Newt Gingrich examines the evolution of conservatism

This is a rush transcript from "Life, Liberty & Levin," October 28, 2018. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

MARK LEVIN, HOST: Hello, America. I'm Mark Levin. This is "Life, Liberty & Levin." We have a great guest. Speaker Newt Gingrich. How are you, sir?

NEWT GINGRICH, FORMER SPEAKER OF THE UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES: Good to be with you.

LEVIN: Pleasure. Whole hour? How often do you get that?

GINGRICH: Not very.

LEVIN: Well, I don't need to introduce you, everybody knows who you are. But I want to talk first before we get into the election because I think it's a crucial election, there are certain issues I want to talk about. Certain candidates I want to talk about. The media and so forth, but before we do, I think a little background is useful.

You're a historian and Donald Trump, I would argue is one of the most conservative Presidents we've had in modern history. Now he may not be a conservative, you know, based on philosophy, but I think he's a conservative as a result of common sense, and his background as a developer and so forth.

But also it's part of a trajectory. Explain this trajectory over the last several decades of conservatism and conservative victories.

GINGRICH: Well, what had happened was that the Roosevelt-era Democrats created the modern system, the bureaucracy, centralized power, a whole set of values compounded by Eisenhower making a huge mistake in appointing Earl Warren and leading to a much more radical court that anybody can imagine.

So by the early 1960s, you had a reaction building in the country. It said, the government is too big, our policy against the Soviet Union is too weak, our taxes are too high and frankly, we don't want Washington running our lives.

The guy who personified that was Barry Goldwater and he wrote a little book called "Conscience of a Conservative," which came out in paperback, and I was a college student at the time, and it just swept the country. I mean, it really created a generation of Goldwater supporters who saw really him to sort of personify a new way of thinking about things.

He was very important because he broke the establishment's grip on the Republican Party. He lost badly in the general election to Johnson, who probably was going to win anyway because John F. Kennedy had been assassinated and weren't going to change presidents twice that quickly, but Goldwater sort of planted the flag, and ironically in defeat, he asked Ronald Reagan to make a nationwide speech in October of '64.

And so, in a way the conservative flag was passed from Barry to Ronnie at that moment. Reagan's speech was electrifying and he went onto become governor of California, and I would argue that there's a continuum that starts with Goldwater, goes to Reagan that in many ways Nixon and all the traditional Republicans are place holders.

Just as later on the Bushes would be place holders, because they don't actually understand the long-term trajectory of conservatism. Reagan comes along, oddly becomes a very consequential president in three ways, defeating the Soviet empire, which is an enormous achievement. One of the greatest strategic victories of all time because he did it without a war.

Relaunching the American economy, getting people to feel good about being entrepreneurs and really focus on American civic culture. In fact, in his farewell address, he says one of his great sadness was that they had not driven home American history enough. But he was trying to rebuild the sense of being American.

You then have a period that were the doldrums and we come along with a contract with America and for the first time in 40 years, the Republicans win the House. We impose a balanced budget for four straight years, we imposed welfare reform. We have a number of other reforms. Bill Clinton actually comes to the Congress and with a straight face says the era of big government is over.

It was really a pretty remarkable moment, and left scars on the left which Hillary never overcame. I mean, there are a lot of liberals hated what the Clintons did, and then we, again sort of had a period of being in the doldrums and following some policies that frankly didn't work.

I mean, look, I was for the war in Iraq. I certainly for the war in Afghanistan, but you have to look 17 years later and say we haven't figured out how to win these things and along comes Trump, and I agree with you about describing Trump, and as you and I talked about earlier off camera, you have the tea party movement beginning to explode around 2010 because they couldn't grow up against a Republican president but they could rapidly mobilize against the Democratic president.

And so you have a whole new wave of energy, and John Boehner and the House Republicans actually won ten more seats in 2010 than I won in 1994.

LEVIN: Sixty three seats, you got 54 seats.

