Good morning. I'm playbook co-author Rachel Bade. It's Wednesday, October 11th. So who's it going to be,

Speaker Scalise, or Speaker Jordan? Or maybe neither. This morning, we should start to get a pretty good

clue. House Republicans are going to be gathering at 10 a.m. to choose McCarthy's successor.

And we spent all yesterday checking in with allies of the two speaker hopefuls.

Oddly enough, both camps seem to be confident that their candidate is ahead and will win.

This doesn't necessarily mean one side is lying because the tricky part of today's nomination process is that the vote will be done by

secret ballot. That means that people can tell candidates they're going to vote one way and then

totally vote the opposite way. But we can't be sure about one thing today. While this vote is not

going to be the final word on the speaker's race, it's a pretty safe bet that if somebody wins the

nomination today, that person is probably

going to be the next speaker, at least eventually. Yes, we're probably going to see conservatives

and moderates, potentially for that matter, threatened to withhold support from whoever is the nominee

on the floor for concessions. But once a candidate gets the official nod from the conference,

this all becomes sort of a matter of wheeling and dealing.

I do think it's important to note that few Republican lawmakers have actually come out insisting that they will not ever back Scalice or Jordan on the floor, as several members had done with Kevin McCarthy.

And that means that once a nominee is named, this all becomes a

matter of negotiation. The question, of course, is when will we see a nominee? And that's a big

question right now, given that there is a last-minute push for a rules change to try to raise the

threshold to win the GOP nomination. Now, typically, Republicans win the speakership nomination when

they garner a simple majority of the Republican conference. But right now, there's a push by

some Jordan and McCarthy allies to actually raise that temporarily to say that the nominee has to

get 217 votes before going to the floor. The idea, according to supporters, is pretty simple. Have Republicans

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