A bold prediction. And Newt favors boldness in his predictions, sometimes to an ill-advised degree.
My best estimate two days before the election is Trump 324 electoral votes Biden 214. The Des Moines Register poll showing Trump winning Iowa 48-41 and the Democracy Institute Poll showing Trump winning popular vote by 1 and swing states by 5 convinced me this will not be close.
— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) November 1, 2020
Seventy seats is his upper bound on GOP gains in November. Watch this to see his lower bound.
Yesterday he told “Fox News Sunday” that he expects the party to flip five or six seats in the Senate as well, which, if true, would give them a chance at a filibuster-proof majority in 2025.
The question of how many seats Republicans will gain is a classic “irresistible force meets immovable object” conundrum. The irresistible force is GOP momentum fueled by inflation and the increasingly real prospect that we are, or will very shortly be, officially in a recession. Republican-friendly pollsters like Trafalgar and Rasmussen already have the GOP up eight to 10 points on the generic ballot, an astonishing margin. Toss in the possibility that we’re headed for another hike in gas prices this fall and there’s simply no limit as to how pissed off voters might be. “It won’t be obvious until October and in October will come crashing down,” Gingrich predicted yesterday. He’s not crazy to think so.
The nearly unanimous sense that the country is on the wrong track under unified Democratic rule is the irresistible force. But there’s an immovable object too — gerrymandering and increased self-sorting by the population along political lines geographically since the last Republican tsunami in 2010. Most of the low-hanging electoral fruit in the House was already picked in 2020; what’s left is more of a reach. Which is why pros like Dave Wasserman are setting an *upper* bound on Republican gains that’s lower than Gingrich’s *lower* bound.
Is the “red wave” ebbing? Probably not much. But as Dems show more signs of life and Rs nominate several problematic candidates, we’re downgrading our @CookPolitical House outlook from a GOP gain of 20-35 seats to 15-30 seats. Full analysis: https://t.co/LozihjYbQz
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) July 22, 2022
A 15-seat gain in the House would easily be enough to flip the House, but after all the hype about a Republican mega-wave that’ll reorder politics for years to come, it’ll feel like a massive disappointment. Which is politically risky for Trump, assuming it’s true that he intends to announce his 2024 candidacy before the midterms. Any sense that the GOP has underperformed at a moment when the former guy is in the spotlight will be blamed on him whether he deserves that blame or not.
There may be forces at work culturally that are helping to buttress the immovable object too. Yesterday Fox News published a poll showing that Democrats are now as likely as Republicans to say they’re motivated to vote in this fall’s elections:
Note which demographic there is the most motivated. It’s Democratic women, which is probably a “Roe effect” at work. The Roe effect isn’t going to prevent a Republican House takeover — the GOP still leads by three on the generic ballot overall in Fox’s poll — but it may leave some of the fruit on the higher branches unplucked, just beyond the right’s grasp.
As for Gingrich’s branding of what’s coming as an “American tsunami” more so than a Republican one, he explained his thinking in an op-ed this morning. With so many voters who have traditionally voted Democratic suddenly open to considering the GOP, he argued, it’s a golden opportunity to expand the party. That means doing some listening and recalibrating accordingly:
Republicans must learn to talk about a New American Majority—not a Republican majority. They must plan, think, and act for the American majority. This requires listening to and learning from a lot of people who have not been historically part of the Republican Party.
This emerging New American Majority requires base broadening—not base mobilization strategies. This is important, because virtually every Washington consultant will reject this idea. But data shows there is a vastly larger majority emerging than Republicans have been used to engaging for the last 90 years. Reaching all of that majority requires new thinking about policy development, language, scheduling, and coalition building…
Getting to an American tsunami requires staying positive and focusing on the cultural and political issues on which the New American Majority can agree. The establishment will do everything it can to draw us into fights that distract us from the areas in which our American majority will dominate. They will seek to focus on gossip, internal tension, or other distractions to minimize our ability to communicate with the New American Majority about issues that bring us together and motivate us to win.
He’s vague about which policies should power this New American Majority except that they should involve “big solutions with broad support.” But he’s also certainly right that many of the working-class voters who are leaning Republican this fall aren’t doing so because they’re particularly enamored of the classically conservative Reaganite agenda. They’re open to the GOP because of bottom-line issues like inflation and crime; Newt’s advice, if I understand him correctly, is to seize on that as a chance to compromise on other cultural disputes that might otherwise leave those voters wary of becoming reliable Republican voters.
It’s sound thinking. There’s just little evidence at the moment that the party’s elected officials share it on the hottest cultural dispute of all, abortion. Red states have moved quickly towards total bans rather than offering the sort of 12-week or 15-week compromise that most voters seem able to live with. Ron DeSantis’s Florida is a notable exception, but I think DeSantis will move towards a stricter ban too once he’s safely past reelection in order to protect his right flank ahead of a presidential run. Last week’s House vote on gay marriage also found three-quarters of the House GOP voting no on an issue that polls at 71 percent nationally. My guess is that Newt himself continues to support a total abortion ban and opposes legal SSM notwithstanding his counsel to the party to build bridges to reluctant Republican voters.
So, I don’t know. He’s right that the GOP will win big this fall, if probably not as big as he hopes. But their strategy for keeping reluctant voters in the fold will likely mirror Democrats’ strategy — namely, trusting the other party to be so terrible once it’s in power that swing voters will eventually run screaming into your camp. It’s “lesser of two evils” elections for us unto eternity.
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