Sen. Josh Hawley was one of six GOP senators who supported mandating seven extra days of paid sick leave for rail workers Thursday, in a vote he said was a litmus test for a party he wants to move in a more populist direction. 

"It really clarifies the stakes for the Republican Party," Hawley, R-Mo., said in an interview with Fox News Digital after the vote. "This is a great example, a great opportunity, for Republicans to say we are for workers over and against all of these other people. And sadly, we didn't take it."

However, Hawley voted to reject the fuller measure to avert the strike – which could have wreaked havoc on the U.S. economy just before Christmas. 

As the potential rail strike loomed, the Senate Thursday took up a House-passed bill which would avert a strike by mandating a contract agreement that was negotiated in September go into effect. That agreement would have granted workers three unpaid sick days as long as employees were provided at least 30 days' notice before the time was taken. 

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However, some transportation unions since have said the deal was unfair and threatened a strike. House lawmakers also passed a measure to tack extra sick days onto the contract agreement, and the Senate Thursday voted on that as an amendment to the underlying bill to avert the strike. 

Hawley and Sens. Mike Braun, R-Ind., Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., John Kennedy, R-La., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., joined almost all Democrats in voting for the sick time for workers. However, with the threshold for that amendment to pass set at 60 votes, the measure failed ahead of a vote on the underlying bill, which passed overwhelmingly. 

"These are working class independent voters, many of them Republican voters, I mean in my state there's over 3,000 of these railroad workers," Hawley said. "These are people who live very conservative lives, and they just want to have a chance to earn a good living."

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"Are you for working people or not?" Hawley said. "My feeling is that if the Republican Party is going to be a majority party in this country, we have to be for working people."

Many lawmakers who opposed adding the paid sick leave said they were concerned about whether it was Congress' role to step into labor disputes like this one. 

"While I am sympathetic to the concerns union members have raised, I do not believe it is the role of Congress to renegotiate a collective bargaining agreement that has already been negotiated," Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who was the only Democrat to vote against the paid sick leave, said.

"I am very glad that the two sides got together to avoid a shutdown which would have been devastating for the American people, for the American economy, and so many workers across the country." Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said.

When asked if he sees any movement from the upper echelons of Congressional leadership moving towards the GOP becoming the working-people party he advocates for, Hawley said, "No." 

"At lunch yesterday… I just made the point that if we're going to ask independent working class people to vote for us… we've actually got to do something that is good for them," Hawley said. "We ought to be the party that is for that, and we shouldn't be the party that is defending the suits and defending the multinational corporations and defending the C-suite."

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis commented on the Republican Party's "huge underperformance" in the midterm elections at a press conference on Thursday, giving reasons why his re-election victory was dominant while the GOP nationwide captured just a slim House majority and failed to take the Senate.

DeSantis, who has been hailed by some Republicans as the new "head of the party" after his nearly 20-point landslide win, was asked for his thoughts on former President Trump being back in the news every day and perceived divisions in the GOP. The governor, who may challenge Trump in 2024, did not comment on his would-be primary opponent but did push back on the notion that Republicans are divided.

"We assumed we were going to end up with like 245 House members, we're at 222 it looks like, which is a huge underperformance," DeSantis said. "The question is, you know, why did that happen?" 

He observed that historic trends favored Republicans and that President Biden's unpopularity and widespread belief that the country is headed in the wrong direction should have led to big GOP gains in Congress. 

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"Usually those voters are going to want to vote for people that are offering an alternative, and yet some of those voters throughout the country, not in Florida, but throughout the country, even though they disapproved of Biden, even though they disapproved of the direction of the country, they still didn't want to vote, you know, for some of our candidates," DeSantis said.

"I don’t think it’s a question of necessarily being divided as a party, I think it’s like, OK, how do you run and win majorities?" he continued. 

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"I think what we’ve done in Florida is we’ve shown that we’ve exercised leadership, we’ve not kowtowed, we’ve been willing to take on big interests … but producing results, and then that ends up attracting more people to want to be on your team," DeSantis said. "That was not something that was happening throughout the rest of the country." 

While the governor has kept silent on his future ambitions, DeSantis fueled speculation that he intends to run for president with the upcoming release of an autobiography titled, "The Courage to Be Free: Florida's Blueprint for America's Revival." 

DESANTIS RECEIVES MULTIPLE STANDING OVATIONS AT FIRST MAJOR GOP 2024 CATTLE CALL

The publishers said that the book "will center on critical issues that brought [DeSantis] to the center of the debate over the future of our country. He shares his thinking from when he was fighting back against COVID mandates and restrictions, critical race theory, woke corporations" and what they describe as "the partisan legacy media." They added that the memoir will chronicle what they call "his bold, substantial policy achievements."

While Trump, who launched his third White House run two weeks ago, is considered the clear front-runner in the GOP nomination race, DeSantis has seen his poll numbers in 2024 Republican presidential surveys start to rival Trump's, and his fundraising prowess matches the former president's.

Fox News' Andrew Murray and Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.