Speaker 1: Well whiskey coming take.
Speaker 2: Don't From Powerline blog dot com and produced by Ricochet
Speaker 2: dot com. This is the three Whiskey Happy Hour with
Speaker 2: your bartenders Steve Hayward, John You and power Lines International
Speaker 2: Woman of Mystery Lucretia.
Speaker 3: Got you gotta giving let that whiskey flat where you're feeling.
Speaker 1: In love down in Loon.
Speaker 4: Good morning everyone. I hate to tell you it's good morning,
Speaker 4: but I have to tell you why we're not drinking whiskey,
Speaker 4: not even Steve, at least as far as I can tell.
Speaker 4: And it's Steve's fault because even though Steve pretends to
Speaker 4: be a major tech guy, because what his internet quit
Speaker 4: on him in the middle of trying to start a
Speaker 4: podcast last night.
Speaker 1: So it's always hardful smart as.
Speaker 4: As your fault. My internet was working, even John got
Speaker 4: his internet working.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm in the middle of I'm in the middle
Speaker 3: of Indiana. I didn't know they had internet. I thought
Speaker 3: this was all startling country.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I thought it was all They were still using
Speaker 4: telephones there. But you know the kind on the wall
Speaker 4: with a really long string, the really long windy the
Speaker 4: house with.
Speaker 1: But but look at the upside. John got to have
Speaker 1: a second new, brand new chicken big Mac, at least
Speaker 1: from the photographic evidence I've seen.
Speaker 3: So, oh no, this is this is the best gift
Speaker 3: I've ever had at any kind of academic talk. So
Speaker 3: I was giving a talk at Notre Dame debating law
Speaker 3: fair with a very good liberal friend of mine who's
Speaker 3: a calmnists at La Times. And afterwards we had a
Speaker 3: reception and Phil Murno is our friend who's a director here,
Speaker 3: surprised me with a big Mac and fries. Oh isn't
Speaker 3: that the best gift you ever got? You got like,
Speaker 3: you know, coffee mugs something. It's a nice time, but
Speaker 3: no one's ever done better than a big Mac. So
Speaker 3: the students are like watching me to see what I
Speaker 3: would do with it.
Speaker 1: So you know I did with it. I hate it,
Speaker 1: they were.
Speaker 3: I was like, you're not gonna let this get cold.
Speaker 3: I was like, after I bit it, I was like,
Speaker 3: anybody want seconds?
Speaker 1: But no.
Speaker 4: I thought maybe they'd had a reception because the picture
Speaker 4: shows your fries inside of a warmer tray, and I
Speaker 4: thought maybe they'd done like a Donald Trump thing and
Speaker 4: brought big Max and fries for everybody. But no, it
Speaker 4: was probably just.
Speaker 3: Usually I would have I would have had two big
Speaker 3: max then. So the funny thing, there's another picture. I'll
Speaker 3: send it to the shows where the fries took a
Speaker 3: while to eat. So the whole time I spoke, I
Speaker 3: had a large fry hand to container my hands.
Speaker 4: That's an academic You speak your speech.
Speaker 3: So this is right after, This is right The Neudar
Speaker 3: Day's really the way they do things. Really, so you
Speaker 3: give a talk and then you meet with students and
Speaker 3: supporters of the program after for a smaller group setting
Speaker 3: when they really ask you what they wanted to ask you.
Speaker 3: And we had one We even had one crazy person
Speaker 3: interrupt the speech because she didn't like that I was
Speaker 3: saying that someone had said Trump lies, and I say
Speaker 3: politicians always lie.
Speaker 1: She flipped out. It had to be removed by the police.
Speaker 1: But this was news apparently only shows. John, you still
Speaker 1: got it going, you know, I know. I started arguing
Speaker 1: with her.
Speaker 3: I was like, did you ever read I was like,
Speaker 3: Steve Hayward, I was like, did you ever read the
Speaker 3: Caro three volume biography of Lindon Johnson? Now there was
Speaker 3: a liar?
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, you know, facts and things, John, That's okay,
Speaker 1: that's crazy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she got really upset and had to be removed
Speaker 3: by the Notre Dame police. It wasn't like they're not
Speaker 3: like the Berkeley police. They don't tolerate any kind of you.
Speaker 1: I was about to say, well, okay.
Speaker 4: Okay, well all right, gentlemen, we have a lot to
Speaker 4: get to this morning.
Speaker 1: We're in trouble. John, I'll just say you want.
Speaker 4: In trouble because I'm on a roll. I'm on a roll.
Speaker 4: But first of all, actually, you know our little gadfly John,
Speaker 4: who goes everywhere and talks to everybody all the time
Speaker 4: and is the most popular guy even on Outnumbered because
Speaker 4: he was there like two weeks in a row. Practically
Speaker 4: the women love him there and he can't get away
Speaker 4: from them.
Speaker 3: But I know, why did this happen to me when
Speaker 3: I was seventeen? It right, it's.
Speaker 1: Right, you know, John, You chick magnet was not on
Speaker 1: my Bengo car to have site.
Speaker 4: You just don't get it, Steve, you don't get that,
Speaker 4: okay anyway, So actually, John, the other gadfly, was probably
Speaker 4: not nearly as exciting as either Outnumbered Chicks, Fox News
Speaker 4: Chicks or mc or McDonald's Notre Dame. It was heritage
Speaker 4: what Heritage when he went to speak to Heritage or
Speaker 4: went to a conference at Heritage and learned all about
Speaker 4: election fraud.
Speaker 1: Well, remember, I mean remind people Lucretia that we ended
Speaker 1: last week's episode he was saying, Okay, I'm.
Speaker 4: Going to I am the boss. Don't you ever forget.
Speaker 3: Its Lucretia's getting the seventy year old listeners really excited now.
Speaker 4: And all of those men who like strong women that
Speaker 4: are going to vote for Kamala right. Anyway, we'll come
Speaker 4: back to that one.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 4: Last week, I wanted to discuss a little bit about
Speaker 4: what I had barely heard supposedly Republicans were doing, both
Speaker 4: at the federal level but most importantly at the state level,
Speaker 4: to try to push back on Democratic attempts to shall
Speaker 4: we say, tweak the rules a bit or stretch the boundaries.
Speaker 4: I'm going to be nice about it. Everybody out there
Speaker 4: who's my fan knows what I really mean by that,
Speaker 4: But I'm trying not to offend John before he starts talking. Anyway,
Speaker 4: for the first time in really in my lifetime, we
Speaker 4: are discussing in very serious terms that the difference in
Speaker 4: this election might be the difference between a fair election
Speaker 4: and an election where we'll keep it at one side
Speaker 4: right now, because I have more to say about that,
Speaker 4: where one side the Democrats will cheat or do anything
Speaker 4: they can to keep Donald Trump from getting into office.