GINGRICH: Yes, and Boehner did it with a very straightforward simple campaign, where are the jobs? And it just worked. When they came together, the people looked up and said, that's the right question. So we were back in charge of the House again.

And I think people today have no idea how unusual this is. We held the House for two two-year terms between 1930 and 1994, so out of 64 years, we held the House four years. We've now had the House a vast majority of the time since 1994. And along comes Trump, and I agree with you, I tell people I'm not sure he's a conservative but he's the most effective anti- liberal in my lifetime.

And whether it's deregulation or conservative judges or cutting taxes or standing up for an American foreign policy based on American values, every time you turn around, he is instinctively saying things which drive the left crazy, and he's doing it, I think, because of this notion of common sense, and the things he learned a long time ago.

Again, he's old enough, he remembers the values of the post World War II, highly patriotic America, where people love the flag and they love the idea that we were the greatest nation on earth and they love the values of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

So in a lot of ways, he's carrying forward almost as a grandfather, the values of two generations ago and taking head on the left-wing radical values which the academic world, the news media is and Hollywood have tried to impose on the country.

LEVIN: And yet, it seems to me, Newt that he wasn't always this way, it wasn't always coming towards a conservative conclusion. He had a background as a Democrat, as a reform party, he supported - he backed some liberals and I think as he's been President that these things have crystallized for him. That sitting there where the buck stops there, seeing these policies, seeing the impact of the policies or potential impact of the left's policies, using his common sense and using his business background and so forth and he's an incredibly intelligent man and he is sitting there and saying no, that's not right. And when you really think these things through, he comes, and many people come to a conservative perspective.

GINGRICH: I think that's partly true. I think the Donald Trump between 1983 or '84 and as early as the 80s, Oprah Winfrey is asking if he's going to run for president. He was a very young guy at that point. That Donald Trump, I think, was stunningly shallow, and sort of for whatever reform because that's what we're doing, and gradually began to change, and I think that it is watching Obama that drove him to the right, because there is just clearly - in a sense, Bush and the failure to win in Iran and Afghanistan drove him into a harsh critique of American foreign policy.

And Obama's entire approach to policy drove Trump to just say "This is crazy." Remember, years ago, I had the opportunity to spend time with the founder of Singapore who had been the great leader who created a remarkably successful country, and I asked him what was the basis of what he did? He said, "You know, I was a graduate student in Britain during the labor government right after World War II, and every time I would encounter a problem, I'd ask myself, what would Clement Attlee and the socialists do? And I would do the exact opposite. And it worked every time."

And I think, in a sense, Trump came out of Obama years having been driven to a much more practical businessman, commonsense approach and because he wanted to run as a Republican. He began to acquire allies like Dave Bossie and others who were naturally in the conservative movement. Sean Hannity, it's probably in some ways ironically his closest adviser in that period, and you can't do the "Hannity" show once or twice a week and not gradually become a conservative because it just doesn't work.

And then I remember, Callista and I were in the meeting here in Washington and his first visit to Washington as a candidate, where we're sitting around and people, to your point, people were kind of going, "This guy a total opportunist, why would I believe him?" And somebody in the group came up and said, "Why don't we put together a list of ten solid conservatives that you would name to the Supreme Court, so that people can realize here's stability, here's a clear commitment. It's a yes or no." And Leonard Leo and Jim DeMint of the Heritage Foundation agreed to take the lead, and Leonard Leo who is the head of the Federalist Society.

That's one of the big changes I think because we now have relationships that we didn't have 30 years ago. You couldn't have produced the number of judges for Reagan that they're now producing for Trump.

LEVIN: And this came by the way out of Reagan administration, sort of the farm team became the team, Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation. Many of the people who are being appointed to the bench, or to the Justice Department, worked in the US Attorney's offices under Reagan and under Meese and they developed this whole farm team.

GINGRICH: That's exactly right. So Trump, because he was running as a Republican, and because he has no hostility to conservatism, he just doesn't think about it much, and he has enormous hostility to political correctness and liberalism because it just doesn't fit how he thinks the world works, and so I think we ended up with somebody who I compare frankly to Andrew Jackson as one of the most disruptive presidents we've had because he's not afraid to take on the establishment every single morning.

