(breitbart) – Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN), the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), told Breitbart News exclusively that he believes the Republicans will retake the House majority in November 2022 and retire Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi once and for all.
The NRCC last week released a list of 47 Democrat-held target districts that Republicans are focused on. Currently, the House Democrats have 222 seats, while the GOP minority is comprised of 213 seats. That means to retake the House, Republicans need to only flip a net five seats back into GOP hands. Emmer, in an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel, further explained those 47 targets that make the Republicans’ path back to a majority clear and easy to accomplish.
“Out of the 47, the top 29 we list as ‘Battleground Democrats,’” Emmer said. “These folks make up the majority of our offensive targets because the list includes members—Democrats—where Joe Biden lost their district in 2020 and several who underperformed the top of the ticket in 2020. We also have added four new members who hadn’t been on the list before. So you have the first group where Biden either lost their district or they underperformed the top of the ticket and their district might have been within five points. Then you’ve got Democrats who won by less than 10 percent and underperformed the presidential ballot—they’re just weak candidates, that’s the bottom line. Then we’ve got 10 we put in there that we’re watching because of redistricting and in states that will either gain a seat or lose a seat in the coming redistricting and, quite frankly depending on that these seats, could suddenly be in play.”
Republicans in the 2020 congressional elections significantly outperformed expectations. Everyone from the Cook Political Report to Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball predicted that Democrats would gain seats in November. Fox News, on election night, even falsely projected that the Democrats would pick five to 10 seats. They were all wrong, as Republicans ended up gaining a net 15 seats in the 2020 congressional elections, now that all is said and done. No GOP incumbent lost, either.
Emmer, in his interview on Breitbart News Saturday, explained that Breitbart News was the only media outlet in America to see this coming. Emmer previously appeared on Breitbart News Saturday in the lead-up to the election, breaking it down, and House GOP Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) did a number of exclusive interviews on the matter with Breitbart News, including an hourlong special in the summer of 2019 setting the table for the House GOP gains in November 2020.
“Nobody but Breitbart, Matt Boyle, and I’m going to add Tom Emmer [saw GOP House gains coming]—I said this from day one—you and I did a show several months back where I told you where our targets were,” Emmer said. “We targeted 55 seats, the top 30 Donald Trump had won four years earlier. The top 13 he had won by double digits. We believed in what we were doing. We recruited probably the greatest class of candidates, I’ve been told by people who have been in Washington for years, and certainly more diverse, with more women candidates than ever, more minorities than ever, and more veterans than ever. Then, we had the right message. We made sure people understood the difference between Republicans—who offer policies that are all about individual freedom, individual liberty, the right to self-determine—versus the new self-proclaimed socialists who have taken over my grandfather’s Democrat Party and who want to remake our country in the vision of Venezuela. That’s not a choice, that’s a major problem. We felt from day one that we were in a position on a good night to pick up eight to 12 seats, and on a great night to take back the majority. But you’re—aside from you and Breitbart, there were very few people out there. It got louder and louder, I would say, from June through November and the election, where they just kept saying that we were going to lose. In fact, Nancy Pelosi probably predicted on election day that she was picking up 15 seats. A different prognosticator in the Washington area the day before the election said we were going to lose as many as 24 seats. Well, as it turns out, we didn’t do as little as I had projected. We actually picked up 15. It’s good to be wrong. We picked up 15, and while I’m disappointed we didn’t get all the way back to the 218 number, we’re at 213 members and we have a record number of women—over 30 women and we’re going to build off of that—and we had some great candidates from minority communities including Young Kim from Orange County, California, a Korean American, as well as Michelle Steel. Burgess Owens from Utah’s fourth district and Byron Donalds from Florida. The list goes on and on. These are great people. So at the end of the day, I’m proud to tell you we held not only every incumbent, which has not happened since 1994, but we flipped 15 seats, and every one of them is with a female candidate, a minority candidate, and or a veteran. And now we have [on the Democrat side] the smallest majority, the most narrow majority, 222-213, since the 1890s, which hopefully will help us over the next two years slow down this incredible lurch to the left that our colleagues in the other party would like to see.”
Emmer said that is the goal of Republicans: to, after the upcoming 2022 midterm elections, retire Pelosi and make McCarthy the Speaker of the House.
“Our goal is Kevin McCarthy will be the Speaker and Nancy Pelosi will be retired,” Emmer said. “I don’t know if you remember, but when the election was over she wasn’t willing to say this would be her last two years. We’re going to make sure this is her last two years as Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. I think our kids and our grandkids are counting on it. So, how are we going to do that? It’s the same template, it’s the same plan we put together in the last Congress. We’ve identified the 47 seats, 29 that are within the margin of error for us to win back, and then the remaining weak candidates and candidates that could suddenly come into play because of redistricting. But it’s going to take exactly what we did last time. We’ve got to recruit excellent candidates, we’ve got to have the right message, and then we have got to raise the right resources. We’re not going to have—the Democrats burn money on a daily basis, and frankly they don’t do it very efficiently. If we raise enough resources–and you saw what we did in the last election, we are razor sharp with where we need to put those resources. I’ve got to give our NRCC team credit. I’ve got to give our leader, Kevin McCarthy, credit. I’ve got to give our colleagues over at the Congressional Leadership Fund credit, because this group, contrary to all the naysayers out there and all the so-called experts, surgically went in and worked the races we needed to put us in a position to take back the majority. We came up just five seats short and the goal is now to finish what we started. Our job here over the first year here, 2021, will be to redefine the opposition. As we come in to the next year, the election year, 2022, we will continue to define these members so people understand they continue to support this socialist agenda, this radical agenda. At the same time, Kevin McCarthy, our leader, will roll out his positive agenda—a value proposition for the American voter so they can see the Republican Party is the party with solutions for Main Street, and I think that will be a winning combination going into November 2022.”