Speaker 4: And if you remember one last really quick side note
Speaker 4: on that I said last week, they can't afford to
Speaker 4: assassinate him now because they'll get Jade Vance, who as
Speaker 4: much as they hate Trump, they'd really be sorry if
Speaker 4: they got jd Vance instead. In my opinion. Anyway, John,
Speaker 4: tell us what you talked about at Heritage.
Speaker 3: It was interesting. It was a conference about election law,
Speaker 3: election integrity, and they actually asked me to come talk
Speaker 3: about law fair but almost all, I think every other
Speaker 3: speaker spoke about what to do to prevent what They're
Speaker 3: all they're all fans of Lucretia. We should create a
Speaker 3: club like fans of Bill, fans of Hillary. They should
Speaker 3: be friends of Lucretia. And they were convinced that the
Speaker 3: Democrats had played dirty tricks four years ago. And each
Speaker 3: of the speakers got many of them were from the
Speaker 3: States or from different national groups, saying what they were
Speaker 3: doing this year to make sure that what happened four
Speaker 3: years ago didn't happen. So we had a small debate
Speaker 3: about whether they'd actually cheated or they had you know,
Speaker 3: as Molly Hemingway says, as Lucretia's point out, that they
Speaker 3: just used COVID as an excuse to change the rules
Speaker 3: in a way that benefited them, and they took advantage
Speaker 3: of it. That was my observation. I thought that they
Speaker 3: had changed the rules based on COVID, gotten the courts
Speaker 3: to approve it or state legislatures to approve it, and
Speaker 3: then took full advantage of it, where our side was
Speaker 3: just totally taken by surprise. So one thing I came
Speaker 3: in with this this time the Trump campaign and the
Speaker 3: Republican Party in the States is not going to be
Speaker 3: taken by surprise. They described this very comprehensive effort where
Speaker 3: in all of the states, even states where we're gonna
Speaker 3: get killed, like California, for example, or New York, where
Speaker 3: they have teams of lawyers who are ready to challenge
Speaker 3: any effort by the Democrats to go in and say, oh,
Speaker 3: you have to change your rules. You have to allow
Speaker 3: ballots to be counted that weren't signed, or you have
Speaker 3: to allow ballots to be counted that weren't sealed.
Speaker 1: Properly.
Speaker 3: So they're gonna, unlike last time, they're gonna be ready
Speaker 3: to go to court in every state, and they have
Speaker 3: a lot of I mean, it was described to me
Speaker 3: a lot of a more systematic campaign of people going
Speaker 3: to the polls to make sure there's no shin in
Speaker 3: against go to the counting centers to say we want
Speaker 3: to be able to observe. So I think what happened
Speaker 3: last time is the Trump campaign was overly confident. They
Speaker 3: thought they were going to win by ten million votes,
Speaker 3: and so they didn't actually roll out any kind of infrastructure.
Speaker 3: So that's why I think what we saw reported was
Speaker 3: anecdotal people here, people there, some connect a campaign, a
Speaker 3: lot of people not part of a campaign, no collection
Speaker 3: of all the data what was going on, and no
Speaker 3: systematic effort to go to court with good lawyers all
Speaker 3: at once to try to stop the Democrats from changing
Speaker 3: the rules. So I was actually came away really impressed.
Speaker 3: I was like, God, I was telling people, you want
Speaker 3: to meet my friend Lucretia. She would be so happy
Speaker 3: if she were here, she'd be handing out gold and
Speaker 3: blue ribbons to all of you.
Speaker 4: Well, well, let me I want to hear what you
Speaker 4: have to say, Steve, I just have an editorial comment
Speaker 4: in there, or again, my fans would never forgive me
Speaker 4: for this. One of the one one thing that you
Speaker 4: described I have to take issue with, and that's when
Speaker 4: you say they changed the rules and got the courts
Speaker 4: to agree to it. But remember Trump for Texas versus whichever,
Speaker 4: that Supreme Court case that was dismissed for lack of
Speaker 4: standing where the States brought.
Speaker 3: Texas versus pennsylvaniaas suspensilvania.
Speaker 4: Thank you that that they were denied for lack of standing.
Speaker 4: But remember the argument was a very legitimate argument, which
Speaker 4: is that the United States Constitution says only legislators can change. Basically,
Speaker 4: I'm ad libbing forgive me because it right. And so
Speaker 4: the fact that the Supreme Court did not issue a
Speaker 4: decision based on the merits, but on standing. But of
Speaker 4: course you know that doesn't matter when it gets out
Speaker 4: in the in the in the media and the public.
Speaker 4: But there really was a legitimate argument that many of
Speaker 4: these changes that were supposedly done because of COVID were
Speaker 4: in fact violations of the Constitution, which by definition makes
Speaker 4: them unlawful. The rules, I get it.
Speaker 3: But can I throw an example of something I learned
Speaker 3: about which has gotten almost no tension, is that you
Speaker 3: might remember last time the Pennsylvania what my home state,
Speaker 3: was the big battleground, and it had to do if
Speaker 3: you remember, with more the ballots signed where they properly signed,
Speaker 3: where they properly dained right, and properly dated. And so
Speaker 3: the Pennsylvania Supreme Court said, well, there's something in our
Speaker 3: constitution that says you have to have free and fair elections.
Speaker 3: So because of the pressures of COVID, it would be
Speaker 3: unfair to not count these ballots because everything else seems
Speaker 3: to be correct. And you might remember that there were
Speaker 3: like ten thousand ballots that fit this category, and Justice
Speaker 3: Alito issued an injunction saying don't count those votes. Yet
Speaker 3: it didn't matter then because Biden's margin there was over
Speaker 3: one hundred thousand votes. But at this Heritage conference, so
Speaker 3: there's an example. These lawyers went to court early. They've
Speaker 3: already gone to court to demand that that not happened again,
Speaker 3: and they actually won. So they won at the intermediate
Speaker 3: Pennsylvania Appeals Court, and they've won a preliminary motion at
Speaker 3: the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to say this time you have
Speaker 3: to sign the ballots. That's like a big deal like that,
Speaker 3: Like if they had done that four years ago, they
Speaker 3: had made a lot of progress. So that's an example
Speaker 3: of how, you know, conservatives are sort of acting preemptively
Speaker 3: rather than waiting for the Democrats to go first. And
Speaker 3: they've been describing, you know, who the Democrat lawyers are
Speaker 3: and what they've been up to, so they're really on
Speaker 3: top of the ball this time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that ought. I mean, I know, Lucretia, you
Speaker 1: want to bring up the sinister market Ellias at some point,
Speaker 1: but I'll just make the observation here that, you know,
Speaker 1: John mentioned that the Trump campaign was kind of caught
Speaker 1: flat footed four years ago and lost a lot of
Speaker 1: cases they shouldn't have lost. I agree with you on that.
Speaker 1: But if you think back to the two thousand election
Speaker 1: in Florida and John, maybe you can add some details
Speaker 1: to this, because you might have been part of that story.
