Clooney predicts Democrats will win back House next year

George Clooney is predicting Democrats will regain control of the House in next year's midterm elections, saying a win will serve as a "check and balance on power."

"I think we’ll get the House back in a year and a half," Clooney, the star of Broadway's "Good Night, and Good Luck" and one of Hollywood's most prominent Democratic supporters and fundraisers, said in an interview with Variety published Tuesday. 

The GOP currently has a razor-thin majority in the House, with 220 Republicans, 213 Democrats and two vacancies in districts previously held by Democrats.

"If you’re a Democrat, we have to find some people to represent us better, who have a sense of humor and who have a sense of purpose," the 63-year-old Academy Award winner said.

In a conversation with legendary theater performer Patti LuPone, Clooney compared the current state of American politics to the civil unrest that the country faced more than 50 years ago. 

"You’ve been around long enough to remember 1968. Every city in the United States was on fire," Clooney told LuPone.

"We’d lost Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. We were losing the greatest speakers we’d ever had. The Vietnam War was raging, the Tet offensive, everything that was going on at that time in our country. The president basically resigned because Walter Cronkite said that Vietnam is unwinnable," he said.

"We’ve been in much worse places. The only thing that’s different is the source of information and how much and how many different sources," Clooney, who plays famed journalist Edward R. Murrow in the Broadway production, said of the media landscape.

"But it’s not nearly as violent, even though it feels violent. It’s not nearly as hopeless as it was at that moment in time. And we’ve done this before," he said. 

"From President Jackson to McCarthy to this, the authoritarian, the demagogue, it goes away when they go away. And he will go away," Clooney said of President Trump. The entertainer described Trump before entering politics as a "New York beast" who was known as "just a guy chasing women" while working as a Manhattan real estate developer. 

Last month, Trump dubbed Clooney — who last year famously penned a New York Times op-ed urging then-President Biden to exit the White House race — a "second rate movie star" and a "failed political pundit."

Republicans, Clooney said, don’t "have anybody that’s as charismatic as [Trump.] He’s charismatic. There’s no taking that away from him. He’s a television star."

"But eventually we’ll find our better angels. We have every other time."