Gingrich on Winning 2026 & The Big Choice Election
Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity argue Republicans must ignore polls, mirroring Truman’s 1948 and Bush’s 1988 victories by attacking Democratic tax hikes, voter ID restrictions, and ICE/police funding cuts while rejecting climate alarmism. They highlight AOC’s evasive Taiwan comments as a liability and cite 2025 CBS data—2,500 murderers and 5,400 rapists arrested among illegal immigrants—to expose Democratic hypocrisy on border security. Gingrich endorses a "No Shutdown Bill" to bypass gridlock, while Hannity and callers praise AI’s role in manufacturing, education, and fact-checking. The episode frames 2026 midterms as a referendum on Trump-era policies, with Democrats’ fractured messaging and selective outrage offering Republicans a path to dominance. [Automatically generated summary]
Power 2 Sean Hannity Show, toll-free on numbers 800-941.
Sean, if you want to be a part of the program, I am looking at November as the most important midterms in our lifetime.
One of the things I've always loved about my dear friend Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, best-selling author, is in his heart of hearts, he's a professor and he's a historian.
And he wrote an incredible piece.
We're going to put it up on Hannity.com.
We'll put it on social media as well.
How Republicans Must Study Truman and Bush.
There are clear principles for winning underdog campaigns against seemingly impossible odds.
Anyway, Mr. Speaker, great to have you back.
I'll let you explain your article in detail because I would never do it justice.
But I read it start to finish and I took a lot out of it.
Well, listen, I'm flattered.
I was sitting around one day trying to figure out how to say to Republicans, first of all, I don't care what the polls say.
I don't care what the news media says.
We have a thing called campaigns.
And I was aware of it because and lost twice.
I came back the third time.
And on Labor Day, after five and a half years of campaigning, I was behind 5137.
And I was going to be out of politics before I ever got in it.
And I luckily had a guy who, a Bob Weed, who understood politics.
And he said, look, we have your opponent on two issues.
Ironically, welfare and taxes.
They'll never change.
And she had voted wrong.
And we knew she voted wrong.
And we had some Republican state legislators who've been in the room in the conference committees when she voted wrong.
And my advisor said to me, if you'll focus on these two issues, we have commercials we think will work to get it across.
And the commercial would say, she knows her record.
She just hopes you don't.
And then one was vivid about welfare reform.
One was vivid about tax cuts.
And my job was to be nice and pleasant and positive.
And she finally got so rattled, she told the press that my commercials were political pornography.
And they came running over to me because it's a great line.
And I said, well, I've never heard anyone describe their own voting record as pornographic, but you might go ask her what she means by that.
And that was the end of the election.
I went from down 5137 on Labor Day to winning 5446.
Now, the reason that mattered was I had studied the Truman campaign, and I knew that Truman was so far behind that Gallup quit taking polls.
They said, this race is over, no point in polling it.
And that's why the famous picture of Truman holding up the Chicago Tribune, whose headline was, Dewey Wins, was so famous because he'd come from behind.
But what struck me when I, as a historian, I dug into it, Truman had the same challenge in 1940 when he was in front of a freshman senator, and he was abandoned by all of the establishment in Missouri.
They ran a governor against him.
He cut off his money.
He got in a car with one guy.
He drove 50,000 miles, visited every county, and ended up coming from behind to win.
So he already had in his head by 48, never give up, stay on offense, attack the other guy, and see everybody.
So in 88, George H.W. Bush, vice president for Ronald Reagan, in May, is 19 points behind.
And you can imagine the panic, the collapse, the morale.
But because I'd seen this work and I knew how to do it, I sat down with Roger Ailes and Lee Outwater and Jim Baker, and I showed them exactly a parallel, which is you polarize with your opponent, you drive them to the left, you have to be ruthlessly, aggressively honest, and you focus on issues, not on personality.
And when you focus on issues, they disintegrate.
George H.W. Bush did that.
The campaign was amazing.
And as a result, he came from behind member.
He's down 19 in May.
He wins by 8 in November.
One out of every four Americans switched because of that campaign.
