House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy told Breitbart News exclusively that Republicans think they can retake the House majority in 2020 by turning out millions of voters who backed President Donald Trump in 2016 but stayed home in the 2018 midterm elections.
In fact, in his latest exclusive interview on Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel, McCarthy explained that Republicans would currently be in the House majority had these voters turned out in 2018—and that the GOP would have held at least 28 more seats than the party currently has.
“There were 8.5 million Trump voters who voted in 2016 who did not turn out in 2018,” McCarthy said. They’re identified. If they turned out in 2018, and we know exactly where they live, we’d still be in the majority. We would have won 28 seats that we currently don’t have.”
Having the president atop the ticket in 2020, McCarthy said, will help the GOP turn those nearly nine million voters out who didn’t vote in 2018 but did in 2016.
“The one thing I’ve seen in intensity level and others, is they will show for the president,” McCarthy said. “They just don’t cross over to show up in the off years. It’s a challenge that President Obama, something that he had. But what I think and see is they’re going to show up for this president and there’s going to be even more who show up. If you look at the rallies and who shows up at the rallies, the number of first-time voters and the number of minorities inside those rallies and others, proportionally much higher than showed up for the president the first time in his campaign in 2016. So I think the turnout is potentially even going to be greater.”
“It’s not just me who thinks it, if you just look at the polling in their own districts,” McCarthy said when asked if the impeachment drive is hurting vulnerable Democrats. “You remember what Nancy Pelosi was telling these Democrats, that it was going to get more popular. They go into the press. They control the entire meeting. They make it different than we’ve ever seen impeachment before. No due process. No ability for the minority to ask for witnesses. Controlling of the time. And it’s become less popular. If you look at the polling today, a number of these Democrats—Kendra Horn [from Oklahoma] and others, they’re going to become upside in their districts. New Mexico, 37 percent of the state only supports impeachment, where a majority does not support it. There is more places to play than just those 31 seats.”
McCarthy said that the reason impeachment is hurting the Democrats politically is because they do not have a case against the president, as George Washington University law school professor Jonathan Turley demonstrated in his testimony.
“If you listened to Jonathan Turley, who is a Democrat but more importantly is probably the highest respected constitutional attorney in the land, he says it’s the thinnest, weakest, and fastest impeachment in the history of America,” McCarthy said. “And it is. In history, when you look at him, now this is an individual who did not vote for President Trump but believes he should not be impeached based upon the Constitution. He even goes as far as to say when you talk about abuse of power, the only abuse of power here really is the Democrats themselves by moving forward and not allowing the administration to go through the judicial branch on the subpoenas and what they’re saying. So, here we are, knowing that the Democrats—and the Speaker admitted she’s been planning this for two and a half years. You got a chairman of the committee who ran for the position on he’d be the best to impeach the president, and you’ve got Democrats who captured the majority with freshmen who on their first day of being sworn in said they’d impeach the mother—. And then you got Al Green who started it, who goes on to say if they’re not successful now, they’ll just keep impeaching him. This is what the American public has to understand: If they are able to maintain the majority, this is more of what we’ll get. Through all of this, the president is so successful—pushing USMCA, pushing it with House GOP members. They mentioned it more than 91 percent of the time it’s been mentioned. Now, getting an agreement with China. We got a stock market at an all-time high and an economy that’s the strongest it’s been in the last 50 years, and it’s nothing that the Democrats have accomplished. The only record they have is they’ve issued more subpoenas than they’ve produced laws.”
McCarthy also noted that the Democrats have lost the enthusiasm edge among voters, as a recent CNN poll showed the GOP with a seven-point intensity level advantage over Democrats.
“So is this putting them in real jeopardy? Well, the CNN poll says Republicans have a plus seven intensity level over the Democrats,” McCarthy said. “Their polling numbers have dropped. They’ve dropped with the independents. And what do they have to show that they’ve accomplished? Show me one thing they’ve accomplished. I think they’ve got a real problem. Even when the Washington Post is now writing that they’re afraid of Democrats abandoning ship. We know that the only bipartisan vote will be against it. Remember what Speaker Pelosi told the entire nation this year in March: that impeachment is so divisive to the nation that, one, it has to be compelling. Two, it has to be so overwhelming. And three, it has to be bipartisan for them to move forward. They set the requirements to move forward, three items—and not one of them was met.”
McCarthy said that Republicans in the House will be unified against the impeachment vote, and will be joined by some Democrats for a bipartisan vote against Articles of Impeachment against Trump. Only Democrats will vote for the partisan impeachment push.
“We will be very strong, Republicans against this, simply because of the facts, not because we’re Republicans,” McCarthy said. “It’s because we put our hands up and swore that we would uphold the Constitution. This does not rise to the level of misdemeanors and high crimes. The other level too, this is purely what Alexander Hamilton warned us about. That one party would get control to try to do this. What the Democrats have done has not only weakened the office of the presidency, making him release a transcript for any future president talking to any other world leader; the other item here too is: Is this going to be the new norm? If we use impeachment for the lowest levels of things for their own political gains. So, in the future, yeah there will be a Democrat who wins the White House again and the Republicans will be in the majority. But is that the call, just to impeach him? To work for 22 months ahead of time to put a timeline together and then, if you have no facts, to just put it through anyway because it’s what you ran for the office for? I think it’s wrong.”
A U.S. Senate trial, he added, will be much fairer than the rigged process in the House.
“The thing that could happen in the Senate is you could have a fair process,” McCarthy said. “If you have a fair process, I think it’ll be a much bigger bipartisan vote over there. Could you only imagine if you had fairness and we had the Inspector General’s testimony be brought forth? If you didn’t have Adam Schiff lying continually in the process? This will be very, very interesting. If you were able to have the whistleblower and not have Adam Schiff protecting this individual? We could really get to the bottom of all this.”