Red Tsunami Could Deliver GOP Largest House Majority in 100 Years

CLAY: We’ve obviously been talking a lot on the program about the need and necessity for a Red Wave to exist in November. A little bit over, what, four months from now, basically, as we get ready to roll into July. And a lot of people are gonna be paused with the July 4th holiday. We hope all of you have fantastic July 4th holiday plans. I was reading a good piece in the National Journal talking about how big a wave Republicans could legitimately have in terms of how many seats could be added in the House.

And, look, in 2010, the party gained 63 seats. Right now, things are better set up for a Red Wave in 2022, but the number of seats that potentially could be available are smaller because not a lot of people are discussing, in 2020 Republicans picked up 12 seats. So, Buck, you and I have been discussing what exactly a historic wave would represent, and the raw numbers may not be there just because there are fewer and fewer seats that are theoretically in play. Now, earlier in the show you pointed out, Buck, that you talked to your buddy Ned Ryun, and he said, “Hey, there are some seats out there 10- or 15-point Democrat favored seats, maybe some 20-point seats.”

BUCK: From 2020. Right.

CLAY: Yeah, for four months from now. But historically this National Journal piece raises an interesting analysis. If there were 35 seats picked up by House Republicans, that would give the Republican Party its highest number of seats, 248 seats, under the auspices of this hypothetical. That would be the most sheets Republicans have had in the House since 1928, since before we saw Franklin Roosevelt come into office. So this kind of historically… You and I are both history buffs. I was reading this, and that was a “wow” moment to me. Almost a hundred-year high for Republican support in the House is legitimately a realistic expectation in this midterm in about four months.

BUCK: I think that we can start to separate out the transactional voter from the ideological voter in terms of who is gettable or persuadable here, right? Meaning, let’s start with the ideological voter. That would be people for whom the prospect of voting Republican emotionally upsets them —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — makes them feel bad about themselves. They watch MSNBC and they drink those soy lattes and they cry at night about the threat of climate change and don’t think that they should have children because of the carbon footprint, et cetera, et cetera. We know it. So that’s why there are limitations of the ideological leftist is the ideological Democrat voter, and I think now because the Trump memory for them is still large.

And of course, the media’s pushing it all the time with January 6th. They’re out of the game. Okay. But now we look at the transactional voter, people for whom — and it takes in a lot of independents but also how motivated are some Democrats. You get some of the Rust Belt Democrats, more union-focused Democrats, and for them the vote is a referendum. This midterm becomes a referendum on the “What have you done for me lately?” question.

What has the Biden regime done for people? I think what we’re seeing is a transactional voter avalanche toward the right because of two things. One, the failure based on what the Biden promises might be. So there’s what Biden promised and didn’t come through with, but then there’s also the result that we’re seeing from different Democrat policies at the border, on crime, obviously with inflation.

So there’s the unmet expectations component and there’s the, “Oh, my gosh. You guys said do X and Y will happen, and Z happened, and it’s not good. It means I have less money. It means I’m less safe. It means I have less freedom.” So, I think that we’re seeing about as much as of a shift as you could be realistically see of the transactional voter — the persuadable voter, however you want to put it — because what else is there right now? What else can you point to? The gas tax holiday gimmick we talked about the top of the show? Biden’s team is out of the tricks, folks. There’s nothing left for them.

CLAY: Here’s the way I think about it. I’m in Atlanta now, and I can look out my studio and I can see the Atlanta Braves baseball stadium. Let me give you a sports analogy, Buck. They say in baseball… You play 162 games. That is an unbelievable amount of games to play, and the old canard in baseball is, “Pretty much every team’s gonna win 60, pretty much every team’s gonna lose 60; it’s what you do with the other 42 that matter,” and so it’s hard to lose. It’s 60-60. What do you do with the other 42?

Giants-Braves with the 11 year old tonight. Going to try and be nice to the umpires. pic.twitter.com/a4F8HMVpP7

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) June 21, 2022

I would say a landslide election is approaching 60% of voters. ‘Cause, to your point, 40% of people are voting Republican. They are allied. It is their brand. Forty percent of people are voting Democrat. It is their brand. They are allied. It’s the other 20% that decide everything, and I believe almost all of that 20% — the persuadable middle — a lot of whom are listening to us right now because they’re so desperate for sanity.

We have attracted the persuadable middle. The reason why we’re number one in all those markets, yes, Rush did a phenomenal job. But things have gotten way crazier since Rush left us, and I think a lot of people out there every single day look around and don’t recognize the America that they live in. And they aren’t particularly affiliated with one party or the other. They just think in terms of sane and insane. They’re overwhelming breaking for Republicans because right now the Republican Party is the same party.

Despite what they want to tell you out there in the larger media ecosystem, there are a lot of things that Democrats believe, such as, “Hey, when a baby’s born; sometimes a doctor gets it wrong when he says, ‘It’s a boy,’ ‘It’s a girl!’” No, he doesn’t right? No, she doesn’t. When Megan Rapinoe is saying (summarized), “Hey, if you want your girls are playing high school sports, it doesn’t really matter what happens in those sports.

“If a boy wants to play and he identifies as a girl, you should basically just suck it up and deal with it.” These are things that people look at and say, “This is crazy: 8.6% inflation, $5 gas.” The Democrats are the party of insanity. What they are arguing for does not make sense to common people out there, and that is why we’re gonna get a landslide election in the well, and I hope it extends to ’24.

BUCK: This is also what we’re seeing in the data already, the polling data and all the anecdotal data as well as Texas 34, that district that just went for a Republican, Mayra Flores. A lot of Hispanics — and by “transactional voter,” I don’t mean that as any kind of a criticism, but, “I vote for this person because…” Everybody, at some level, is transactional voter. But it’s just a question of how ideologically attached to a certain platform or certain individual you may feel.

I think a lot of Hispanic voters are trending toward the GOP because they’re saying, “We vote for people not because as much of the identification with the Democrat Party that we feel innately, intrinsically,” in the depths of our soul, right — again, going to the more coastal elite, deep-blue Democrat mentality. They vote, basically, because they want good schools. They want normalcy in the schools in terms of what’s being taught. They want safe streets.

They want economic opportunity, they want to be able to build businesses, they want to be able to pay reasonable taxes, and they want a reasonable and reasonably effective government. Now, maybe they want a government that’s more active sometimes and more helpful than what you would see on the right. But if that is your approach — if you want safe schools, reasonable economics, safe streets — you have to vote Republican. You have to, if nothing else, to repudiate the Democrat failures that we’re seeing. What was the most recent number? What, 55% of Hispanics nationally are leaning for a Republican candidate? Sounds good to me. I’m hoping we get up to 60, 65.

CLAY: Yeah, no doubt, and I just wanted to contextualize that 35 seats, because a lot of people have in their minds, “Oh, in 2010, it was a 60-seat swing.” But that’s a function of what’s available and what’s not available. That 35 — just put 35 in your minds out there — would lead to the largest Republican majority in the House in nearly a hundred years. That’s how much of a landslide would have occurred in the House of Representatives, and that’s worth keeping in your mind as we move towards the midterms as a number that would be good to hit.