So my message to Republicans is simple.
The Democrats are wrong on virtually everything.
I would start with the one big, beautiful bill.
Every tax cut, the Democrats unanimously voted no.
Every tax increase, the Democrats unanimously voted yes.
Now, we had a governor of Ohio at one time who used to, he won four straight elections.
He'd gone to college for one term, dropped out, got into politics, and he ran, and Jim Rhodes was his name.
And he would get up and he would take his wallet out.
He would slam it on the podium, and he would say, the difference in this election is they want to take money out of your wallet.
I want to put money into your wallet.
You decide.
Now, if Trump and the Republicans could slow down on four or five big, big, big issues, stay on them, tell the truth, win the argument, take on the news media, they would win this fall, the biggest off-year victory for an incumbent president in modern history.
But they have to have faith, they have to have discipline, and they have to be willing to stay on offense.
And they've got to learn a big truth beats a big lie, but you have to be prepared to stand up and defend the big truth.
That's the essence of that paper.
Defending Taiwan's Sovereignty00:10:42
Okay.
So I look at your list of five specific things that you lay out for every Republican that's running this year.
I think the polls are meaningless.
I also don't think historically people polled Donald Trump well.
And so I don't really pay that much attention to it.
But I think if we want a choice election, and I think that's what you're talking about here.
Okay, do you want open borders or not?
There's your choice.
Democrats want amnesty for illegals.
Where do you stand?
Do you want voter ID?
It's an 83-17 issue.
Democrats want to defund ICE.
They want to defund the police.
They don't want any bail laws.
The Democrats voted for the largest tax increase in history.
They voted against working men and women with no tax on tips and overtime.
They voted against seniors with no tax on Social Security.
The Democrats cling to climate alarmism and reject energy independence and energy dominance policies.
And I believe they're weak on foreign policy, as evidenced by a country like Iran.
Okay.
Tell me, what issues am I missing?
Well, first of all, as evidenced by watching them at Munich, I mean, you had this magnificent speech by the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and then you had people who were just crazy.
I mean, AOC's comments verged on, you know, a seventh grader visits Europe.
I think it's worth playing again.
This was AOC's answer to Taiwan and China.
Let me play it because this is too good not to play again.
To all of you, and Congressman, I'll start with you.
Would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move?
You know, I think that this is such a, you know, I think that this is a, of course, a very long-standing policy of the United States.
And I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point.
And we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise.
I think with that one answer, that Kamala Harris liked word salad.
Any presidential aspirations or ambition she may have died with that answer.
Sean, I got to tell you, I'm sitting here listening thinking, this is common.
It is.
It's a word salad.
I'm like, oh, my gosh.
I don't think she, she doesn't have a clue.
And then she said, you know, she was talking about Venezuela knows nothing about geography either, but that's a separate issue.
That's me.
But here's the challenge, which you understand as well as I do.
We've had two great communicators as Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan and Donald J. Trump.
They were both Democrats.
They were both in the media.
Normal Republicans are stunningly incompetent at communicating.
I mean, as somebody who's been in this party actively since 1958, it is embarrassing.
You have this great one big beautiful bill.
You have tax cuts in there for people who get tips.
I'll give you that example right now.
You have a tax break for emergency workers who work overtime because thanks to Donald Trump and the Republicans, they don't have to pay taxes on the first $1,250 of overtime.
It's tax-free.
Now, how many Republicans have gone home and said to people who have been taking care of putting back up the telephone lines, putting back up the electricity lines, you know, I'm so glad you're here.
And by the way, I'm so glad for the first $1,250, it's free.
You have people who are going to have a bigger child tax credit.
You have people in small business who are going to have a better break.
You go down the list.
It's an embarrassment that we're here eight or nine months later.
No one that I know, with the exception of Trump, has gone out and methodically begun to fight this and to point out this to the other side.
On every one of these issues, the Democrats voted no.
So you could literally, I don't think the president will do it, but he could, at the State of the Union, go through line by line, and Republicans would then say, and the Democrats voted no, because that is the truth.
And we have to.
Let me take you back 32 years.
