Newt Gingrich urged the GOP to embrace mail-in voting in the wake of Georgia Senate runoff loss

• Newt Gingrich called for a rethink of election strategy by the GOP after the Georgia runoff defeat.
• He called for the party to rethink its hostility to mail-in ballots.

Former House Speaker and veteran Republican operative Newt Gingrich called for the party to rethink its tactics in the wake of GOP candidate Herschel Walker's defeat in Tuesday's Georgia Senate runoff.

Walker was the latest Donald Trump-endorsed midterm candidate to slump to defeat.

The results have prompted hand-wringing in the Republican Party, as they fell well short of the sweeping gains some had been expecting before the election.

In an appearance on Fox News host Sean Hannity's show Tuesday, Newt Gingrich, who served as House Speaker between 1995 and 1999, and was a longtime US Representative for Georgia, addressed the reasons for the defeats.

He said Republicans needed to embrace platforms such as TikTok, which some in the party have attacked as a tool of the Chinese government, as well as early voting.

Mail-in ballots and other early voting measures have long been the target of Trump and his allies, who have baselessly claimed they are plagued by mass fraud.

Some analysts believe these attacks have dented the confidence of Republican voters in the integrity of elections, while a surge in early ballots have given Democrats strong platforms to build off.

"You have to play the game by the rules that are existing," Gingrich said.

"That means, for example, if you want Generation Z voters you've got to be on TikTok, even if in fact in the long run we may abolish TikTok as a Chinese communist device," he said.

"It means that you have to recognize early voting. It doesn't do Republicans any good to save their TV money until October if they've had a third of the vote come in in September."

During Gingrich's stint as House speaker he introduced hyper-partisan, aggressive tactics that have shaped the Republican Party ever since.

In recent years he has been a political ally of Donald Trump, backing the former president's baseless claims the election was stolen from him in 2020.

"Democrats focus on elections, Republicans focus on campaigns," Gingrich concluded. "We need to rethink from the ground up."