LEVIN: And we need a disruptive president, don't we?

GINGRICH: Absolutely. It would have been, I think if we had had a Reaganite follow Reagan in '88, we might have in fact gotten to where we are today, a generation earlier, but it was very hard to break out of establishment. That's why you have the never-Trump movement because these are people who are just paralyzed at the idea that their little world is disintegrating and that this brand-new populist conservative world is overwhelming them.

LEVIN: And because he is a disrupter in a positive sense, the people who don't like being disrupted, you talk about the never-Trumpers, are really the Trump haters.

GINGRICH: Right.

LEVIN: Not just within the Republican Party. The entire Democrat establishment, including the media establishment, including academia, almost to a man and woman, they are lined up attacking this president because he's a disrupter, correct?

GINGRICH: Yes, and I actually think there's a profound historic reason for that. I think at 8:00 on election night, all of those people who had a bottle of champagne chilling. They were all going to celebrate breaking the glass ceiling with Hillary. They were going to get radicals appointed to the Supreme Court and life was good.

Two hours later, it's clear that Hillary is going to lose, and if Hillary is going to lose, that means, "Oh, my God, Donald J. Trump is going to be president." So this two hours is the equivalent of psychologically of an IED going off. And they get basically the equivalent of PTSD. I mean, these people are all in a state of shock. They try to recover and this part of Trump's genius.

Every morning they wake up and they think this could this be a better day, and then he's already tweeted six times before they get awake, and go, "Oh, my God, he's still president," and go right back into the PTSD. And so what you've had is a collective psychotics experience by the entire left, who would then get together in sort of therapy support groups called fundraisers and cocktail parties and what have you, and they all talk to each other and they get hysterical.

And so Max Boot, a good historian wrote at one point he'd rather vote for Joseph Stalin than for Donald Trump. Now, that is an insane comment.

I mean, Stalin killed well over 30 million people, but it was just that sense of the mood, and trying to express how deeply he felt.

LEVIN: When we come back, I'm going to ask what you all of this has to do with the upcoming midterm elections and how you compare this to other midterm elections? Is it as important and consequential as so many people have said, or is it just another election?

Ladies and gentlemen, don't forget to watch us on Levin TV almost every week night. Just sing up at crtv.com/mark, crtv.com/mark or give us a call 844-LEVIN-TV, 844-LEVIN-TV. We'll be right back.

LEVIN: Newt Gingrich, this midterm election, what does it have to do with Trump? Does it have everything to do with Trump? And how historic is this midterm election?

GINGRICH: Well, I think it's a very historic election because I think Trump is a very historic, disruptive figure and if at the beginning of the year, the great blue wave had actually emerged and they had won the Senate and the House, I think Trump would have been in real trouble and in a sense, he was repudiated.

Now, I went out on a limb this week and said, "Look, I think it is more likely that we will have 57 Republican senators than that Schumer will be the majority leader." Now, that's a conditional bet, but I think the odds against Schumer are now so bad that we can - I think we could get as high as 58 or 59 but that would take winning in New Jersey and winning in Minnesota.

LEVIN: That would be a red wave almost?

GINGRICH: Well, that would mean, if we got that many, it would be a red wave. I think in the House where we had an unusually large number of retirees, that they're having to fight their way back, but I think with the leadership from Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise and others and with a lot of fund-raising by Paul Ryan, they are certainly within fighting distance, and I've told people, I think it's probably somewhere between 229 Republican in which case we'll have a majority and in the worst case, about 204.

LEVIN: What is the majority? How many do you need?

GINGRICH: Two eighteen.

LEVIN: Two eighteen.

GINGRICH: And we currently right now, I think are 241.

LEVIN: So you are fairly optimistic?