It's Election Day, 1994.
And you are on the verge.
The House Republicans have been out of power for 40 years.
You ran on something called a contract with America.
I run into you earlier that day.
There's media everywhere.
There's a buzz around you.
And I'm this logo radio guy, you know, this little peon that comes up to you and says, how are you feeling about tonight?
And I just wanted to know for my own edification.
It was for no other reason.
I wasn't recording you.
And you said, I think you predicted with almost pinpoint certainty exactly how many seats you were going to win that night and, yes, bring Republicans into power for the first time in 40 years.
I would argue, along with Truman and George Herbert Walker Bush, I think there's a lesson to be learned about your revolution that took place because it was based on ideas and it was a choice election in every way back in that time.
Look, no, I agree.
The reason I decided that I would get back reinvolved at this level of detail is we knew how, now, to be fair, we were standing on Ronald Reagan's shoulders.
And the contract really is pure Reaganism.
But we knew what we were doing.
We knew how to do it.
We knew how to create a national election.
We knew how to create a big choice.
The Democrats want to do two things.
They want to run a referendum on Trump, which we will lose, because no president is going to win a referendum.
It's never good enough.
And second, they want to be able to fight one district at a time.
We want to run a big choice election, and we want to run a national election.
So everywhere in the country, every Democrat who voted no should wear that around their neck as an anchor, and they should drown.
That requires a campaign that emphasizes, here are the tax breaks you just got.
Here's the refund you just got.
The Democrat voted no.
If the Democrat had his way, you wouldn't be getting this refund.
Now, you want the refund, or do you love the Democrats so much, you'll give up your refund?
They're going to lose that badly.
We had one poll.
Let me ask you this.
Are you willing to meet with every House Republican that's running in this midterm year and just give them a two-page synopsis on how to run their campaign and what to say?
Sure.
Because I agree with you in your analysis.
A lot of these guys, there's a reason we invite the same people on all the time because these other people are afraid, number one, or they're just not capable of communicating, number two.
Look, I believe, as you said at the beginning, that this is the most important off-year election in modern history.
Because if the Democrats win this fall, they will destroy the Trump revolution.
If Trump wins this fall, we will, in fact, truly be historic, and we will spend the next two years getting more stuff done.
I cannot overstate to our audience, this is the most important off-year election of your lifetime.
And, you know, Callista puts up with my being totally focused as a citizen.
And she, you know, we both are committed to Trump.
We're both committed to America.
And I would do anything that I can from now to Election Day to make sure that our team is on the field, well-trained, totally prepared, and with a strategy that breaks up the Democratic Party.
Mr. Speaker, we appreciate you being with us.
Snoop Gingrich, thank you, sir.
Great.
800-941-Sean, our number, if you want to be a part of the program.
I think, let's go back to yesterday, Linda, if we can.
I think this Kamala Harris-like answer of AOC when talking about Taiwan and China might be the end of any presidential ambition she might have.
I mean, I can't listen to this enough.
I probably have listened to it 15 times.
Listen.
To all of you, and Congressman, I'll start with you.
Would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move?
You know, I think that this is such a, you know, I think that this is a this is, of course, a very long-standing policy of the United States.
And I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point.
And we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise.
I found that very enlightening.
Linda, did you find that enlightening?
Whenever AOC is talking, the room is brighter, without question.
The room is brighter.
You sure that's the adjective you want to use?
Oh, yeah.
She's just nothing but pure genius from that trap that never stops moving.
Let's go to Linda's home state of Pennsylvania, Ed next Sean Hannity Show.
What's up, Ed?
How are you?
Hey, Sean, longtime listener, first time caller.
Welcome aboard.
Yeah.
Budget Reconciliation Challenges00:02:34
Two things on my mind.
One is that you have the year of the president, Speaker of the House, other representatives.
Probably millions of Americans like myself are sick and tired of hearing about government shutdown.
And we need to have a bill called the No Shutdown Bill passed in Congress.
That anytime they can't agree to a budget, they continue.
They stay with the existing budget until they come to some type of agreement.