Speaker 1: I don't know, But what happened was is that every
Speaker 1: Republican lawyer in the country who knew something about election
Speaker 1: law was in Florida practically by noon the next day,
Speaker 1: I mean overnight. James Baker, who was the person that
Speaker 1: the Bushes brought in to run their drill. They brought
Speaker 1: lawyers down and they were fairly successful at hand to hand.
Speaker 1: I mean, it took thirty six days, as we know
Speaker 1: and all that ness. But that was a case of
Speaker 1: where they you know, they found and assembled a team
Speaker 1: really fast and flooded the zone. I'd like to think,
Speaker 1: and it sounds John like I'm right in thinking this,
Speaker 1: that the Republicans have got teams in place ready to
Speaker 1: flood the zone if there's any funny business in Wisconsin
Speaker 1: or Michigan, or Pennsylvania and or Arizona and other places.
Speaker 1: By the way, did you go to Florida in two thousand, John,
Speaker 1: or you?
Speaker 3: I did so to one public and one I guess
Speaker 3: I could talk about it now that wasn't really public then,
Speaker 3: but I think has known now if you were really
Speaker 3: watching things. So I testified before the Florida legislature, ah,
Speaker 3: and I urged the theory that Lucretia just urged. Although
Speaker 3: I didn't know Lucretia then, even then she was pulling
Speaker 3: my strings, and.
Speaker 4: I said from Germany, no less.
Speaker 3: I always knew Lucretia worked for the intelligence services. She
Speaker 3: just got busted. She got busted, so I actually went
Speaker 3: down to the Florida Legislature and testified that if the
Speaker 3: disorder had kept going on, that the Florida Legislature could
Speaker 3: constitutionally take the power back and allocate the electoral votes,
Speaker 3: because otherwise Florida would have no electoral votes and that
Speaker 3: would actually violate federal law. Then this is the interesting thing.
Speaker 3: About a week later, during the recount, I got asked
Speaker 3: to come see Jeb Bush, who was the governor, right,
Speaker 3: and to basically say, well, if the Florida Legislature doesn't
Speaker 3: do its constitutional duty, then the governor should at least
Speaker 3: try to send in some electoral votes for the state
Speaker 3: of Florida, because otherwise you won't be counted and this
Speaker 3: would be an issue of Florida constitutional law. Guess who
Speaker 3: I So the campaign sent somebody to yeah along with
Speaker 3: me because I wasn't working. I wasn't working for the
Speaker 3: campaign at the time. I was just an outside commentator.
Speaker 3: So I went and then get who went with Lucretia.
Speaker 3: Guess who the Republican Party sent with me?
Speaker 4: I have no idea.
Speaker 1: It was John Roberts.
Speaker 4: I never would have guessed that.
Speaker 3: Never, And let me tell you, during the whole meeting.
Speaker 3: He didn't say a single word, not a single thing,
Speaker 3: just let.
Speaker 4: You drop one of the smartest things he's probably ever done.
Speaker 4: That's awesome. Yeah, But with you guys, I was kind
Speaker 4: of out of the loop on that one because I
Speaker 4: really was living in Germany at the time and only
Speaker 4: watching it on air Force Network News, you know, three
Speaker 4: in the morning, trying to keep up with things as
Speaker 4: they were happening. But anyway, anyway, that's a great story.
Speaker 3: John still remember like we met at them. I still
Speaker 3: remember like we met at some I didn't know this,
Speaker 3: but Florida is covered with pancake houses, or at least
Speaker 3: it was back you know, in two thousand, So I
Speaker 3: remember meeting a pancake a pancake house. Like then, there's
Speaker 3: not a chain there like Little Mabel's pancake House. Fred's
Speaker 3: pink all over the place. So we met some pancake
Speaker 3: house right near the governor's office, and I talked with
Speaker 3: him about you know, this theory about the article to
Speaker 3: and taking the electoral votes and voting them for the state.
Speaker 3: Seems to be nodding his head into agreement, you know.
Speaker 3: John Rbert was just you know, a Pellot lawyer Washington,
Speaker 3: at the time I knew who he was. He was
Speaker 3: a great advocatory then, so I thought he was all
Speaker 3: on board. You know, I felt like I who knew
Speaker 3: I had the same feeling. I guess Thomas and Alito do. Now.
Speaker 3: I thought he was all on board, be marching right
Speaker 3: with me. We go to the meeting, not a peep,
Speaker 3: not a peep.
Speaker 1: But you know, on this election law business, Roberts has
Speaker 1: always been good all the way through.
Speaker 3: So he wrote, he wrote, Shelby County, which is the
Speaker 3: biggest the rejection of the liberal theory of voting rights
Speaker 3: in our lifetime.
Speaker 1: Well, he's the one.
Speaker 4: Who pulled over Cavanaugh and Amy Cooney Barrett on the
Speaker 4: whole Texas versus Pennsylvania standing issue. He didn't, I get it.
Speaker 4: He didn't want the onus to fall on the Supreme
Speaker 4: Court for interfering in the election. Again, after having been
Speaker 4: there with John and watching how how incredibly acrimonious it
Speaker 4: all was, it probably scarred him for life listening to
Speaker 4: John's powerful and passionate please And so when it came
Speaker 4: time to having to make an important decision like Texas
Speaker 4: versus Pennsylvania, he just punted. That's my opinion. About it.
Speaker 4: But now I recognize whose fault that is. It's John's
Speaker 4: fault for just outfinding him so much.
Speaker 3: Ah, it's always our fault. I take full blame. I
Speaker 3: take full blame. I'm like Steve. I've learned to take
Speaker 3: full blame when Lucretia accuses me of something.
Speaker 4: I never accuse you guys of anything. Uh So I
Speaker 4: have an interesting deeper discussion than to take you guys
Speaker 4: into I hope that you'll indulge me on this. And
Speaker 4: so I remember again out of the country for some
Speaker 4: time after the two thousand election, actually, so a little
Speaker 4: bit less on getting the pulse of how that all,
Speaker 4: how that all came about or came down, I guess
Speaker 4: is the best way to put it. You know. I
Speaker 4: read stuff about people who are still still to this
Speaker 4: day and shock about it and sad and all those
Speaker 4: other things. But what I would my impression of it
Speaker 4: is that as many people who thought it was a
Speaker 4: stolen election, you know, people went to Halloween parties with
Speaker 4: hanging chads as hanging chads and things like that, it
Speaker 4: didn't seem to tear the country apart in quite the
Speaker 4: same way that the twenty twenty election did. Now, you
Speaker 4: can tell me I'm wrong, but and I'll let you do.