GINGRICH: I'm very optimistic in the Senate and I'm pretty optimistic overall, and I think we still have almost ten days to get to the election, and in 2016, we actually got stronger every single day.

LEVIN: Well, the early numbers, and they are that, from NBC among others, looking at a number of these state, and other than Nevada, some of these other states -- Georgia, Florida, Texas, Montana -- early voting where they actually monitor it by party, the Republicans are turning out in larger numbers than the Democrats.

Now the independents are turning out too, who knows how that will go. What do you make of that?

GINGRICH: Well, I think first of all, there's clearly not going to be a giant blue wave. You also have in a lot of these states, in Nevada, for example, we have a very important Senate race, I think Dean Hiller is going to win. In Arizona, we have a very important Senate race. This is a good example what's happening with the Democrats.

They nominated a Congresswoman named Sinema who turned out to be a real radical and led anti-war demonstrations in a pink tutu, went on a radio show and said that she thought it was okay for Americans to join the Taliban, and while you can say, well, that was years ago when she was young. She can't bring herself to say she was wrong.

Martha McSally, who is the first American woman in combat and as a fighter pilot.

LEVIN: A fighter pilot.

GINGRICH: He has been after here and McSally keeps drawing the distinction. She look, I served with people who were killed by the Taliban and you can't say it was wrong for an American to join our enemy? And it's almost a Jane Fonda moment for those of us old enough to remember the Vietnam War. And Sinema just can't get off of it.

LEVIN: Why are the Democrats nominating people like this? You look at her, you looked at the governorship race in Florida. Gillum is a radical leftist. You look at Georgia. You've got Stacey Abrams, she is a radical leftist.

GINGRICH: Right.

LEVIN: This Robert Francis O'Rourke who likes to be called Beto for some reason, he's a radical. And so they have nominated almost across the board for these statewide offices. These hard left-wing radicals.

GINGRICH: One of my favorite lines ...

LEVIN: What's that?

GINGRICH: One of my favorite lines was Ted Cruz who referring to comrade Beto.

LEVIN: The party has so fundamentally - and people don't notice this, he is so fundamentally transformed as an institution.

GINGRICH: Yes, I think two things. I think first of all, a lot of the current hard left was outlined in a terrific small book called by Matt Bai called "The Argument." Bai is a "New York Times" reporter. He wrote it back in 2006-2007 and it really, in retrospect, I read it at time and it sort of indicated Hillary was going to have a hard time, and Obama has a small role in the book.

You don't see Obama necessarily emerging, but you clearly see that at least half the party opposed Hillary because they thought her husband had sold out. And Clinton had interestingly exactly the same experience as his counterpart in Great Britain, in that they - they both tried to bring their party to the middle. They were both in the end repudiated by their party because the left-wing of their party was the dominant wing and the wing that has all the energy.

And so what's happened is - and then Obama comes along and Obama is a radical. I mean, the one person I know personally who really got this fairly early was Sean. Hannity very early said, "Look, this guy is exactly out of rules for radicals and exactly represents that kind of radicalism." So he kept the left relatively happy because under the happy face, they knew he was really them.

Now, I would say 60% of the Democratic Party today is a radical party. Kevin McCarthy had it exactly right when he said, "This is a now campaign between America and socialism. It's not between Democrats and Republicans." And I think this is now the socialist party of the United States, and you look at places like Venezuela which is disintegrating, and you have to ask yourself how can any rational person favor the kind of socialism that every time it's tried is a disaster.

LEVIN: So you think this election, like McCarthy, is about Americanism.

GINGRICH: Yes.

LEVIN: Versus socialism.

GINGRICH: Which country are we going to be?

LEVIN: And that makes this election historically crucial.

GINGRICH: Yes.

LEVIN: Because we're on a precipice now making that decision, and they view, I assume, Donald Trump is in the way. They want to remove Donald Trump. They want to repudiate the 2016 election. They want to take one of the instrumentalities of the Federal government so they have a foot hold from which I guess to spring in 2020 as well, and their entire agenda is sort of political Molotov cocktails, that is subpoenas, impeachments, slow Trump down and so forth, not really even an agenda that they are prepared to run on. As radical as they are, they are smart enough to try and camouflage their actual views, aren't they?