You know what the problem with that is?
There is a problem.
What's up?
Is the government will never pass another budget if, assuming that government stays as divided as it is now.
And I don't see any hope that we can reconcile very deep, profound, philosophical differences.
I mean, the left wants no voter ID.
The left wants open borders.
They want to defund ICE and the Department of Homeland Security and with it, FEMA, and with that, the Coast Guard, and with that, the Secret Service.
The left wants to defund, dismantle, and have no bail laws.
The left in America, I mean, they want to pack the courts.
They want to make D.C. and Puerto Rico a state.
The left in America voted against the largest tax decrease in history and voted for the largest tax increase in history.
The left is beholden to the climate alarmism.
Tell me where there's middle ground and we can reconcile these differences because I don't see that we can.
We already have an existing budget, don't we?
We have an existing budget, but budgets need to be, like, for example, we fell behind in terms of military technology during the Biden years, and we've got to fill that gap of vulnerability.
And if you have an existing budget, you never shut down the government again.
You keep that budget until they make a decision to change it.
If they don't make a decision, change it, it stays the same.
That's what I'm saying.
Well, I understand, but it would stay the same.
How many years are you willing to let it stay the same?
Well, until they can come to a consensus of what they want to change, they're our representatives.
They're the ones running the.
Surely they can come up with something if there needs to be something done to the budget.
But we should not have to go through this nonsense of government shutdown every three months.
Nobody Knows Names00:10:13
Listen, it's not the worst idea I've ever heard.
It's not.
I would prefer that we all, I prefer that more common sense exists in Washington, but it doesn't.
I mean, this is why the left has to be defeated.
This is why this midterm matters so much.
But anyway, you make a good point, Ed.
All the best to you.
Appreciate you.
Love the people of Pennsylvania.
Let's stay in Pennsylvania.
Say hi to Keith next on the Sean Hannity show.
Hey, Keith, how are you?
Hi, Sean.
I'm doing well.
I wanted to talk to you about the benefits of AI.
We all too often hear about the negatives of AI.
As an engineering director here in York, Pennsylvania, we manufacture parts for the military, and we have begun implementing AI in our front office engineering systems to help us streamline our process and become more efficient with our engineering tests.
And it's been quite beneficial.
And the new wave of American manufacturing is being called smart manufacturing because of the AI revolution.
There's two other benefits to AI, and there's also education.
If I need something, need to know something about a particular topic, I can say ask Rock, and it'll give me a whole explanation of the topic that I'm interested in.
And then the last benefit is politically fact-finding.
The other day, my wife challenged me: hey, is ICE doing anything in the blue states and the red states?
And so I asked Rock, and he came back and said, there's all kinds of activity in Texas with ICE, and it helped solve the conversation that she and I were having.
What are your thoughts?
I think it is the most fascinating technology I've ever used in my life.
I use it every day now, and I learn a lot from it.
There's no question it can't answer.
And I think that we look, I love this audience because you're with me, and I want everyone to be ahead of the curve.
Everybody needs to, and I don't care what your age, everybody needs to become acquainted with artificial intelligence.
And by that, I use Grok.
I think Grok is the best by far.
And you can ask it any question.
And some nights I'll just spend like an hour or two or three, you know, just messing around with it and asking all sorts of questions.
And I think that it will, we've already seen the beginnings of, like, for example, automobile manufacturing, other manufacturing.
You know, we've seen robotics go to a whole new level.
And you think, okay, well, we're losing American jobs in the process.
Elon Musk's observation is it will create more jobs than we will lose, but there's definitely going to be disruption in the economy.
And I just want people in this audience to be thinking through what those disruptions are and whether or not it may impact what their career is.
And if so, to make the necessary adjustments so that you don't get caught off guard.
I don't want people to get caught off guard.
I want people in this audience to thrive and to succeed, which is why I'm advising everybody, take it for what it's worth, to become, to familiarize yourself with it.
I agree.
If you look at efficiency gains between the typewriter and the word processor, this is the next revolution in efficiency gains in the office and the world.
Yeah.
Look, you're echoing my statements on it.