Speaker 4: So that's a sub point to my larger pipe. Go ahead, Steve,
Speaker 4: I can see you picking your lips.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Actually, I think it was a ratchet and liberal
Speaker 1: Democratic Party derangement. I mean I think they didn't get
Speaker 1: over it, and they still think it was told. Actually,
Speaker 1: there's the broader thesis here. If you look closely, Democrats
Speaker 1: think that every Republican president since Nixon was illegitimate, and
Speaker 1: they have always cheating theories. You know, Nixon interfered with
Speaker 1: the Vietnam talks, and you know Reagan in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: got the Iranians to hold the hostage and stuff that
Speaker 1: there's no evidence for it and in fact falls apart
Speaker 1: on any closer look, right, And then of course Bush
Speaker 1: in two thousand stealing the election of Florida. You know,
Speaker 1: something that is always forgotten is that there were I
Speaker 1: think at least two consortiums of news organizations, you know
Speaker 1: USA Today, New York Times. They went and did their
Speaker 1: own full recount of the state, and they did it
Speaker 1: under every standard, you know, hanging chads, dimple chads, all
Speaker 1: the rest, and Bush won every single time, sometimes by
Speaker 1: an even wider margin. I mean, it was what finally
Speaker 1: six hundred and thirty six votes. But the point is
Speaker 1: that all disappeared down a memory hole that never got
Speaker 1: big headlines. You can imagine what would happen if the
Speaker 1: media had found the other results. We'd have never heard
Speaker 1: the end of it. But Democrats are dug in on that,
Speaker 1: and I do think that that's what you know Bush
Speaker 1: de arrangement syndrome. We called it twenty years ago, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but no, But okay, so twenty is worse.
Speaker 1: I agree with your observation. At twenty twenties, that's so
Speaker 1: much worse.
Speaker 4: I think it's qualitatively, qualitatively worse, although I would probably
Speaker 4: agree with you with the idea that that began Trump
Speaker 4: de arrangement syndrome. The difference, of course, is that Bush
Speaker 4: it wasn't really that much of an existential threat to
Speaker 4: the Democratic Party because he really may as well have
Speaker 4: been a Democrat when it all came down. But my
Speaker 4: real anyway, wasn't there.
Speaker 1: To the bushwisi as I call that world.
Speaker 4: But that's not the word I used, as you call either.
Speaker 3: John. I object I objected, least in the grounds of
Speaker 3: good taste. Just being a Bush administration.
Speaker 4: Right, I know, but but you were. You were the
Speaker 4: shining star of the Bush Administration's.
Speaker 1: Getting worse and worse, and.
Speaker 4: Not really not trying to make fun of George W. Bush.
Speaker 4: What I'm trying to say is I was doing a
Speaker 4: little bit of research for a piece I'm trying to
Speaker 4: write for Steve's Political Question Substack, and every single article
Speaker 4: that I pulled up with a certain search engine, it's
Speaker 4: a certain search word was Trump cannot win because he
Speaker 4: is he is, in fact, an existential threat to democracy.
Speaker 4: And if he won, even if he got enough votes
Speaker 4: to win, which I think there is plenty of evidence
Speaker 4: that he probably will do, so, he cannot win anyway
Speaker 4: because of his insistence in the big lie. You know
Speaker 4: that he won the twenty twenty election, it will destroy
Speaker 4: our republic. We are now at a point where, on
Speaker 4: the one hand, to only twenty seven percent of Republicans
Speaker 4: pull to believe that this election will be fair, that
Speaker 4: it will you know that there won't be cheating, et cetera,
Speaker 4: et cetera. Eighty four percent of Democrats believe it's going
Speaker 4: to be fair. Now. That was taken a few weeks
Speaker 4: ago before Kamalama ding Dong was, you know, crashing in
Speaker 4: the polls. Come back to that later, But we are
Speaker 4: now at a point where it's not even about who
Speaker 4: wins or loses the election. The fact that Trump had
Speaker 4: the audacity to question all of the cheating, fair and square,
Speaker 4: whatever you want to call it, that happened in twenty twenty,
Speaker 4: and the Left realizes now that they probably can never
Speaker 4: win with the broader general public on their policies, on
Speaker 4: their people. I mean, how could you have come up
Speaker 4: with two worse candidates than Kamalama Ding Dong and mister
Speaker 4: new masculinity. I really I don't get it. So my
Speaker 4: point is that there's no bench in the Democratic Party,
Speaker 4: there's no policies that a majority of Americans support, so
Speaker 4: that the only way they can win is to call
Speaker 4: to call Trump an illegitimate president, even if he wins
Speaker 4: a huge by a huge margin, because he challenged the
Speaker 4: last election and that makes him unsuitable for ruling in
Speaker 4: a democracy trademark.
Speaker 3: Can I let me respond to that by talking about
Speaker 3: what happened in our debate yesterday at Notre Dame. That
Speaker 3: was exactly the argument argument that my opponent made. He said,
Speaker 3: so I said to you know, the leftist done all
Speaker 3: kinds of unprecedented things in this election, prosecuting former president,
Speaker 3: current opposition candidate. And he said, it's all justified. This
Speaker 3: is an essential argument. It's all justified because he's a
Speaker 3: unique threat to democra. He repeated that phrase several times,
Speaker 3: unique threat to democracy. And I said, first of all,
Speaker 3: I said, have you ever read the biography of LBJ?
Speaker 3: Have you ever read Bigermy Andrew Jackson? I mean, these
Speaker 3: are you know, you want to talk about people who
Speaker 3: were really outrageous and fighting the political establishment. They were
Speaker 3: far worse than Trump. But then but my point was
Speaker 3: the second thing I said to him was you may
Speaker 3: think he's a unique threat to democracy, but once you
Speaker 3: do these things, you have opened up a Pandora's box
Speaker 3: where it now becomes part of regular election year politics.
Speaker 3: And then you can't say anything if a Western Texas
Speaker 3: state DA prosecutes Kamala Harrison prosecutes Doug em Hoff for
Speaker 3: beating up his ex girlfriend, right, so that's one thing
Speaker 3: they can't They don't. Their explanation answer to everything is
Speaker 3: Trump is unique threat democracy, so that justifies anything we do.
Speaker 3: And their promise is it's one time only he it
Speaker 3: was weird, he would then. And then once Trump loses,
Speaker 3: he will be purged from the Republican Party. Everything will
Speaker 3: be back to normal and you guys will be glad
Speaker 3: that we did this for you.
Speaker 1: Oh well, aren't they aren't they nice to us? Right?
Speaker 4: But that's I'm not surprised and interesting perspective. It doesn't
Speaker 4: surprise me at all. But again they don't. It's usually
Speaker 4: centered on Trump and the big lie, right, Trump and
Speaker 4: the big lie. And if you think about everything they did,
Speaker 4: not just to Trump, but to anybody else, our friend
Speaker 4: John Eastman, everything they did to stop anybody ever from
Speaker 4: questioning a democratic victory. The same thing happened in Arizona,
Speaker 4: by the way, in twenty twenty two, when that twit Katie,
Speaker 4: that that that valley girl Katie has but the most
Speaker 4: you've ever ever and she won by cheating, no doubt
Speaker 4: about it. Anybody who challenged it her her attorney un
Speaker 4: Erroll prosecuted. They prosecuted several of the county supervisors in
Speaker 4: Mike County for refusing to certify the vote.
