John Thune likes to be liked.
So it is a bit uncomfortable for him, as the gregarious Senate majority leader from South Dakota, to be the subject of an outpouring of conservative venom for his resistance to mounting an old-school filibuster to try to force through a voter identification law that President Trump is demanding.
Mr. Thune says the votes just aren’t there for the legislation, which is headed to the floor as soon as next week.
“For better or worse, I’m the one who has to be the cleareyed realist about what we can achieve here,” Mr. Thune said on Tuesday, as he threw cold water on the idea of a momentous and time-consuming floor showdown over the election-related bill called the SAVE America Act.
Unfortunately for Mr. Thune, who finds his Republican majority under increasing midterm threat in the second year of his stewardship, the standard Senate strategy for handling a bill that lacks enough votes to advance — forcing a show vote to put opponents on the record saying no — is not enough to satisfy the president or the bill’s fervid supporters. They have instigated a firestorm of pressure online in an effort to push the majority leader to wage a bigger battle.
“They are such weenies that they won’t even try,” said Cleta Mitchell, a longtime conservative election lawyer who has been among those regularly castigating Mr. Thune on social media, along with the billionaire Elon Musk and Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff. “It is a lack of spine and a lack of leadership. Our guys won’t fight.”
The fierce intraparty feud has created the first significant blowback of Mr. Thune’s tenure as majority leader, much of which has been spent trying to maneuver carefully between a president who insists that he always get his way, the interests of his politically endangered majority and his own pledge to protect the legislative filibuster at all costs.
Mr. Trump has so far shied from a direct assault on the majority leader despite some past tension between the two. He did, however, name-check Mr. Thune sotto voce during the State of the Union last month as he urged him to pass the bill over solid Democratic opposition.
“We have to stop it, John,” the president said, referring to what he groundlessly claimed was a Democratic plan to steal the midterm elections.
But if the president has mostly gone easy on Mr. Thune, it seems as though virtually everyone else in his orbit has the majority leader in their sights. That includes Mr. Musk, who is using his platform X to warn of electoral Armageddon in November if the bill dies.
Almost anything the majority leader’s office posts on social media — even something as innocuous as expressing support for the troops fighting in the Middle East or urging on South Dakota teams in their upcoming college basketball tournaments — draws a torrent of replies attacking him for not going all out on the measure.
“The people DON’T care about YOU posting encouragement to teams,” one X user immediately responded. “WE WANT YOU TO DO YOUR JOB.”
Mr. Thune’s colleagues do not envy him. But they say he is representing the will of the majority of his conference and is taking the heat for them.
“John Thune has the toughest job in Washington, and I think he is doing just fine,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina and one of those backing Mr. Thune in his resistance to mounting round-the-clock debate to force through the voter bill over Democratic objections with a simple majority. “He, quite honestly, is taking on a lot for the members.”
The president has added a host of new complications to the already complex situation. He has said he will not sign any new legislation at all until Congress delivers him the SAVE Act, which requires state-approved identification when voting, proof of citizenship to register and a federal review of voters rolls to purge potentially ineligible voters. Mr. Trump also wants to add a measure that would prohibit most voting by mail and add some transgender bans — an issue that played well politically for him and Republicans in 2024.
The bill has also gotten caught up in a crucial Senate primary contest in Texas, with Mr. Trump pushing for approval of the bill as a condition of endorsing Senator John Cornyn, the Republican in a battle royale with Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, who is challenging Mr. Cornyn from the right. Mr. Paxton has said he will drop out of the race and clear the field for Mr. Cornyn only if the SAVE Act passes.
On Wednesday, Mr. Cornyn announced in an op-ed that he was changing his longtime position and would support a rules change to upend the filibuster if necessary to pass the SAVE Act.
“It is time for our Senate Republican conference, led by our strong and strategic majority leader John Thune, to retake the initiative, rebuild momentum and get results,” Mr. Cornyn wrote in The New York Post, putting the onus on Mr. Thune.
Despite the change of heart by Mr. Cornyn, who unsuccessfully challenged Mr. Thune for the top Republican post in the Senate, Mr. Thune says that sufficient senators are opposed to any rules change that it would be futile to pursue what proponents call a talking filibuster. That would not lead to passage of the legislation while conceivably tying up the Senate for weeks or months.
“We don’t have the votes either to proceed — get on — a talking filibuster, nor to sustain one if we got on it,” Mr. Thune said on Tuesday. “It is just a function of math, and there isn’t anything I can do about that.”
At their private lunch on Tuesday, Republican senators debated how to move forward on the legislation. Several expressed strong reservations about meeting Mr. Trump’s demand to restrict voting by mail, which has been beneficial to their own election success, attendees said.
In addition, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and former majority leader, made the case that those pushing the bill were trying to do the same thing the G.O.P. objected to Democrats doing four years ago, when they attempted unsuccessfully to go around the filibuster to push through voting legislation that would have set federal rules on a process that has historically been left to the states.
Mr. McConnell’s comments were noteworthy not only for his deep opposition to the bill, but also because they reflected a profound difference in leadership style from his successor. In his long tenure, Mr. McConnell embraced the role of the bad guy and relished criticism, as reflected in a wall in his office filled with hostile editorial cartoons.
Mr. Thune, who has always been well liked, is not so amenable to being portrayed as the problem. He has shown flashes of frustration, deriding the attacks on him as the work of the “paid influencer ecosystem”— a remark that drew backlash of its own from the right.
At the moment, Mr. Thune seems content to bring up the bill and let the Democrats block it, a time-honored Senate strategy that usually would allow the Republicans to attack Democrats for standing in the way of provisions such as requiring identification to vote, which polls show to be widely supported.
Yet without a more strenuous effort, Mr. Thune is likely to continue taking a public shellacking from his own party.
He says there is only so much he can do.
“I can guarantee the debate,” he said. “I can guarantee a vote. I just can’t guarantee an outcome.”
Carl Hulse is the chief Washington correspondent for The Times, primarily writing about Congress and national political races and issues. He has nearly four decades of experience reporting in the nation’s capital.
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