Former House Speaker Gingrich predicts Republican 'tsunami' in midterm elections

Former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Tuesday predicted a Republican 'tsunami' for the midterm elections. 

"What I'm watching is a building of a real tsunami, because it goes from coast to coast," Gingrich said on the John Solomon Reports podcast. "It goes from Maine and New Hampshire and Rhode Island, Connecticut and all the way across to Washington state, Nevada and Arizona." 

Gingrich was elected speaker by the House Republican Conference after the GOP in 2014 gained 54 seats in the lower chamber. Republicans also gained eight Senate seats in an overall electoral rout referred to as the "Republican Revolution."

"You just see race after race where the Republicans are gaining ground, or are actually pulling ahead and moving out," Gingrich said Tuesday, amid new polls that appears to show the GOP regaining momentum with Election Day now just roughly three weeks away. 

The former speaker pointed specifically to races tightening in states that overwhelming in recents years have voted Democrat. 

"You see candidates like [Sen. Richard] Blumenthal for example in Connecticut, whom people thought was totally safe, is now in a very, very close five- point race that's getting narrower," Gingrich said.

Gingrich also pointed to the New York gubernatorial race in which GOP nominee Rep. Lee Zeldin now trails incumbent Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul by single digits, according to new polling.

He also noted that Zeldin went from slightly behind to basically even with Hochul after two people were recently shot in front of his Long Island home while his teenage daughters were studying inside, perhaps signaling to voters that increases in urban crime across the country can eventually reach anybody's front door.  

Gingrich also argued that other key, Election Day issues will be parents' demand for more transparency in their children's public school curriculum and some school leaders appearing to go beyond accepting students' desire to identify with their preferred gender to fostering such transitions.

"I think the notion of parents rights vs. the teachers union and the notion of protecting children from what I think is in effect child abuse" are key, he said. "You have a cult of transgenderism, which is really a cult in a religious sense. I think this is going to become a major issue because for some reason on the left, this has become a fetish.

"They just have an absolute passion for maximizing the number of people who go through a transgender process."