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Happy Monday morning. There are 22 days until Election Day.

We spent two days on the road last week with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who’s in a state of perpetual motion at this point in the cycle. This trip took McCarthy to St. Louis, Springfield, Mo., Des Moines, Chicago and Minneapolis. We had access to McCarthy’s private fundraisers and interviewed him on multiple occasions about what a House Republican majority might look like next year. We dug in deep on topics ranging from the vote for speaker to legislating to impeachment. We have a lot of material, so we’ll roll it out over the next few days.

Let’s start with this – Just weeks from Election Day, McCarthy and his political machine feel good about where they stand. Better every day, the 57-year-old California Republican tells crowds in nearly every city he stops in.

McCarthy acknowledges that August was rough for the GOP. The backlash over the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which struck down Roe v. Wade, caused a seismic shift in the political landscape. Gas prices were falling daily, a plus for President Joe Biden and Democrats. And Democrats had left Washington having achieved some solid legislative victories, including passing the Inflation Reduction Act. Democrats had some momentum.

As McCarthy said during a fundraiser in an Italian restaurant in Chicago for Jennifer Ruth-Green of Indiana, “I’ll be frank with you: August was not a good month for us.”

But that pro-Democratic bump ended, and the advantage shifted back to Republicans, McCarthy said. Public polling largely confirms this. With inflation still raging and gas prices ticking up once again, McCarthy said he believes the election will be fought on “the issues … we’ve been talking about.” Here’s McCarthy in Chicago:

McCarthy firmly believes the elections will be waged on more friendly territory for Republicans; just look at the front page of today’s New York Times. The fundamentals are against the Democrats and have been for the last year, the eight-term GOP lawmaker said.

“I look at Democrat incumbents right now,” McCarthy said during the first of several interviews we conducted during the trip. “Any Democratic incumbent that’s sitting at 46 [percent] or less, they’re going to have a really hard time winning. I think they’re in denial.”

The general view inside the House Republican conference is that McCarthy needs a modestly big night on Nov. 8 in order to win the speakership on Jan. 3. There’s always a pocket of lawmakers who vote against their party’s nominee for speaker on the House floor.

But McCarthy is overwhelmingly confident that the conventional wisdom is wrong. In fact, for someone who has been spurned by his party before – McCarthy had to pull out of the race in 2015 in the face of right-wing opposition – his demeanor is surprisingly confident.

McCarthy did allow that it would be “a little hard” for him to win a speaker vote in 2025 if the Republican majority shrinks. But if he can’t win this time, McCarthy said it is “not God’s plan for me to be speaker.”

Being speaker is an incredibly difficult job – especially for Republicans. John Boehner lasted just four years, while Paul Ryan made it three years and some change. McCarthy seems to understand this, noting that “Republicans … make it more difficult than do Democrats.” That’s absolutely true, but there’s only been one Democratic speaker in nearly 30 years, making the comparison a little difficult. Republicans are on their fourth. Nancy Pelosi intimidates Democrats, even scares them. Very few Republicans feared Boehner or Ryan.

The larger question for Congress, the White House and the country is how many Republican lawmakers does McCarthy need to effectively govern. A single-seat margin would make life very difficult for the California Republican. McCarthy made the argument to us that a smaller majority could inspire unity – as it did for Denny Hastert and Tom DeLay in the early 2000s. Pelosi has operated throughout this Congress with a small majority as well.

But McCarthy told us that he would like at least a 10-seat cushion — netting at least15 seats — to account for “real life problems” such as unexpected deaths in the House.

We’ve been covering McCarthy since he ascended to the leadership in 2009. He was chief deputy whip to former Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) before making the jump to majority whip in 2011. And we’ve spilled our fair share of ink on the rivalries inside the GOP leadership. For example, Boehner and Cantor famously did not get along. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), who would be the majority leader in a GOP majority, thought about trying to knock McCarthy out of the leadership in 2018 , something we wrote extensively about in our book about McCarthy and the GOP the following year.

McCarthy said leadership teams fail when the individuals don’t have clear lanes of responsibility, something he is intent on avoiding.

The show: McCarthy told us that after he becomes speaker, he’ll load up a government plane with several dozen House Republican lawmakers and fly somewhere in the middle of the country to talk to Americans about whatever legislation they are about to pass. After the House passes those bills, he’ll go back on the road to try to put pressure on the Senate to pass it. McCarthy has long believed that congressional leaders should think outside the box, and this is an attempt to do so.

There will be much more in our editions this week. Subscribe to Premium to make sure you don’t miss anything.

– Jake Sherman

Today: We’re in Miami to talk to Republican Mayor Francis Suarez about the challenges facing small businesses coming out of the pandemic. Doors open at 9 a.m. ET and we’ll start at 10 a.m. ET. The conversation is the final event in our four-part traveling series, “The Road to Recovery.” RSVP to join us on the livestream or in-person if you’re in Miami!