Democrat President Joe Biden’s leftist agenda at the outset of his administration, Emmer said, is making it easier for Republicans to zone in on the majority. Democrats in Congress are wasting the first month of the Biden Administration on a second failed effort to impeach now former President Donald Trump—while pushing a plan heralded as relief for the coronavirus pandemic that he says is nothing of the sort—helps show Americans that the Democrats are not honest brokers when it comes to wielding power.
“First off, this so-called COVID relief bill is not a COVID relief bill—$1.9 trillion, it’s basically a socialist agenda wishlist,” Emmer said. “People out there need to understand there is still $1.4 trillion that has yet to be put to work that has passed from the CARES Act and the COVID relief bill where some $900 billion was added to the CARES Act at the end of December. So this idea that this is bringing relief to Americans is ludicrous. This is their wishlist. That’s not to say though that Republicans would not be interested in supporting some targeted relief to specific industries that have been missed. That discussion would be gladly had. But they’re not doing that, like you say. This impeachment hoax again on the other side, I’m going to tell you if they wanted to move President Trump out of office, all they’re doing is putting him on the front page every day and allowing his counsel to once again show the hypocrisy of the left. Videotapes that they rolled out [on Friday] literally showing their own words and using them against them infuriated them, but again America needs to be able to see this.”
Emmer said that in 2018 when the Democrats took back the majority for the first time in eight years they “committed a fraud” on the American people by promising to solve problems on issues that matter to ordinary Americans, then governing as partisan hacks. But then Republicans won back many of these districts in 2020 by exposing the Democrats’ radical agenda.
“Let’s talk about 2018. Democrats who got elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018 did so by selling themselves as problem-solving moderates who were going to come to Washington, DC, and work on the issues that were most important to Americans, and you named it, it’s our healthcare, it’s roads and bridges, it’s all kinds of issues that are important to people out there on a daily basis,” Emmer said. “What did they do? They committed a fraud. Why? Because they came to Washington, DC, and became the most partisan House majority that I think we’ve ever seen in the history of this country, not just our lifetime. Now, in 2020, we ran and won in districts all over this country by highlighting Joe Biden and the House Democrats’ job-killing anti-energy agenda. We won in places like Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma because we warned people of the Democrats’ anti-energy job-killing agenda. Look at what happened on Joe Biden’s first day in office. With the stroke of his pen, he killed as you mentioned the Keystone XL pipeline and the 11,000 great-paying American jobs that support it. He also eliminated even more jobs and threatened America’s energy independence by banning all new fracking on federal lands. To put it in perspective, you started to go there but here are the numbers, those two actions on their own are projected to eliminate upwards of one million energy jobs and cost nearly one billion—that’s with a B—in tax revenue that’s used primarily to fund schools and first responders. These actions I would suggest show just how damaging the Democrats’ socialist agenda is and the real-life impact it has on people’s lives. And it is why we are going to finish what we started two years from now by taking back the House majority and making Kevin McCarthy the Speaker.”
What’s more, Emmer said he believes 2022 will be a referendum on policies in both directions—on Republicans, particularly the Trump administration’s policies, and on Democrats through the Biden administration’s policies.
“I think the Trump policies are going to be on the ballot in 2022, compared and contrasted with the Biden policies,” Emmer said. “People got to remember, the Trump administration implemented some amazing policies—not just the tax cuts for the middle class and the energy policies, that all-of-the-above energy policy that we talk about, but immigration policies and securing of our border policies, putting Americans and America first policy. We need to celebrate that over the next two years. We need to remind voters that is what the Trump administration was doing because they were incredibly popular. Now, the Democrats and Joe Biden have said they are going to unwind all of this. In fact, I think it was the president who said just within the last few days that they have effectively abolished ICE without abolishing ICE. Think about that for a second—at a time when safety and security in our communities and safety and security in our states is still, if not the top issue, one of the top issues that Americans are concerned with. You better believe this is going to be on the ballot when we get to November 2022. It’s going to make a huge difference and this is why Republicans are going to take back the House, take back a majority in the Senate, and guess what? Kevin McCarthy will be the Speaker.”
breitbart.com/politics/2021/02/15/exclusive-nrcc-chair-tom-emmer-lays-out-path-for-gop-to-retake-house-majority/
