House lawmakers held a third round of voting on Tuesday following two earlier failed votes. In the first two rounds, 19 Republican members voted against McCarthy, while 20 voted against him in the third.
Republicans won a slim 222-212 majority in the House in the November midterm elections, leaving the party a four-vote margin to rally the 218 total votes needed to elect a speaker behind a single nominee.
The incident marks the first time in a century that the House has failed to elect a speaker in the initial vote. A total of 14 speaker votes have required multiple ballots, with lawmakers taking nearly two months and 133 ballots to select a speaker in the mid-1850s.