Newt to Establishment: Heed Your Voters

Newt Gingrich said Thursday the Republican Party risks cracking up if party elites do not figure out a way to incorporate the populist message that both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are preaching.

The former House speaker, who appeared on “The Laura Ingraham Show,” said that he and rank-and-file Republican voters are not just resisting big government, they also mistrust big corporations and their crony relationships with government.

“If that many people are going out and choosing Trump and Cruz, they are explicitly repudiating the old order in the Republican Party,” he said. “Now the question is … do you receive that message and rethink what you are doing, or do you say, ‘Boy, they’re sure stupid’? There’s no successful corporation in America where if two-thirds of its customers are unhappy wonders why the customers are dumb.”

In a separate appearance on Ingraham’s show, Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson said that rather than resisting the populist message from voters wholesale, Establishment Republicans should incorporate it into their platform, perhaps by attaching it to specific policy proposals that are more realistic. But ignoring the message outright is a perilous proposition, he said.

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That is why talk of using the Republican National Convention to insert an alternative to the candidates who are running is so reckless, Carlson said. He said Establishment figures are wrong when they think the worst-case scenario is that a weak candidate wins the primaries and goes on to lose the general election.

“The worst-case scenario is that happens and, in the process, Republican voters learn that their party hates them and has no regard for their votes and isn’t interested in democracy,” he said. “The worst-case scenario is where you tell the American people this is a sham. Hey, you think this is an oligarchy? Actually, you’re right.”

Carlson said convention rules that produced such back-room convention maneuverings in the 1800s were designed for a different era.

“People’s expectations of democracy have totally changed,” he said. “We live in a world where you can email the head of your company. It’s a much flatter world. And if you tell people that they have no recourse — they don’t understand where America’s going and they don’t like it, but they can vote. That’s the pressure-release valve. That’s what keeps us a stable society.”

Gingrich said front-runners Donald Trump and Ted Cruz should consider an anti-Establishment alliance, but he acknowledged it is a difficult prospect when both men are fighting hard for the GOP nomination.

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Gingrich compared Trump and Cruz to Villanova and the University of North Carolina in the middle of the men’s basketball national championship game.

“You’re not going to get Villanova or North Carolina to decide to work together at the beginning of the fourth quarter,” he said. “I mean, you’ve got to finish out the game, and I think it will get tougher.”

Gingrich said the first job of the winner will be to reach out to the runner-up and “bind up the wounds.” But don’t expect Trump to stop calling his rival “Lyin’ Ted” while the race is still underway, Gingrich said.

“He can’t help himself,” he said. “He’s very good at it. He likes it, and it gives him energy. And Cruz fights back pretty hard, too. I mean, this is not like a game where one of them is a bully and the other one is some soft person.”