Speaker 1: Well, three quick observations on this general scene, John, you
Speaker 1: left out the contradiction that's obvious and clerics in the face.
Speaker 1: How can you be a threat to democracy if he's
Speaker 1: democratically elected by not just the electors.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, Harriet Hageman was because lost.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, look, I mean again, you know, double standards, hypocrisy.
Speaker 1: But you may have noticed the news this week that
Speaker 1: Jamie Rescue and a few other Democrats said We're not
Speaker 1: necessarily going to certify Trump's victory in the Electoral College
Speaker 1: on January sixth, twenty twenty five, or whatever the date is,
Speaker 1: if we think there's foreign interference. They're getting ready to
Speaker 1: rerun that whole business. But then, finally, what I think
Speaker 1: you're going to see happen is if Trump wins, as
Speaker 1: I expect he will, the left will not be able
Speaker 1: to help themselves. And you remember two thousand and four, John,
Speaker 1: you know Bush is reelected. They thought Carry was going
Speaker 1: to win even on election day, and I remember flipping
Speaker 1: out all the articles of the time. This is William Jennings,
Speaker 1: Bryan's Revan. Just these crazy, fundamentalist, evangelical, stupid Americans who
Speaker 1: went for Bush instead of the enlightened John Kerry. They're
Speaker 1: going to do that on steroids. They're going to say
Speaker 1: the American people, and by the way, their ideology is
Speaker 1: already there and things like black Lives Matter and all
Speaker 1: the rest of it. American people are racist, they're stupid,
Speaker 1: they're ignorant, they turned the blind eye to crime. They're
Speaker 1: easily manipulated by foreign actors. And that is going to be,
Speaker 1: you know, the repeated message in the New York Times
Speaker 1: every day for a month, and therefore Trump's an illegitimate
Speaker 1: president and democracy.
Speaker 3: This is one thing that some of the speakers at
Speaker 3: Heritage said, which I couldn't believe but now you're persuading me,
Speaker 3: was they said, don't count on Democrats being consistent if
Speaker 3: Trump wins the vote. They said, they will turn right
Speaker 3: around and make the same arguments that Trump has been making.
Speaker 3: And they said they're the ones who and they point
Speaker 3: out what Steve pointed out about two and four, these
Speaker 3: are the guys who first invented the arguments about attacking
Speaker 3: the system. The people who first invented the idea of
Speaker 3: the vice president, you know, rejecting electoral votes. Was actually
Speaker 3: the Democrats who were working on the campaign. So they said,
Speaker 3: don't expect them to make these arguments if their election
Speaker 3: results are the opposite of what they're expecting.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, call Harris will be the presiding officer for that.
Speaker 1: Isn't that going to be interesting?
Speaker 3: Yes? Yes, the Vice President.
Speaker 4: Steve mentioned earlier about Mark Olias, the vile, despicable Mark Olias.
Speaker 4: He currently, I mean, he's working in the same way
Speaker 4: that John talked about that the Republicans are doing across
Speaker 4: the country. Mark Elias has already filed more than sixty
Speaker 4: lawsuits to stop what he's saying is a Republican voter suppression.
Speaker 4: And why is it voter suppression? Because they're asking for IDs,
Speaker 4: They're they're suing to ask for IDs. They're there, you know,
Speaker 4: I mean, I know that in your guys' state, your
Speaker 4: pathetic governor has now made it but illegal to ask
Speaker 4: for voter I d I think it's like that. Yeah,
Speaker 4: who knows. But the challenge to Trump from Mark Elias
Speaker 4: is going to be that all of the things that
Speaker 4: Republicans are doing to assure of free and fair vote
Speaker 4: are actually voter suppression, to suppress the minority vote. And
Speaker 4: he's going to sue based on I don't know what
Speaker 4: is it a fourteenth Amendment argument, Steve John.
Speaker 1: I don't really know voting right, tech I'm not sure either.
Speaker 1: I think this is mostly bluster. I mean, he means it,
Speaker 1: and he may get some traction in some places. But
Speaker 1: I think remember John, if I recall this, right, hasn't
Speaker 1: Elias been kicked out of his fancy K Street law
Speaker 1: firm in Washington for essentially being such a hack?
Speaker 3: Well, you know, basically he's It's really interesting. I think
Speaker 3: what he's done is we have no and we have
Speaker 3: no counterpart in the Republican Party. So what he did
Speaker 3: is he basically set up a law firm under the
Speaker 3: guise of presenting you know, fair elections, but really representing
Speaker 3: the interests of the Democratic Party in state after state.
Speaker 3: And yeah, I think he had to leave Perkins Cooy,
Speaker 3: which was his law right national firm based in Seattle,
Speaker 3: of course, but he had to even set up basically
Speaker 3: his own operation because right, no law firm's going to
Speaker 3: want to be just a wholly owned subsidiary of either
Speaker 3: of the political parties.
Speaker 1: But that's what he was doing.
Speaker 3: He invented it. So this is one thing at the
Speaker 3: Heritage conference again, you know, I'm talking to all these
Speaker 3: people who are basically fighting him, and they're you know,
Speaker 3: they're keeping an eye on him. But this time they said,
Speaker 3: four years ago, he and his firm went into every
Speaker 3: state basically and filed the exact same argument COVID is
Speaker 3: such an emergency waive the election rules and got no
Speaker 3: resistance and a lot of the states the Republican Party
Speaker 3: of the Trump campaign didn't even show up, wasn't present.
Speaker 3: But this time they said they're all over.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I mean, I mean, I mean, one of
Speaker 1: the problems with and we've had we've gone through some
Speaker 1: of these arguments on this podcast before, although it's been
Speaker 1: a while. But let's assume large scale cheating by Democrats
Speaker 1: succeeded in getting votes counted in twenty twenty, they still
Speaker 1: barely beat Trump, right, I mean, it was you know,
Speaker 1: it took all that effort to be forty thousand votes
Speaker 1: in three states. That's really was the margin for the
Speaker 1: electoral college purposes. Right. And so here's maybe I'm pivoting
Speaker 1: of sooner that you want to lucretia. But the threats
Speaker 1: out there right now are not so much dead people
Speaker 1: voting necessarily, or we can talk about some of other
Speaker 1: aspects of you know, commandeering ballots and nursing homes and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. Doesn't add up to that much. I
Speaker 1: don't think it adds up to the margin, and I
Speaker 1: think Trump is going to get however, a few facts.