GINGRICH: They are, but I think also, it's genuine hostility. It's Antifa trashing the Republican Party houses in New York and some guys throwing a boulder through Kevin McCarthy's campaign office in California. It is a crowd going in to try to drive the Senate Majority Leader McConnell and his wife out of a restaurant where they are having dinner.

LEVIN: Ted Cruz, so many we can't name them all.

GINGRICH: Yes, and so you have the backdrop of growing hostility and you've had people like Congressman Waters saying, go after them wherever they appear in public, don't let them appear in public, and so forth, and all of that now, we'll see what happens because of the bombs that were mailed, and whether or not suddenly people take a deep breath and begin to lower their voices.

But when you have the former Attorney General of the United States say if the Republicans go low, kick them. And you have Hillary Clinton the other day saying we can't possibly be civil to these people. There really was a wall that said that Republicans are the other, and our job is to crush them and get rid of them.

LEVIN: When we come back, I want to ask you what are the big issues in this campaign, and also the media's role leading up to the campaign and today. We'll be right back.

LAUREN GREEN, CORRESPONDENT, FOX NEWS: : Live from "America's News Headquarters," I'm Lauren Green. Thousands gathered at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Home in Pittsburgh today to mourn the loss of the 11 people who were killed Saturday when a gunman opened fire during Sabbath services at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The authorities releasing the names of the eight men and three women who were killed. All of them middle-aged or elderly ranging in age from 54 to 97. Among them two brothers and a married couple.

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LEVIN: When I look at media, and you look at these bomb threats and you look at Antifa and Black Lives Matter, and how they really have played down Antifa and Black Lives Matter and other radical organizations and the things you listed earlier. There's a long list of the harassment, of Trump officials and Republican officials in restaurants and so forth, and then last week, the President calls himself a nationalist.

I'm not a nationalist, I'm a constitutional conservative, but I know what he meant by that, he meant Americanism. American first. And they insinuate or flat-out say he's Hitler. He is comparing himself to Hitler, and that Trump is too foolish, he doesn't know he's comparing himself to Hitler.

Well, actually the new nationalism speech was given by Theodore Roosevelt, a progressive. Part of their ideology or at least it was. And I think, how in the world do you compare this president to Hitler and Stalin and then take from that that he is a racist. He hasn't done anything that suggests that.

And so, this is a mantra that they keep pushing, a propaganda that they keep pushing and then I ask myself are they trying to influence the election? Are they just trying to destroy the man? They're trying to remove the man? What is your take on this?

GINGRICH: I think the level of hostility is beyond anything we've ever seen. I think the last study said 92% of the news media was hostile to Trump, of the actual coverage, story by story by story by story. I think if you are openly pro-Trump, in the "New York Times" newsroom, they'd fire you or "The Washington Post." They would just fire you.

I mean, they say, clearly you understand, you shouldn't be here. I mean, take the example of what Trump was saying about nationalism. Really one of the great magic moments of American history is Benjamin Franklin who goes to England to represent the colony of Pennsylvania, and after seven years realizes that he will never be accepted as an Englishman. That the aristocracy simply will not accept him even though he was a world-famous scientist and a very wealthy man.

And people have said he left as a British subject, he came back as an American, and in a way, this thing about being an American starts there. And I think it's important to recognize it, but what Trump is saying, when he uses the word nationalism isn't at a level of a Federalist anti- Federalist arguments, but it's saying look, these guys on the left want to basically sell our country out for some kind of global cause whether it's the Paris Accords or the International Criminal Court or the United Nations.

You know, I tell people the reason that John Kerry runs all over the world the way he does and the reason he still sees the Iranians is in Kerry's mind, he was never really the American Secretary of State, he was a world Secretary of State, doing good things on behalf of the world, which is why I don't think you could charge him with the Logan Act because you'd have to be an American in order to be charged him with the Logan Act and Kerry is not psychologically an American, he's psychologically a person of the globe and would regard people who care about America as sort of pygmies, obsolete.

