Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has been in politics for decades, and never has an election bewildered him as much as the 2022 midterms.
“I’ve never been as wrong as I was this year,” Gingrich, an Epoch Times contributor, said on Nov. 10.
“It makes me challenge every model I’m aware of, and realize that I have to really stop and spend a good bit of time thinking and trying to put it all together.”
People from both sides of the aisle were projecting substantial losses for the Democratic Party amid rising discontent over inflation, the economy, and crime. But that expected red wave didn’t happen.
The Senate is currently a tossup. And with 211 House seats won against the Democrats’ 192, the GOP is still poised to take charge of the lower chamber when Congress convenes in the new year, but with less leverage than initially hoped.
Gingrich, having previously expressed confidence that his party would score sweeping gains in both chambers, is, like many others, at a loss trying to explain what went awry.
He pointed to a vote tracking sheet by the Cook Political Report, a bipartisan newsletter that analyzes elections, which shows a roughly 50.7 million Republican turnout for the House—outnumbering Democratic votes by nearly 6 million.
Gingrich noted this gap could shrink to 5 million when ballots in deep blue California are fully processed. “But it’s still 5 million more votes,” he said.
“And not gaining very many seats makes you really wonder what’s going on,” he added. “I want to know, where did those votes come from?”
It was a puzzle that the former speaker hasn’t been able to solve.
Questions and Inconsistencies
Part of what made a difference in this race was how the incumbent lawmakers have fared. In both the 2020 and 1994 House elections, no Republican incumbents lost seats to their Democratic challengers, and ousted 13 and 34 Democrats respectively. Had the same scenario played out, “we’d be six or seven seats stronger than we are now,” he said.
By Eva Fu