Speaker 1: I think the figure I've read recently is that there
Speaker 1: are two point five million new citizens sworn in in
Speaker 1: the last four years. Who are they? Who are they
Speaker 1: going to be voting for? And it's been reported that,
Speaker 1: you know, in rare a bout of government efficiency, the
Speaker 1: process of making people full citizens and therefore legal voters
Speaker 1: has been accelerated by the Biden administration in the last
Speaker 1: several months.
Speaker 4: Any any more, any deeper dive into who those people are?
Speaker 4: I mean, actually, in the last couple of years, I
Speaker 4: know a couple of people who got their citizenship. Good people,
Speaker 4: you know, no worries there. But I'm just wondering if
Speaker 4: there's been any kind of nefarious behind the scenes push
Speaker 4: for say, Haitian immigrants, or yeah, it's just that they've
Speaker 4: speeded up the system good.
Speaker 1: I have no idea. That's probably a hard question to
Speaker 1: know about. I mean, I think it's hard to say.
Speaker 1: I do wonder, though, just idly that if I'm a
Speaker 1: recent a recent arrival, whatever neologism Democrats are using, uh
Speaker 1: and even a Haitian immigrant. Do you want more coming
Speaker 1: in or is your interest in pulling up the ladder
Speaker 1: behind you?
Speaker 4: It's not all the evidence says the ladder.
Speaker 1: Yeah. See, it's not automatic to me that all these
Speaker 1: new citizens are necessarily Democratic voters. But that leads us
Speaker 1: to the second possible pool, which is how many illegal
Speaker 1: aliens are being registered to vote and are going to
Speaker 1: have their ballots cast for them or nudged that. You know,
Speaker 1: it's hard to rule that out.
Speaker 4: It's very hard to rule it out because I'm if
Speaker 4: I'm a Democrat, if I'm a Democratic politician, and I
Speaker 4: know that half of the country believes that the last
Speaker 4: election was suspect, and I want the appearance of a
Speaker 4: fair and free election, not just the lip service given
Speaker 4: to it. I would have a allowed more actual investigations
Speaker 4: into what happened in twenty twenty. But b how to
Speaker 4: pass the Save Act? If there's no illegals voting, why
Speaker 4: on earth didn't they pass the Save Act? There's really impossible.
Speaker 4: There's no good argument that I've ever heard of Democrat
Speaker 4: make about why other than it could be voter suppression.
Speaker 4: And of course it's not voter suppression. Anybody who let
Speaker 4: them get away with that because the word stupid ass
Speaker 4: Republicans and voted for it too.
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't find it persuasive. I mean, I
Speaker 3: think having voter ideas obvious, and I think nothing like
Speaker 3: seventy percent of Americans support it. More than that, I think,
Speaker 3: I can tell you what I mean. Justice Ginsberg and
Speaker 3: her you know, dissented in some of these cases. I
Speaker 3: can tell you what her argument was, which is that, yes,
Speaker 3: you may think voter idea is neutral and it looks
Speaker 3: like the way in face, but in effect it does
Speaker 3: suppress minority voting. That's her claim that.
Speaker 1: It'll have a.
Speaker 3: Look I I you know, she just made this claim,
Speaker 3: she didn't.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: What she then said is then you look at states
Speaker 3: where you have unequal voting participation, you know, and then
Speaker 3: you know between blacks and whites and southern states, and
Speaker 3: she would say that's explained in part by these voter
Speaker 3: idea requirements. Although that's interesting, John Roberts, you know, Lucretia's
Speaker 3: friend said in response. He said, in the most recent
Speaker 3: elections in these southern states, actually black registration and voter
Speaker 3: turn out is higher than whites. Now, yeah, so he said,
Speaker 3: like where's your proof?
Speaker 1: And by the way, the low participation rates, especially among Hispanics,
Speaker 1: is very notable in California where it has all these
Speaker 1: pro Maybe that's if you let me lucreatia pivot a
Speaker 1: little bit too.
Speaker 3: Can I just throw in one response on Steve's points,
Speaker 3: you know, love your two points. I actually don't find
Speaker 3: the two million new citizens a problem because that's over
Speaker 3: four years. You're only talking about six hundred thousand, seven
Speaker 3: hundred thousand new citizens a year in a country of
Speaker 3: three hundred and fifty million people. I mean, like we're right,
Speaker 3: like this is, you know, zero point two percent of
Speaker 3: the population. I and as he said, I actually, you know,
Speaker 3: I was first generation immigrant. I don't think they naturally
Speaker 3: vote Democrat. You know, there's in fact, there are a lot
Speaker 3: of these new immigrant voters don't like what's going on
Speaker 3: at the border. If that's what right I think, If
Speaker 3: I remember, the majority of them don't like the large
Speaker 3: searge of illegal immigration.
Speaker 2: All.
Speaker 3: So the second thing, the second thing, though, I think
Speaker 3: is the harder problem. Because of our federal system, we
Speaker 3: allow states to run elections. We basically rely on the
Speaker 3: states to police the voting rules. We rely on the
Speaker 3: states to decide how to prevent aliens from voting. Right,
Speaker 3: it's their job unless Congress steps and override it. So
Speaker 3: one question I have for you both is do you
Speaker 3: really want to create like a federal agency authorized by
Speaker 3: Congress to be policing elections like this to the extent
Speaker 3: that they would? Right say, it's just automatic.
Speaker 4: That if the Staate Act had passed, that there had
Speaker 4: to be a federal agency to information.
Speaker 3: I'm saying, that's I think that's what you're calling for.
Speaker 3: In the end.
Speaker 1: States aren't. But how else would you do it?
Speaker 3: If you have some states that care and then some
Speaker 3: states that really don't care.
Speaker 1: Well, it's not just states. I mean, let's remember that,
Speaker 1: you know, states run elections, but elections are run in
Speaker 1: three thousand individual counties with three thousand registrars of voters.
Speaker 1: We have over one hundred thousand precincts in the country.
Speaker 1: And you know, some of those registrars are right, conscientious
Speaker 1: and do a good job, and some are likely hacks,
Speaker 1: and some may be crooks and throuped and partisan.
Speaker 4: And yeah, let me just add to that though for
Speaker 4: a second we have I mean, yes, you're absolutely right
Speaker 4: under the original Constitution, and it was entirely left up
Speaker 4: to the states to decide voter qualifications for federal elections,
Speaker 4: for national elections, for congressman for president. However, we've seen
Speaker 4: now one, two, three, four constitutional amendments that have in
Speaker 4: fact told the states, you still get to do what
Speaker 4: you want to do, However, you cannot do so if
Speaker 4: it denies people the right to vote on account of
Speaker 4: the color of their skin race unfortunately, on the account
Speaker 4: of their sex. That's called the nineteenth Amendment. And Steve's
Speaker 4: looking at me like he doesn't know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 4: And then you've got the twenty fourth Amendment right, the
Speaker 4: poll tax, and the twenty sixth Amendment. You have eighteen.
