Exclusive — Kevin McCarthy: GOP Aims to Retake House After Impeachment by Turning Out 8.5 Million Trump Voters who Stayed Home in 2018

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.”

To retake the majority in 2020, Republicans need to, at this stage, win a net 19 seats back from the Democrats. There are currently 31 districts represented by Democrats that President Trump won in 2016, and another 20 or so that Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton won in 2016 that are considered battlegrounds.

With the likely embarrassing-for-Democrats defection of Rep. Jeff Van Drew (D-NJ)—an ardent opponent of impeachment who is reportedly quitting the Democrat Party to join the GOP—that drops the magic number for the GOP to flip to retake the majority down to 18.

A special election upcoming in California’s 25th congressional district from which Democrat Katie Hill resigned amid a sex scandal in her office offers the first major opportunity for the GOP to make progress on the road back to the majority.

In a coup for Republicans, former GOP Rep. Steve Knight—who lost in a close race in 2018 to Hill—is running again for that seat, which Clinton won in 2016 but was previously held by the GOP, in the special election. If Knight is successful in the spring, it would drop the magic number to 17 along with Van Drew’s defection.

McCarthy added that GOP recruitment of candidates is far ahead of schedule. After Breitbart News specifically mentioned former Oakland Raiders Super Bowl champion Burgess Owens—who is running in Utah’s fourth congressional district against vulnerable Democrat Rep. Ben McAdams (D-UT)—and Nicole Malliotakis, who’s running on Staten Island against Democrat Rep. Max Rose (D-NY), McCarthy cited several more rising GOP stars around the country.

“Just those two you named—then you look at Wesley Hunt in Houston, Young Kim and Michelle Steel in California, Ashley Hinson in Iowa, Maria Salazar in Florida—there’s so many,” McCarthy said. “If you measured our current recruitment based upon the 2010 class that ended up beating 63 Democrats, we’re so much further ahead. We have more women, we have more minorities running. But more importantly, we have more candidates—about a hundred more candidates—running than we did before. I attribute a lot of that to what the Democrats promised they would do and the promises they have broken. There’s no ‘Squad’ of AOC and others—look at Beth Van Duyne down in Texas, or Genevieve [Collins] down in Texas as well—we have such an amazing group of candidates. It’s so impressive. Look at Michelle Fischbach who’s running in Collin Peterson’s race, first woman ever to be a president of the Minnesota Senate and former Lieutenant Governor. There’s so many others. Tom Kean in New Jersey. This is Leonard Lance’s old seat. This is a Republican seat, he’s raised over a million dollars. I think New Jersey is going to be a very good state for us.”

Impeachment, McCarthy said, has caused Democrat poll numbers to plummet and offered Republicans opportunities for pickups well beyond those original 31 Trump districts that Democrats currently hold.

“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.”

McCarthy looks across the pond to the United Kingdom, where the Tories just won a historic majority for Prime Minister Boris Johnson a few years after the original Brexit vote. That majority win comes in the face of opposition from a socialist leftist movement in the Labour Party, but also came after the globalist power structures in the U.K. attempted multiple times to undermine the will of the British people’s votes to Leave the European Union, against those who sought to Remain.

A similar effort by deep state forces here in the United States has attempted to undermine the will of the people in the 2016 election through impeachment and other efforts to hurt President Trump, and McCarthy sees a potential rehash of 2016 where Brexit paved the way for Trump’s win. In 2020, it could be the historic Conservative Party majority in the U.K. that paves the way for a GOP and Trump victory in the U.S.

“It could because remember: what’s the underlying issue here,” McCarthy said. “The underlying message is about freedom. Those in the U.K., do they want to be a part of the E.U. or do they want to be a part of the U.K.? Do they want a better future for their own children? Do they want their own country to grow at an economic level where they can determine their own future? I think that answer is overwhelming yes—it’s the same thing that President Trump ran on, about America First and that we can have an economy that grows at more than three percent, whereas Barack Obama thought it needed a magic wand, yet here we are with the strongest economy we’ve had in over 50 years. Think about how much more we would achieve if we didn’t have a majority party in Congress only investigating but actually working and doing their jobs.”

Playing right into GOP hands, too, is the fact that Democrats have zero legislative accomplishments since they took the majority in the 2018 midterms—something McCarthy first noted in a summer Breitbart News radio special and again pointed out here this weekend—and that’s why they’re now rushing to pass the U.S.-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) trade agreement after initially holding it up for a year. But, McCarthy noted, it’s been a similar refrain on basically every other issue too: Speaker Nancy Pelosi has nuked deals that would result in policy wins for the country in order to push partisan priorities she and her far-left flank believe in.

“They get no credit for that [USMCA],” McCarthy said. “She waited more than a year. This is something that the president—people will study in business class, the art of the deal and the way he negotiated this. Another promise that he made in the campaign that he kept – and it’s only the Speaker that had the power to pull it up, but she held it making our country weaker. She waited until we had an agreement with China, when Mexico and Canada are our number one and two trading partners. Had we had the USMCA already done, our negotiations with China would be stronger. For all the mishaps again, to show how the Speaker has mismanaged her ability. Remember what she promised: That she would be different. That she would work with the other side. None of those issues have been kept. Any time we had a bill—we had a prescription drug bill, three times we had a bill come out of committee where every single Democrat and every single Republican voted for it. But what did she do? She put a poison pill in it after it came out of committee before it came to the floor so it could not become law. These are the things that are happening that the American public has to know about.”

LISTEN TO HOUSE GOP LEADER KEVIN MCCARTHY ON BREITBART NEWS SATURDAY:

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