Here Are All the Fox News Stars Who Promised a Red Tsunami

In the days leading up to Tuesday’s crucial midterm election, Fox News hosts and commentators went into overdrive, confidently pushing the notion that Republicans would pick up “historic” victories and crush the Democrats in an unprecedented “red hurricane.”

By the end of the night on Tuesday, however, amid Democrats defying expectations and the promised red wave turning into little more than a trickle, many of those same Fox News stars began to do a bit of introspection and wonder what went wrong.

While the narrative of a massive GOP victory had played out on Fox News airwaves for months ahead of this week’s elections, the conservative cable giant did hedge its bets over the summer when liberal anger over the reversal of Roe v. Wade and legislative wins by the White House suggested Democrats could overcome the traditional headwinds.

Buoyed by a rash of GOP-friendly polls, surging gas prices, rising crime, and stubborn inflation, the network led the right-wing media charge in recent weeks in predicting a colossal Republican victory. Not only did they insist the GOP would easily overtake the House with a comfortable margin, but many Fox pundits also projected that Democrats would lose multiple Senate seats and even the governorship of New York.

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On the Oct. 27 broadcast of The Five, for instance, stridently MAGA Fox News host Jesse Watters was so confident in his forecast of a “wave election” that he bet his colleague Geraldo Rivera $1,000 that the GOP would take back the House and Senate. Judge Jeanine Pirro, another pro-Trump host who would later say Democrats were looking at a “homicide” in the upcoming election, also took up that bet with Rivera. (Asked by The Daily Beast if he still plans to collect from Pirro and Watters now that it looks increasingly unlikely that the GOP will take the Senate, Rivera simply responded: “Yup.”)

While Watters and Pirro would continue to confidently promise viewers that the GOP was poised for a blowout victory over the next two weeks, they were hardly alone in their prognostications.

From Oct. 16 through the afternoon of Election Day, the term “red wave” was mentioned on Fox News and its sister channel Fox Business Network more than 450 times. And while much of this rhetoric was uttered by GOP strategists and politicians conveying confidence in their upcoming races, Fox personalities were more than willing to play along.

Reacting to The View host Sunny Hostin comparing Republican white women to roaches, Fox News contributor Lisa Marie Boothe urged viewers to watch the ABC talk show after the elections to relish in the panel losing it over the GOP victories.

“I think everyone should watch The View on Nov. 9 to watch the meltdown that's going to take place because Democrats are going to get crushed. They are,” Boothe declared on Fox Business last week. “Democrats are going to get crushed on Nov. 8 because a red wave is coming in part because of garbage like this.”

Also taking a shot at media rivals while predicting Democratic losses, Fox News resident “late-night comedy” host Greg Gutfeld snarked about MSNBC’s Joy Reid’s widely criticized remarks on Friday night.

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“Dems have taught us plenty of words like bankruptcy, insolvency, and multiple stab wounds, but I am betting Joy will learn two new words Tuesday: ‘Red wave,’” he quipped. “Hope it doesn’t go over her head.”

Nowhere was the hopium flowing more freely, however, than on Sean Hannity’s show.

Hannity, a key figure in Dr. Mehmet Oz’s failed Senate campaign, regularly featured in recent days other pro-Trump colleagues who offered up sunny forecasts for Republicans—that is, whenever Hannity wasn’t giving GOP politicians an open forum to promote their campaigns.

Fox News contributor and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, in his final election predictions last week, boldly declared to Hannity that the GOP would pick up as many as five seats in the Senate and gain 44 in the House. He even went so far as to predict the GOP would win the Senate in New Hampshire and had a decent chance in Washington—two states in which the GOP candidates were handily defeated by fairly large margins. “So I think it’s going to be a great night,” Gingrich gushed.

As of Wednesday afternoon, meanwhile, Democrats are poised to either retain their seats in the Senate or even pick up an additional one, while Republicans are likely to net a very slim majority in the House.

Former President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara, now a Fox News commentator, also told Hannity last week, “We could see things happen in America we haven’t seen in decades with the historic red wave.”

During the final 24 hours heading into Election Day, the confidence only grew stronger.

Kellyanne Conway, another ex-Trump adviser turned Fox News pundit, said on Hannity’s Monday night broadcast that “I think that a number of people deserve a lot of credit for this going the Republicans' way,” and Trump is going to “have a lot of good to say tomorrow about the candidates he endorsed.” (In the aftermath of the elections, Fox News and other Murdoch-owned media outlets have quickly pivoted to being skeptical and even overtly critical of Trump following the extreme underperformance by the GOP, largely due to Trump-endorsed candidates.)

Watters, referencing his bet with Rivera, added this on his Monday night program: “And if there's not a red wave, I will dance. How about that?”

Fox & Friends Weekend host Pete Hegseth asserted that President Joe Biden would be ruined by the results. “This midterm election is the end of Joe Biden's political career,” he said on The Faulkner Focus on Monday. “When the red wave comes, and it is coming, Joe Biden’s political utility is over. It will be the beginning of a race to the bottom of who will replace him.”

Hegseth’s Fox & Friends colleagues, meanwhile, spent Monday morning seemingly attempting to outdo each other in forecasting a landslide victory for the GOP.

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“Can I say something moving forward because I think this election will be a red wave, and obviously the American people don't agree with [Biden] on his war on American energy,” Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy asserted.

Steve Doocy concurred, adding that “predictions of a red wave are accurate.” His proof: SNL had done a skit the weekend before mocking Biden. “Saturday Night Live knows that Joe is going to lose big so they are making jokes about it,” the longtime Fox & Friends star said.

Just hours before the polls closed, others at Fox were still willingly putting it out there that a “red wave” was coming, including Fox News contributor Tomi Lahren and Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney.

But perhaps no Fox News personality was more bullish on the GOP’s chances than contributor Marc Thiessen. In multiple appearances heading into the elections, he assured viewers that it was not only in the bag for Republicans but that Democrats would suffer a historically humiliating defeat.

“Will it be a red wave or tsunami? I think a hurricane. If you think back in August, Democrats thought the sky was clearing, sun was coming out,” he exclaimed on Monday’s broadcast of America’s Newsroom. “They were just in the eye of the storm. Now the storm is hitting again. so it will be a red hurricane.”

By Tuesday evening, however, Thiessen had quickly changed his tune—and seemed to lay the lion’s share of the blame on Trump and the MAGA movement.

“We have the worst inflation in four decades, the worst collapse in real wages in 40 years, the worst crime wave since the 1990s, the worst border crisis in U.S. history, we have Joe Biden, who is the least popular president since Harry Truman, since presidential polling happened, and there wasn’t a red wave,” Thiessen fumed during Fox News’ midterm election coverage. “That is a searing indictment on the Republican Party. That is a searing indictment of the message that we have been sending to the voters. They looked at all of that and looked at the Republican alternative and said, ‘No thanks.’”

He doubled down on that assessment on Wednesday morning, stating that the GOP “nominated a bunch of people the voters rejected in a lot of these Senate races” and that the “election denial put people over the edge.”

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