SEA ISLAND, Georgia — House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy predicted President Trump will win reelection in 2020 and that his victory will sweep House Republicans into the majority in the House.

McCarthy said 13 “ruby red” districts that voted Democrat in the midterm elections but supported Trump in 2016 would form the foundation of a new Republican majority. The House minority leader dismissed a flurry of Republican retirements as mostly inconsequential, volunteering that more of the members were poised to quit. Trump matters most, McCarthy emphasized, saying the president’s coattails will erase the advantage in resources and enthusiasm that fueled the Democratic Party’s House takeover.

“If I was the Democrats, I’d be worried,” McCarthy said Friday in an interview during an appearance at the Sea Island Summit, a political conference hosted by the Washington Examiner. Asked directly if Republicans would recapture the House in 2020, McCarthy said: “Yes, because President Trump’s going to get reelected.”

House Republicans need to flip a net 19 Democrat-held districts to reclaim the power they lost in a 40-seat blowout in the midterm elections. Thirteen of them should be relatively easy to win back, McCarthy said, because they were drawn to elect Republicans, and Trump won them overwhelmingly. Among them are districts anchored by the conservative metropolitan areas of Charleston, South Carolina, Oklahoma City, and Salt Lake City.

According to exit polls from 2018, Democrats beat Republicans among women voters, 59% to 40%. To solve this problem, McCarthy said he is focusing on recruiting female candidates. In the 55 House districts that McCarthy considers in play, a majority of the Republican candidates the minority leader is backing are women. The previous record for women running for the House as Republicans was 136, a figure that McCarthy said has already been eclipsed by six.

McCarthy credited his success at landing female candidates to “the squad,” a group of four outspoken liberal female House Democrats popular with the Democratic base. They include Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.

“There’s another thing these four new socialist Democrat women have done — the squad. They have empowered and have people, women, who have differences of opinion with them, decide that they need to have a voice,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy issued one stark warning for his party. He said younger voters are worried about climate change and cautioned that Republicans were risking their viability in elections over the long term by ignoring this critical issue.

Most major Republican leaders have been reluctant to address climate change. Some Republicans have even referred to fears about the warming of the Earth as a hoax. But McCarthy said that voters in their late 20s are the largest demographic age group in the United States and said Republicans could permanently lose this voting bloc absent offering a climate change agenda.

“We need to have an open discussion about, what should the party look like 20 years from now, and we should be a little nervous,” McCarthy said. “We have to do something different than we’ve done.”

To that end, McCarthy said House Republicans are planning to introduce a series of bills addressing climate change. He said the legislation would seek to use conservative, free-market principles to protect the environment, rejecting Democratic proposals such as Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.

“Let’s have that debate instead of everybody saying we’re just deniers,” McCarthy said.

