Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich offered a blunt postmortem on Republicans’ midterm wipeout Sunday, and critics were quick to dig up his own pre-election predictions.
“We got beaten badly,” Gingrich said on Fox News. “We got beaten because the American people believed we had failed.”
Gingrich also pointed to Mississippi, where Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) is trailing Democrat Scott Colom in a race that hasn’t been called.
“We’re on the verge of losing a seat in Mississippi with a senator who explained that there are less expensive ways to get protein,” Gingrich said. “Now, if you’re an average, everyday American in Mississippi and you want to barbecue or grill something and you’re being told, you should go and get tofu?:
Critics pounced on his framing that voters only “believed” Republicans had failed.
“Believed we had failed... Reality is you did fail,” one X user wrote. “The American people didn’t imagine it, Newt. They lived it.”
The parody account Bad Fox Graphics had a sharper reminder. It resurfaced a post Gingrich wrote on Election Day touting turnout in Montgomery County, Texas.
“Montgomery County, Texas, voted 72% for President Trump, and it is reporting a very large turnout, which is a good sign for Atty. General Paxton in the Senate race,” Gingrich wrote at the time. “This is very encouraging!”
“Newt, this you?” Bad Fox Graphics asked.
Ken Paxton lost the Texas Senate race to Democrat James Talarico by 12 points.
Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann also took a shot, calling Gingrich “an amazingly stupid man who impeached Clinton but only got himself fired.” Gingrich led the House impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998. He resigned as speaker after Republicans lost seats in that year’s midterms.
Conservative commentator Daniel Horowitz didn’t let Republicans off the hook for Hyde-Smith either.
“It would have been nice to have this coalition of people hating on Hyde Smith the two times we tried to take her out,” Horowitz wrote, “but Trump supported her.”