LEVIN: Now, the issues in this election, what are the top two, three, four issues, right now?

GINGRICH: Well, I mean, number one, which doesn't get much coverage because it's working is the economy. If we didn't have a great economy, Republicans would be in desperate trouble, but the economy is so good that in district after district people say, "No, wait a second, I am not sure I want to throw out guy that gave us the lowest black unemployment in history, the lowest Latino unemployment in history. Tremendous job growth compared to the last ten years."

Second, he's a huge ...

LEVIN: And by the way, there's very little reporting on that.

GINGRICH: Of course, because it's positive. But people know it, people talk about it. They say it in the business news.

LEVIN: They live it.

GINGRICH: They live it. The second thing I think is a fight that is under way between whether we fix the health system incrementally with practical, commonsense steps or we jump to a government-run big health structure and there I think the Democrats made a mistake because they embraced Medicare for all, which is a great slogan and a terrible program, and as a result, it's been torn apart. The President himself wrote a tremendous op-ed in "USA Today" just taking it apart, and Republicans have figured out how to sort of make sure people understood that it is this socialist idea which means you lose your health care.

LEVIN: Let me just stop you in this before we get to three and four because Medicare for all means Medicare for nobody.

GINGRICH: Right.

LEVIN: It's government-run, centralized, old Soviet-style health care.

GINGRICH: And seniors have begun to figure out that this Medicare for all thing means you're going to take away my Medicare. So I think it's a dead loser for the Democrats which it wasn't when they first said it.

But as the argument goes on, they're losing. I think the other two are Kavanaugh because I think what happened with Judge Kavanaugh galvanized the right, reminded people how radical the Democrats are, and for the Senate races, it was devastating because it reminded people that this is a team sport.

So if you watch Manchin who is a person who is pretty popular in West Virginia, is now behind, and the reason he's behind is people figured out he's going to go back and root for Schumer. Don't tell me you're a conservative if you are going to go back and work for Schumer.

So the reminder of the Kavanaugh fight that this is a team sport was particularly badly timed for all the Democrats running in states that Trump carried.

LEVIN: And it brought all the factions of the Republican Party together, which ....

GINGRICH: And energized them immensely. And then lastly, I think is the caravans. I think when you start seeing footage and it's one of those cases where the news media can't say enough to undo what you're watching with your own eyes, you see 7,000 to 15,000 people, almost all of them male coming north. That looks like an invasion. It doesn't look like a family reunion.

And I think the result has been that the country is really debating immigration now and is front and center in a way that is very much the disadvantage of Democrats who just can't cope with it.

LEVIN: Don't forget, ladies and gentlemen, almost every week night you can watch Levin TV, that's me, by the way. Levin TV on crtv.com/mark, crtv.com/mark. We'd love you to sign up there or give us a call at 844- LEVIN TV. 844-LEVIN TV. We'll be right back.

LEVIN: Newt Gingrich, let's look at a couple of these races that come to mind. Let's take a look at Florida. Florida the third most populated state, it's crucial for Republicans. You start losing states like Florida, you can't win. If you lose Texas and Florida, there's no way you can win a presidential election.

But these are very, very important states. You have got a governorship race there, Ron deSantis and Andrew Gillum. Ron deSantis, is a war veteran. He is a Harvard graduate, he served a brief time in Congress, but he's shown himself to be a leader. A solid conservative, a Trump supporter.

You have Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, it's a corrupt city. The murder rate is through the roof. He pushes taxes through the roof. He was Bernie Sanders' candidate. He has worked for People for the American Way. Norman Leary, he's backed by George Soros and I watched this debate last night, he keeps bringing up race.

He's under investigation among others by the FBI and he says it's because of race. What is your comment on that?

