Even though Newt Gingrich’s political prognostications on some occasions have been spectacularly wrong, he shouldn’t be taken lightly when writing on Jan. 28 for Fox News that President Trump will likely win re-election.
First, the reasons to doubt Gingrich’s perspicacity. On the eve of Election Day in 2012, he predicted Mitt Romney would win “by a landslide” over President Barack Obama. (Not even close.) In 2010, he gave Obama only a 20-percent chance to be re-elected in 2012. (See above.) As late as May 2018, he was predicting Republicans would gain a net of 4-6 Senate seats in the midterm elections. (They gained just two seats, but at least he got the victorious party right this time.) And back in 1998, when he was speaker of the House, all year long he predicted a GOP net gain in the House of 25-30 seats, only to see his caucus actually lose five seats — and himself lose his speakership.
On the other hand, Gingrich did engineer one of the most stunningly successful insurgencies in modern history to lead Republicans to a House majority in 1994, and he did insist throughout 2016 that Trump would win the presidency even when Trump’s poll numbers were awful. One never knows when Newt the Obtuse will become Newt the Astute.
The case Gingrich made this week for Trump’s re-election is that the president’s “devoted base will stick with him,” that a solid economy will boost him, that other Trump accomplishments will begin to be appreciated, and especially that the Democrats keep pushing so far leftward into “craziness” that Middle America will stick with Trump as the comparatively safer, known quantity. Even better for Trump, Gingrich wrote, if a serious third-party candidate (such as Howard Schultz) does run, that candidate “will divide the anti-Trump vote and have no effect on the pro-Trump vote.”
Gingrich makes good points. Candidates don’t run campaigns in a vacuum. They don’t run solely based on their own popularity or lack thereof. Instead, they run against other candidates — ones who may be even more unpopular, or whose proposals turn off voters in just the wrong combinations in just the wrong states. The Democrats’ leftward lurches really are astonishing, and really could cause a backlash against them and thus to Trump’s electoral benefit.
Plus, two years is a lifetime in presidential politics. President George H.W. Bush famously enjoyed 90 percent approval ratings just a year before his would-be re-election date, but suffered ignominious defeat at the ballot box. Trump himself trailed in polls by a consensus of about 6 percentage points until FBI Director James Comey announced 11 days before 2016’s Election Day that he was re-opening the investigation into Hillary Clinton.
As Gingrich specifically noted, President Ronald Reagan’s baseline approval rating in 1983 at the equivalent time in his presidency, 35 percent, was worse even than Trump’s is now. Insightful journalist Lou Cannon, who had covered Reagan closely since the 1960s, issued a biography then that assumed Reagan’s presidency was a noble failure. Former conservative Rep. Mickey Edwards, then the chairman of the American Conservative Union, proffered that same elegiac tone at the Conservative Political Action Conference that February — a wistful, sad note of “well, at least we tried,” amid what was supposed to be a virtual pep rally for the Gipper.
Yet, as Gingrich’s column notes, Reagan went on to win 49 of the 50 states, a remarkable landslide, just two years later.
Many of us wish some Republican other than Trump would be the party’s nominee in 2020 and think another Republican is much more likely to win. But Gingrich’s words are wise: Trump is hardly a goner yet.
