the media before a closed-door meeting with House Republicans last week.
Given her broad relationships and lack of enemies in the House, some see McClain on the speaker short list if Johnson falls prey to an ouster like the one that ended Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s tenure in 2023.
“You saw how quickly her team ramped up their structure and their ability to put out information and talking points and all that kind of stuff,” said conference Vice Chairman Blake Moore (R-Utah), whom McClain leapfrogged in leadership when she became chairwoman. “She does exceptionally well.”
Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell, a fellow Michigander, says McClain’s a good friend willing to “talk turkey” despite their political disagreements.
“She understands the importance of relationships,” said Dingell.
‘Aw, Don’t do that’
Jumping into a House primary against a more well-established candidate in 2020 wasn’t the first big career risk for McClain.
After more than a decade at American Express, the financial executive from Romeo, Michigan, partnered with fellow employees to quit, Jerry Maguire-style, and launch the financial planning firm Hantz Group in 1998. The company now has 20 offices and more than 600 employees.
McClain was founder John Hantz’s “right-hand person,” according to Tim Nash, an economics professor who taught them both at Northwood University, a small, business-focused college in central Michigan.
In 2019, Nash got a call from McClain. She told him she was considering a run for Congress.
“I said, ‘Aw, don’t do that,” Nash recalled in an interview.
But McClain was determined. She said her family often talked at the dinner table about all the ways Washington was broken, gridlocked and filled with career politicians. McClain’s daughter had encouraged her to do something about it.
Nash became an informal campaign adviser. Multiple times before the primary, McClain drove to see him in Midland for a refresh on “a lot of economic topics, from international trade, public policy to general macroeconomics, general monetary theory,” Nash said. He prepared books and binders for her, and she asked a lot of questions.
“She’s the kind of person that she’s curious on every subject because she wants to do the right thing,” Nash said.
McClain officially kicked off her congressional campaign in October 2019 with $250,000 of her own money. At the time, she was seen as a longshot to replace Rep. Paul Mitchell, a Trump critic who left the Republican party before retiring.
Michigan politicos expected State Rep. Shane Hernandez — endorsed by Mitchell, the conservative Club for Growth and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) — to glide to a win. That changed with McClain, who portrayed herself as the “Trump candidate” in the race.
In a July 2020 ad, she highlighted Hernandez’s early reluctance to support Trump in the 2016 primary. Her campaign later posted on YouTube a 30-minute audio clip of Hernandez boosters accusing McClain of supporting Democrats, under the title “Unbelievable.”
“Politics can be nasty,” read the lone comment posted under the clip, a not-so-subtle jab at her opponent.
At campaign rallies, McClain touted her experience as a businesswoman. She hammered Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, over her Covid-19 social-distancing policies; McClain said that she, like other private business owners, should be allowed to decide when to open her office.
But McClain’s main selling point was her position as an outsider with zero political ties or baggage. She promised to be a disruptor, breaking political convention in favor of free markets and small government.
Hernandez had legitimate conservative bona fides — he was an early Tea Party activist. But just his few years in the state legislature gave McClain enough ammunition to paint him as a swamp creature and part of the problem in politics.
“The establishment is desperate — they want their man,” she said in a straight-to-camera video before the primary, leveraging Hernandez’s mainstream support against him.
That August, she beat Hernandez by about five percentage points in a hugely expensive primary. She hasn’t struggled to win a race since then.
Outsider-Turned-Insider
McClain, 59, now represents the reddest congressional district, Michigan’s 9th, in a purple state that Trump won by a point in 2024 after losing it to Joe Biden in 2020.
She sees Trump’s comeback as inspiration.
“What President Trump did — which I thought was genius — he was able, across all the coalitions, to increase his percentage by a little bit,” McClain said in an interview in her Capitol office. “We do have a diverse conference — way more than people give us credit for. We just don’t highlight them very well.”
As a chief communicator for the party, McClain has made it her mission to highlight Republicans with different backgrounds. She regularly brings lower-profile freshmen like Reps. Troy Downing (R-Mont.) and Abe Hamadeh (R-Ariz.) along for media appearances and has co-authored op-eds with rank-and-file members including Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.).
As part of Republicans’ ongoing efforts to court Hispanic and Latino voters, she hired a press secretary fluent in Spanish, Linoshka Luna, who previously worked for Puerto Rico Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón.
McClain has also taken a hands-on approach to her conference chair role. She’s organized “masterclasses” for members, including one on when and how to talk to the media, led by Reps. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa) and Mark Alford (R-Mo.). McClain also said she’s been active in getting talking points and useful facts to newer members of the conference.
“Just today, she brought me some research that her team had done around the impact in my district, around certain issues,” Rep. Tom Barrett (R-Mich.), a freshman who flipped now-Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s district red last November, said in a March interview. Both Barrett and McClain represent a state where a dominant industry — automakers— anxiously await updates on Trump’s yo-yoing tariff strategy.
McClain wasn’t around for the first Trump administration. Now as a member of her party’s top brass, she’s tasked with helping House Republicans, many of them newly elected, adjust to his second term.
“The speed at which things happen is absolutely no comparison” when it comes to Congress under Trump versus Biden, McClain said. “I will come out of a meeting right now and they’ll say, ‘Did you see what President Trump just did?’”
Some of the swing-district freshmen under McClain’s tutelage, like Barrett, might not be back in 2027 if Trump’s tariff economy spirals and Republicans get the blame. McClain is better positioned to weather the storm.
She hasn’t faced a primary challenger back home since 2022, when attorney Michelle Donovan launched a campaign based in part on supporting term limits to prevent “career politicians.”
That cycle, McClain raised more than $1 million, to Donovan’s roughly $20,000. The GOP incumbent drew from corporate PACs, individual donors, and at least one of her new House colleagues’ campaigns.
The once-scrappy outsider had become an establishment darling. She beat Donovan by more than 57 points.
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