GINGRICH: Well, I think, first of all, most people in this day and age when they have a guy stand there and say I had to take the tickets to "Hamilton," which were by the way, I think $1,800.00 apiece because I was black. What is he saying to us? That it was okay to be corrupt if you're black? Or that it's not corrupt by definition if you're black because it's never corrupt?

Then it turns out, he also took a trip to Central America - what are they saying about the FBI guy? And you have to say to yourself so you shouldn't be held accountable for anything you do because you're black? And I think it actually is a disservice to every African-American in the country to have a politician at that level who faced with their own personal corruption hides behind the issue of race because then - on the one level, he's sort of smearing every single person who's African-American, and that's just wrong. This is about him personally.

LEVIN: I agree with that. I mean, it had nothing to do with race. He's an undercover FBI agent, they're investigating a corrupt city and investigating they are investigating the mayor as part of it, and the fact is, he took the tickets to "Hamilton," which he didn't pay for, the taxpayer paid for it, and the fact is he took the hotel room, the fact is he went to Costa Rica. It has nothing to do with race and I agree.

To bring that up is really a disservice to African-Americans but it's a disservice to the people of Florida, too to play that kind of game and the media has largely - the national media, not the local media has let him off the hook.

Let's take a look at another race. We have Texas, Ted Cruz seems to be doing much better against Robert Francis O'Rourke. I won't call him Beto. That's his deal. He can call himself Beto all he wants. But O'Rourke, he is another guy who is a hardcore leftist. He was a leftist for a few years representing El Paso in the House of Representatives. He's backed by Hollywood, he's backed by Manhattan, he's backed by the usual leftists, some billionaires and so forth. What do you make of that race?

GINGRICH: Well, Texas is a place where liberal hearts get broken. Four years ago it was Wendy Davis. She was the great hope. She was going to bring them a governor as a liberal Democrat. She crashed and burned. It's going to be doubly interesting in O'Rourke's case, because he has raised so much money, I think he's raised $68 million. If he loses with $68 million, at some point there's going to be kind of buyer's remorse.

LEVIN: They're already talking him up for 2020 presidential run. Bizarre.

GINGRICH: Well, it works for me. You have to think it's kind of bizarre. He started this race and in midsummer, it looked like he was going to be a serious candidate. But Texas is a conservative state. Cruz is a very smart, effective guy, and he got backed down on the basic issues -- gun control, right to life, balancing the budget, smaller government -- the kind of things where left-wing Democrats don't do very well.

LEVIN: Let me give you one more, I've got one minute on this, Stacey Abrams against Kemp, in Georgia, another radical.

GINGRICH: Sure. I think in the end, Stacey Abrams loses because she is both a radical and she is totally Atlanta. She has no idea about the state outside of Atlanta, and I think that it's beginning to be clear whereas Brian Kemp was Secretary of State, represents the whole state and my guess is he will win by four to six points.

LEVIN: Michigan, John James, a wonderful candidate, African-American, combat veteran, successful small businessman, gets almost no national attention, CNN, MSNBC, all but ignore him, Debbie Stabenow.

GINGRICH: If he gets enough money in the next week and if there are a couple of breaks, he'll win. The most recent poll that just came out showed the governor is race much closer, the Lieutenant Governor's race is much closer and everything in Michigan is coming together and getting much, much tighter, that would be one of the biggest upsets but he is such an attractive candidate and has such a great background and Stabenow has been around a long time.

LEVIN: He really is a great candidate. Ten seconds, McCaskill and Hawley. Missouri.

GINGRICH: Hawley is going to win handedly because McCaskill made a comment that she didn't need any rural Missouri as long as she carried St. Louis. There may not be enough votes in St. Louis.

LEVIN: And she can only conceal her left-wing beliefs for so long in a state like Missouri and at this point, she's been unable to conceal them. We'll be right back.

Newt Gingrich. It's election night, we're watching the returns, are there a couple of states, a couple of House races that we should keep our eye on to get a feel for what might be trending?