Speaker 4: It didn't require are a whole new agency to put
Speaker 4: those federal constitutional guarantees in place at the state level.
Speaker 4: I mean, it probably didn't happen the way it should have.
Speaker 4: It certainly did in the South with respect to the
Speaker 4: fifteenth Amendment. But just having federal a constitutional amendment or
Speaker 4: federal law that makes it a crime, the Justice Department
Speaker 4: could won't not under Garland, but could you know, just
Speaker 4: be empowered like they are now to make sure that
Speaker 4: there's not racial discrimination in voting laws and voting practices
Speaker 4: in states and counties and precincts. So I don't know
Speaker 4: that you'd need a whole new agency to say you
Speaker 4: can only vote have a federal law that says you
Speaker 4: can only vote in federal elections if you are a citizen.
Speaker 4: I mean, I'm not sure I'm actually throwing that out
Speaker 4: there for debate.
Speaker 1: Thought, can I unless you want to jump in on that, John,
Speaker 1: I was going to propose bringing up the two thousand
Speaker 1: and five commission, the bar the Harder Baker Commission on
Speaker 1: the Securing America's Elections.
Speaker 3: Right, What I actually want to hear from you, Steve, first,
Speaker 3: about what the polls are showing, because this only matters
Speaker 3: if the election is close. Oh, that's kind of how
Speaker 3: our system has worked, is we never had to have
Speaker 3: these precise procedures because we weren't deciding elections by forty
Speaker 3: thousand votes in a country three hundred and fifty million before.
Speaker 4: Right, well except two yeah, six votes, yeah right.
Speaker 3: And the system didn't work so well.
Speaker 1: But that's what it was like. I hope that whoever.
Speaker 3: Wins wins by a significant margin so that we don't
Speaker 3: have to worry about this.
Speaker 1: That would be nice, Yes, but we live in the
Speaker 1: fifty to fifty country and it shows no signs of
Speaker 1: breaking out from that. Unfortunately. Look, I think Trump is
Speaker 1: all right. I'll comment on that. I think Trump is certain.
Speaker 1: Tell us how the polls me Well, I I read
Speaker 1: a little about this. We see the public polls, and
Speaker 1: there's a wide variance among them. They tend to when
Speaker 1: you average them together, show Harris with like a two
Speaker 1: point lead nationally and dead even, and almost all the
Speaker 1: seven battleground states up down from uh, you know, two
Speaker 1: three point lead she had in a lot of those states.
Speaker 1: What you're hearing in the last week, well reported by
Speaker 1: people like Mark Halpern, is the private cracking polls the
Speaker 1: two campaigns, which are better than public polls for reasons
Speaker 1: I can explain, are all showing Trump surging and Harris sinking,
Speaker 1: and it's causing panic among Democrats and confidence among Republicans
Speaker 1: in the Trump campaign.
Speaker 3: Briefly, why tracking polls more reliable than even the public polls?
Speaker 4: They want to know the truth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, The Times just came out with a poll showing
Speaker 3: Trump ahead nationwide, which is unbelievable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right in Quinnipiac apparently, which is always that Twinnipiac
Speaker 1: had one of the largest margins of air in the
Speaker 1: twenty twenty election. They were off by like nine points.
Speaker 1: It's from the result. Well, the point is, is a
Speaker 1: public poll, what are they doing those for? They want
Speaker 1: to make news, and you know they try to do
Speaker 1: a serious job. But tracking polls, by the campaigns, they
Speaker 1: have to be right, and so they're more detailed. They
Speaker 1: ask fourth fifth order questions. They target voters who they
Speaker 1: know that they're more serious about screening for true likely
Speaker 1: voters and not just adults and registered voters. And their
Speaker 1: incentive is, look, they're going to be the campaigns are
Speaker 1: going to be deciding where to spend hundreds of millions
Speaker 1: of dollars that are scarce resources, and where they're going
Speaker 1: to spend it, what messages on which voting groups to
Speaker 1: try and get their majorities. And if you're bad at
Speaker 1: your tracking polls, your business drives up pretty fast because
Speaker 1: no one hires you for future election cycles. Most of
Speaker 1: the tracking polls are done by posters you've never heard of,
Speaker 1: because that's their specialty. They're not the people who go
Speaker 1: on CNN or Fox News. And you know, I think
Speaker 1: there's some good public polls of conservatives like like Rasmussen Introfalker,
Speaker 1: which have been closer to the result all the last
Speaker 1: several cycles. But generally it's the no name people. I've
Speaker 1: learned this in California years ago for a story I
Speaker 1: won't go through. But most of the tracking poll posters
Speaker 1: are people you've never heard of, and that's their specialty
Speaker 1: and that's why they're better.
Speaker 3: So when those kind of showing, yeah, what are they showing?
Speaker 1: Well, what they're showing is Trump moving up to a
Speaker 1: solid lead in I think six of the seven battleground
Speaker 1: stage no two three points or more. I think he's
Speaker 1: only trailing in Nevada or Arizona. I forget which one
Speaker 1: in the tracking polls of the two campaigns, they don't,
Speaker 1: by the way, release their actual numbers. They just tell
Speaker 1: you and leak in general terms.
Speaker 3: How do we know? One is, how do we know
Speaker 3: what they actually say? But then two they really showed
Speaker 3: Trump ahead in Pennsylvania, Michigan, in Wisconsin, because yeah, that's true,
Speaker 3: then the game is up right.
Speaker 4: Here's how we know. And again it's a whole lot
Speaker 4: more about how the operatives, especially the Democratic operatives, but
Speaker 4: even Trump's people, how they react, so just total anecdote.
Speaker 4: If you go to the front page Real Clear Politics,
Speaker 4: which you know, does conservative articles, it does liberal articles,
Speaker 4: progressive articles, and it does people that are kind of
Speaker 4: middle of the road, And there is not a single
Speaker 4: article this morning that talks in positive terms about Harris's
Speaker 4: chances for winning this election. Even our good friend Robert
Speaker 4: Kuttner from The American Prospect, who's the biggest ideological progressive
Speaker 4: hack you ever met in your life, is making excuses
Speaker 4: for why Kamalama ding Dong is gonna lose. That's how
Speaker 4: I think, you know, you know, by the way they react,
Speaker 4: you know, by some of the things that the Kamalama
Speaker 4: ding Dong Harris campaigns have been doing, like trying to
Speaker 4: put her out in a media blitz, I mean, so
Speaker 4: incredibly misguided and stupid, But they think, I mean, I
Speaker 4: don't know, does she just have a bunch of dumb
Speaker 4: gen z Ers working for her? I don't understand.
Speaker 3: I think they've been running a brilliant campaign given the
Speaker 3: material they're working with.
Speaker 1: Well, well, I know this. If she does contrive to win,
Speaker 1: I'm buying stock and teleprompter manufacturers because that's what.
