The outcome of the 2022 election was far different from what I expected – and what most pollsters and analysts expected.

I thought Republicans would win dramatically bigger victories.

When the exit polls had 75%, three-out-of-four, voters saying America was on the wrong track, I thought for sure there would be a repudiation of Democrats and a Republican tide.

With the crisis in the cost of living (gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil, food, rent, and so on), the rising murder and crime rates in our largest cities, a flood of more than 4 million people illegally crossing our southern border, and the growing anger over schools indoctrinating our children with radical values, I expected a wave of opposition.

REPUBLICAN WORKHORSES WON BY SHOWING LEADERSHIP ON KEY ISSUES VOTERS CARED ABOUT

And in fact, (to make things more complicated) there was a Republican wave. According to the Cook Political Report, Republicans had 6 million more votes for the House than Democrats. These votes did not translate into a surge of seats because districts are tightly gerrymandered and many Democrat incumbents hung on by narrow margins.

The Cook Political Report estimated that Republicans got 52.3% of the vote for the House compared to 46.2% of the vote for Democrats. That 6.1% margin was greater than the 2.5% generic Republican advantage from the average of the national polls just before the election.

As someone who has been involved in campaigns since 1958, this is a surprisingly confusing outcome. The gloom hit a lot of Republicans as the results came in as a red trickle instead of a red wave. Frankly, I briefly joined them in a more somber attitude. Then my wife Callista, who served as chief clerk of the House Committee on Agriculture and knows the House well, turned to me and said, "a majority is a majority."

That realism was strengthened by the Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s chief attorney, Machalagh Carr, who rightly said the speaker’s gavel doesn’t come in small, medium and large. There is only one speaker’s gavel – and it transfers all the power from Nancy Pelosi to Kevin McCarthy.

REPUBLICAN VICTORY IN MIDTERM ELECTIONS A FIRST STEP TOWARD NATIONAL ECONOMIC TURNAROUND

The biggest single change coming out of the 2022 election will be the shift from a hard left Democrat Party House to a conservative Republican Party. This change will affect everything from spending, to investigations, to committee actions, to what bills move.

As a former speaker of the House, I know that a strong speaker can achieve remarkable results. In this last Congress, Speaker Pelosi passed trillions of dollars in spending and radical social policy bills with a mere five-vote majority. A new Speaker McCarthy can implement a remarkable number of changes and set the stage for a totally different pattern of governing.

The other big outcome was the enormous success of Republican governors.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ re-election was the most obvious example of dramatic change in a state. Florida had been competitive in 2018 when DeSantis won by only 32,463 votes. After four years of conservative, confrontational and remarkably successful leadership, he won re-election by 1.5 million votes. Four years ago, he lost the largest county, Miami-Dade. He carried it decisively in 2022. He also carried the Latino vote. Now, with four years of the DeSantis administration, Florida has been realigned as a Republican bastion.

The challenge for Republicans is to learn what led this election to be the least predictable election in my lifetime. They also must think through a clear, positive program that creates a vivid alternative of workable, doable solutions that solve the American people’s problems. This should represent 90% of their effort. 
The Commitment to America was a start, and I promoted it everywhere. But it didn’t become the center of the campaign the way the Contract with America did in 1994. The 75% who said America is on the wrong track want to know what Republicans will do to get America on the right track. McCarthy made a start in this direction, but the party system never drove it home and made it vivid.

The Republicans should spend 10% of their time on serious thoughtful investigations (not show trials or baseless mock hearings). The American people have the right to know about the corruption, dishonesty, inefficiency and law breaking that have occurred while Democrats had complete power.

The Democrats have a totally different problem. In 1994, the size of the GOP victory led President Bill Clinton to admit that their leftwing policies had been repudiated. After that, he went to the Congress and said, "the era of big government is over." Working with Clinton, we passed welfare reform, the largest capital gains tax cut in history, telecommunications reform, Food and Drug Administration reform, and ultimately four straight years of a balanced budget paying down the national debt. (This was the only time in modern history the budget was balanced for four straight years.)

This year, because the Republicans did not have the massive win that was expected, the Democrats will not be alarmed or inclined to change. But they should be. President Joe Biden was clearly self-satisfied during his hour-long press conference the day after the election. He seemed certain that there was nothing that needed to change. He offered to work with Republicans – but promptly pointed out he has a veto pen and can kill any bill he doesn’t like.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE OPINION NEWSLETTER

The 75% of Americans who believe the country is on the wrong track aren’t on the Democrats’ radar because they did not translate into losing House and Senate seats. The Democrats have 23 Senate seats up in 2024. The Republicans have only 10. Many of the Democrats are in increasingly Republican-leaning states such as Montana and West Virginia.