I know everybody in my team now is using it.
I'm using it regularly.
It makes you smarter than you really are.
And any question you want answered or can answer in seconds.
It's amazing.
Anyway, Keith, appreciate you.
Love our friends in Pennsylvania, the Commonwealth.
Thank you.
All right, quick break, right back to our busy phones.
Here's our toll-free number.
It's 800-941-Sean, if you want to be a part of the program.
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All right, back to our busy phones, 800-941-SEAN if you want to be a part of the program.
Let us go to Ted in Arizona.
Ted, how are you?
Glad you called.
Good afternoon, Sean.
How are you doing?
I'm good, sir.
What's going on?
Nothing much.
I need your help.
I need your help.
This country needs your help, Sean.
We've got Jeffries up there on the hill saying that the ICE is untrained, rogue police.
If that's the case, that means that they did not do their job because they're the ones that set that up.
Repeat that again.
I want to make sure I'm fully understanding you.
Say it again.
Representative Jeffries that ICE is an untrained organization.
Under Article 1, Section 8 in the Constitution, they are the ones that are supposedly to train that, make sure that they're funded and trained in a disciplinary manner.
That means that he's not doing his job along with the rest of them.
They should be fired or voted out, however you want to look at it.
You see, understand that a lot of what we've been witnessing, they caused.
They caused it by either remaining silent or complicit in the open borders of Biden, Harris, and Majorca.
So they sat by, idly lied to us, or they just said nothing and they protected Biden and allowed these 12-plus, you know, however many million people into the country unvetted.
That created the problem.
Donald Trump runs on a platform that he's going to deport these people.
He's finding them.
You know, I went through earlier in the program.
I brought it up yesterday.
I can bring it up again today if you like.
But, you know, just in the last year, 2025 alone, which I think is indicative of a lot of years, is just indicative of the success, but you'd never hear about it.
I mean, we had 2,500 murderers, illegal immigrants that killed Americans arrested, over 5,400.
This is CBS News.
It's not Sean Hannity making it up.
5,400 rapists or illegals guilty of sexual crimes also against Americans arrested.
And they can't name one person.
They don't know the name of one victim.
They don't know, they don't care.
That's not their argument.
They just want to oppose Donald Trump and oppose really supporting the laws of our country.
I know.
And what I was trying to get to is basically, you worked your behind off in the restaurant industry.
You know what I mean?
To know what kind of food to serve, what people like to eat.
These representatives have no idea what they're talking about.
None.
So where does he get off calling the ICE untrained?
I know different.
I live here at Yuma.
I talk to him in the grocery store all the time at the Fry's.
You know what?
I hear what you're saying.
And I mean, this is the real sinister, dark side of the Democratic Party.
I mean, they don't want voter ID laws.
Why?
Because they want to cheat.
I mean, they don't want, you know, they want defund, dismantle, no bail.
Who's going to protect you?
Who are you going to call?
They want to defund and they demonize, they incite against agents.
And now the confrontations occur because they're inciting it all.
And then they want to turn around and blame the agents whose lives are in jeopardy and never give them any benefit of the doubt.
Like in the case of the one officer that had a car being accelerated at him and got hit and had internal bleeding.
Yeah, right.
And they want to rush to judgment.
You see, it's sort of like, you know, it fits into my long-term narrative that I've made.
If they can't weaponize something, if they can't politicize something, then the lives don't matter.
It's not about Alex Predty's life to them.
They are weaponizing his death.
You know, the same with Renee Goode.
I say every life matters.
I wish they were alive today.
I wish that they weren't out there harassing ICE agents and stopping them or trying to attempt to stop them from doing their job or interfering or distracting them from their job, however you want to describe it.
I don't want anybody to die.
I don't want the people that are shot and shot and killed in Chicago to be shot and shot and killed every weekend either.
And nobody knows their names.
And nobody knows the names.
You know, Democrats couldn't stand.
I think it spoke volumes for the family of Lake and Riley or Jocelyn Nungari.
And that's why I'm saying if they can't weaponize it or politicize it, they don't want to touch it.