Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich claimed on the latest episode of “Pod Force One” that President Trump could help the GOP have its “largest off-year election in modern times” this November — if he’s able to bring gas prices down to $3 per gallon.
Gingrich told The Post’s Miranda Devine on the latest episode, out Wednesday, that the cost of fuel will have to start dropping “around the Fourth of July” — and Trump will have to “put back on his candidate hat” — to ensure Republicans don’t face a blowout in the Nov. 3 midterms.
“If you tell me the price of gasoline on Labor Day, I’m pretty confident I can tell you about the election,” he said. “If the president can get gasoline down somewhere in the $3 range and people begin to feel like it’s going to continue to come down, the Republicans will win the largest off-year election in modern times.”
Democrats currently lead the GOP on the generic congressional ballot by 7.6 percentage points, according to the RealClearPolitics polling aggregator, but Gingrich cautioned against trusting “any public poll.”
The average price of a gallon of regular gas nationwide hit $4.49 per gallon on Tuesday, per AAA, down 4 cents from last week.
Ginrich, who masterminded the Republican Revolution that saw the GOP gain the House majority for the first time in 42 years in 1994, added that Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill should have fully kicked in by the time voters head to the polls this fall.
“We’ll probably be at 5% or 6% growth by this fall, which means that jobs will be showing up, people will have wages rising faster than inflation, and we will really be back ruling as the arsenal of democracy,” he said.
“The other thing is that the Democrats really have become a party that is, I think, weak and woke and far too liberal,” he added. “And I think as a result, almost like [Democratic presidential nominee] George McGovern in ’72, they are open to the potential for a collapse on a scale they can’t quite imagine.”
For that to happen, Gingrich acknowledged, the president will “have to open” the Strait of Hormuz to secure the passage of crude oil exports from the Persian Gulf.
“You can fight Iran forever as long as you get the strait open,” the ex-speaker told Devine. “Trump has been very clever. People don’t care if you’re using air power. … It doesn’t feel like a real war. You’re not getting terrible pictures of American troops getting killed.”
“And so Trump can sustain the war if he can minimize the impact here at home. It’s the impact here at home that’s a real problem,” he noted.
Iran’s closure of the strait shortly after the start of Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28 caused global energy prices to surge, with oil shooting up to more than $100 per barrel as ships were barred from traversing the waterway.
Between one-fifth and one-quarter of the world’s seaborne oil passes through the strait, which has since been blockaded by US warships to halt the passage of Iranian-flagged tankers. Only a handful of ships have entered or exited over the course of the conflict.
Trump administration officials have been furiously working to hammer out terms of a peace deal with Tehran in recent days, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared Tuesday that the strait will open “one way or the other.”
“The straits need to be open, unimpeded, without tolls,” Rubio told reporters in India. “And obviously, that needs to happen immediately as soon as anything’s agreed to.”
Trump insisted in a post on Truth Social Monday that any agreement with Iran “will only be a Great Deal for all or, no Deal at all.
If the latter, he said: “Back to the Battlefront and shooting, but bigger and stronger than ever before — And nobody wants that!”