GINGRICH: Well, I think in the House, if you look At Barbara Comstock in Northern Virginia and Dave Bratt down around Richmond, those two races are really important signals, and if the Republicans keep both of them, there is no possibility the Democrats get control of the House. If we lose both of them, then it could be a really long night. I think they're really central as a weather vane of what's going to happen.

I think in the Senate on the East side, Bob Hugin is running a great race in New Jersey, it's a long shot race. If he's winning in New Jersey election night, it's going to be a really long night for the Democrats.

LEVIN: Let's say he loses and it's close? Still a long night?

GINGRICH: Then it's potentially a long night. Because then you go further west where Karin Housley for example is running against the appointed replacement for Al Franken and because of the impact of Ellison who has had all sorts of problems, he's dragging the entire ticket down and there's a real chance there, and Trump's been out on the iron range which is the area of Northern Minnesota, they used to be very Democrat and now it's become very Republican, so Minnesota is a state that is a process of really dramatic change, I think.

If we win that Senate seat, it will be for Schumer, a devastating night.

LEVIN: Now, you know these votes come in on the East Coast, they start to spread towards the Midwest and they go to the west and to the far west and have you California where there's six or seven races there, the Republicans have held where they're really tight races, I mean, a couple of points apart. You've got Rohrabacher, Hunter, a few of the other seats, you've got Chairman who has retired.

I think, tell me if you agree, I think the media will do in this country is the report in such a way quote, unquote "as to try and get the Democrats out, try and get the Democrat base out," because they know if it's close they need those six or seven California seats to put the Democrats over the top. Am I being too cynical or am I being realistic?

GINGRICH: No, that's exactly how it works. I remember in 2000, they would hold up states that were going for Bush and not call them. Well, they were calling states who were going for Gore. And so early in the evening, they were giving you this impression of a totally one-sided election for Gore and then later in the evening, all of these states, which they knew, they just hadn't reported them, they knew they were going to go for Bush, started piling on. So, yes, I think it's very hard to overstate the depth of bias in most of the news media against Trump and against the Republicans.

LEVIN: So you agree with me, then that if the Republicans seem to be holding on or actually better, they don't want to deflate the voters out west where they need those key House districts, those races and they will try and pump them up somehow.

GINGRICH: Well, what happened in 80 when Reagan won so decisively and Jimmy Carter conceded too early. He conceded while California was still voting, and the result was that we picked up several seats because people were listening on the radio, their portable radios back then and they heard that carter had conceded and the Democrats went home, and the Republicans stayed because they wanted to vote for the winner.

LEVIN: We'll be right back.

LEVIN: You know, it is possible if the Democrats take the House even by little and they overreach and there are subpoenas everywhere and they are trashing the President and they want his tax returns, the tax return of his grand children and on and on where they are bringing up Articles of Impeachment, isn't it possible, like the Kavanaugh hearings and so much more, that the Democrats do that they are going to walk into the door that is, there will be a great backlash in America that would actually help Trump's reelection in 2020?

GINGRICH: I think, look, I think it is very possible. I also think it's very possible that the party would be able to split between the hardliners who are rabid and want to go and bite Trump's ankle and the more moderate ones who just think, we've got to do something positive before the 2020 election. So I can imagine House Democrats being bitterly split.

LEVIN: And you would have people like Nadler who is a leftist heading the Judiciary Committee, you'd have Maxine Waters heading the Finance Committee - I mean, it would be hard to conceal who they really are, wouldn't they? Because the left is from the deepest, the blue parts of the deepest of blue states. They have no reason to control themselves.

GINGRICH: Remember, they then hire staff who are even more radical than they are. That's how Feinstein ended up with a bill that's an open borders bill that every single Democrat incumbent cosponsored in the Senate because her staff is totally - is so far to the left it did not even occur to them that an open border bill is crazy.

LEVIN: It was a pleasure, Newt.

GINGRICH: Good to be with you with.

LEVIN: Thanks.

LEVIN: God bless. Join us next time on "Life, Liberty & Levin."