If the Democrats relax because they dodged the bullet of an unhappy public, they may be in worse shape for the 2024 elections than they would have been if the Republicans had won big and forced them to course correct.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has already said publicly he believes it will take 6% unemployment to break the back of inflation. That would double the current unemployment rate. President Biden cleverly got big corporations to hold off on announcing layoffs until after the election. That probably helped in 2022. However, it also will make the economic pain bigger for 2024. Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta (the company that owns Facebook) will lay off 11,000 people was the beginning of what may be an avalanche of pink slips laying off people.

The radicalism in the schools will continue to frighten parents and anger most Americans.

The border will remain open and illegal immigrants, drug cartels and fentanyl will continue to pour into America.

This will set the stage for a decisive presidential choice in 2024.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM NEWT GINGRICH

For more commentary from Newt Gingrich, visit Gingrich360.com.

American patriot and longtime man about London town Ben Franklin was named the leader of the colonial rebellion by the British press on this day in history, Nov. 14, 1776.

"The very identical Dr. Franklyn, whom Lord Chatham so much caressed, and used to say he was proud in calling his friend, is now at the head of the rebellion in North America," reported the St. James Chronicle of London. 

"Lord Chatham" was a reference to William Pitt, who served as prime minister of Great Britain from 1766 to 1768 and who was known for his sympathetic view of the American cause.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, NOV. 11, 1921, TOMB OF UNKNOWN SOLDIER DEDICATED AT ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY

The international news highlighted Franklin’s uniquely complex role among the Founding Fathers. 

First, and most obviously, Franklin was old enough to be the father, and even grandfather, of many of the shockingly young Founding Fathers. 

Born on January 17, 1706, in Boston, Franklin was 70 years old when he signed the Declaration of Independence.

John Adams, John Hancock and Thomas Jefferson were 40, 39 and 33, respectively, on July 4, 1776.

Thomas Lynch Jr. and Edward Rutledge, both of South Carolina, were each only 26 years old and the youngest signatories.

WORLD WAR II VETERAN GLADYS HUGHES, 99, HAS A PATRIOTIC MESSAGE FOR THE NATION

The future Father of His Country, Gen. George Washington, was only 44. 

Second, the other Founding Fathers achieved their fame in the fight for American independence. Franklin already enjoyed celebrity as an author, statesman and scientist on both sides of the Atlantic. 

His research on electricity "won him the 1753 Copley Medal (the 18th-century equivalent of the Nobel Prize) and a fellowship of the Royal Society," Smithsonian Magazine wrote in 2016 of Franklin’s life in London. 

"It also transformed his social standing. He was famous. This son of a poor tallow chandler was embraced by a British aristocracy enthralled by science and particularly keen on the sizzle of electricity."

Third, Franklin had spent much of his life living in London, moving there for the first time as a teenager in 1724 before returning to Philadelphia in 1726. 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, JULY 26, 1775, US POST SYSTEM ESTABLISHED UNDER BEN FRANKLIN

He lived in London from 1757 to 1775, briefly returning to America in the 1760s. 

He was known to enjoy the pleasures of English high society and relationships with Britain’s leading citizens. 

Smithsonian Magazine, in the same report, called the man embraced as a leading American patriot "a loyal British royalist" and "one-fifth revolutionary, fourth-fifths London intellectual."

Franklin appeared to draw closer to his native soil as Parliament issued increasingly punitive laws against the colonies. 

London society, meanwhile, increased its verbal attacks against both him and his countrymen. 

He raced to the defense of the colonies nearly two decades before the revolution in a letter to the same St. James Chronicle following a scathing anti-American screed penned by a British officer.

"There are several strokes in (the officer's article) that render the colonies despicable, and even odious to the mother country, which may have ill consequences," Franklin wrote ominously on May 9, 1759.

He brought American grievances before Parliament in 1774, for which he was personally savaged by British solicitor-general Alexander Wedderburn.

"Spots of dirt thrown upon my character," the incensed Franklin wrote of the verbal abuse.

Increasingly an outcast, he left Britain for Philadelphia for the last time on March 20, 1775, just four weeks before the transatlantic disagreement exploded into warfare at the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

Franklin's break with his beloved London was complete when he pledged his life, fortune and honor to the cause of American independence on July 4, 1776. 

Said Franklin to his fellow American revolutionaries upon signing the Declaration of Independence: "Gentlemen, we must now all hang together, or we shall most assuredly all hang separately."

London has since re-embraced the legacy of the scientist-turned-rebel. 

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR OUR LIFESTYLE NEWSLETTER

The Benjamin Franklin House at 36 Craven St. in London, where he lived for nearly 20 years before the American Revolution, opened as a museum in the heart of the city in 2006. It is the "world’s only remaining home of Benjamin Franklin," says the museum's website.