Speaker 4: But does that make sense, John, you don't necessarily know
Speaker 4: what those internals are unless you know somebody else tell you.
Speaker 3: Like I hear like political operative types saying momentum is everything,
Speaker 3: and they're saying all even the public polls show that
Speaker 3: her momentum is petered out. Trump seems to have the momentum.
Speaker 3: But I was hoping Steve was going to explain where
Speaker 3: we see the proof for this, But tracking polls we
Speaker 3: don't actually have access to, so we don't really know
Speaker 3: what they're telling us, right.
Speaker 4: That, Well, question before you go on, question quick, do
Speaker 4: the betting the betting Well, we'll have access to those polls.
Speaker 1: Well, I don't know if they do. We're not, but
Speaker 1: the betting markets swung wildly in Trump's favor this week.
Speaker 1: And those betting markets are not universally right, but they're
Speaker 1: right and awful lot of the time. That's right. I mean,
Speaker 1: you remember, I mean this is not brand new. If
Speaker 1: you go back to nineteen eighty, the public polls gallup
Speaker 1: Paris the others, they had a race between Carter and
Speaker 1: Reagan dead even even Carter a couple of them a
Speaker 1: slight lead, you know, half a point or a point.
Speaker 1: The private polls for both campaigns showed the race breaking
Speaker 1: wide open for Reagan over the weekend. The Carter campaign
Speaker 1: knew by Sunday that he was going to lose, and
Speaker 1: lose huge, but nobody in the public knew that, and
Speaker 1: so I, you know, I could see that happening again
Speaker 1: depending this time.
Speaker 3: I was gonna just one last question about polling. I
Speaker 3: find this really interesting, is that public polls are just
Speaker 3: so Your point is they're not as good because they're
Speaker 3: not investing any money and resources. You could actually do
Speaker 3: this if you wanted to, by investing a kind of
Speaker 3: resources that are being put into tracking polls.
Speaker 1: It would just public, right, it would cost a lot more.
Speaker 3: And like the New York Times and so on, they
Speaker 3: don't feel like, yeah, what's the point for them of
Speaker 3: getting that kind of really detailed information, as your point,
Speaker 3: But campaigns they really need it because it they have
Speaker 3: to spend money based on that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they win. They spend a lot more on
Speaker 1: their polling than the New York Times stats. And this
Speaker 1: is unknown to the wider public. But what's the New
Speaker 1: York Times care? They want? They do these polls to
Speaker 1: make news, right, we need data. Well, let's make up
Speaker 1: some data and and that they.
Speaker 3: Just have an interest in showing showing changes. Right, So
Speaker 3: the New York Time like they actually want to have, actually,
Speaker 3: in a weird way, an insensitive poll that just shows
Speaker 3: wild swings because that's what makes the story.
Speaker 1: Oh, I get it.
Speaker 3: That makes total sense.
Speaker 4: Now, can I just bring up one quick one, Steve
Speaker 4: about Michigan. Just a poll just asking Muslim voters who
Speaker 4: they're going to vote for. So the vast majority of
Speaker 4: them are going to vote for Jill Stein. Oh Trump
Speaker 4: is beating Kamalama ding Dong in the Muslim vote in Michigan.
Speaker 1: Yeah, come on, seriously.
Speaker 4: It's true. It's like sent for Trump and twelve percent
Speaker 4: for Kamalam Edingdong. I forget something like that, right, Steve,
Speaker 4: did you see that?
Speaker 1: I didn't see that, but doesn't surprise me. I mean,
Speaker 1: I can speculate on some reasons, several reasons for that, but.
Speaker 3: Well, let me just say. Can I just say Steve
Speaker 3: has done a great public You guys have both done
Speaker 3: a great public service on polling.
Speaker 1: Because one thing.
Speaker 3: I did at Notre Dame is we had dinner afterwards
Speaker 3: with a bunch of political scientists and a very prominent
Speaker 3: Notre Dame supporter who's a big success in real estate
Speaker 3: and he thinks Trump's gonna win. He lives in Florida,
Speaker 3: he feels it. And I was telling you about the polls,
Speaker 3: and he started asking me all these, you know, very
Speaker 3: sharp questions about polling, and I was like, so, I
Speaker 3: actually told him tomorrow, Steve Hayward and Lucretia are going
Speaker 3: to answer all your questions because I don't know the answer.
Speaker 3: None of the political scientists in the room knew the
Speaker 3: answer to his questions.
Speaker 1: No, no, the political scientists, they skip polling and survey
Speaker 1: methodology and go straight to regression analyses. And you know,
Speaker 1: all right, that's it, right, Yeah, But can I get
Speaker 1: back from creation to your about you know, how would
Speaker 1: you enforce the Save Act? Or you know how what's
Speaker 1: the remedy for this? I just want to draw everybody's
Speaker 1: attention back, partly because Lucreati you sent her an email
Speaker 1: a couple of days ago. What about a bipartisan commission
Speaker 1: to investigate voter fraud election security?
Speaker 4: Well, I think, I said a bipartisan commission. I said,
Speaker 4: a bipartisan effort. Oh well, all right, and those are
Speaker 4: different things because those commissions are.
Speaker 1: Well, I was going to bring up when this was
Speaker 1: kind of done, and it was you know, Jimmy Carter
Speaker 1: and James Baker got together in two thousand and five
Speaker 1: and they did a commission on you know, securing election integrity.
Speaker 1: By the way, they were looking at the statute passed
Speaker 1: after Florida two thousand to have a Help America Vote Act,
Speaker 1: and they were going through, well, this thing hasn't really worked.
Speaker 1: It's kind of hard to implement. It's up and down.
Speaker 1: But that reports now again, you know, Jimmy Carter and
Speaker 1: James Baker, you don't get any more establishment than those guys.
Speaker 1: That report that came out in two thousand and five
Speaker 1: said voting by mail. They raised a lot of red
Speaker 1: flags on vote by mail. Here's three quick excerpts from
Speaker 1: the final report. Rooting by mail raises concerns about privacy
Speaker 1: as citizens voting at home may come under pressure to
Speaker 1: vote for certain candidates, and it increases the risk of fraud.
Speaker 1: By the way, we know that there were nursing homes
Speaker 1: in Wisconsin where they had one hundred percent voter turnout.
Speaker 1: That doesn't happen organically or naturally. Somebody's gone to harvested
Speaker 1: the votes from those people. Doesn't mean it's they're fraudulent,
Speaker 1: they're legal voters and so forth. But that's part of
Speaker 1: the funny business of the twenty twenty election rules changes.
Speaker 1: Here's another one. Oh, They, by the way, cite a
Speaker 1: lot of academic literature saying vote by mail. There's no
Speaker 1: evidence and this is true in the political science technical
Speaker 1: literature that increases a minority doesn't increase voter turnout at all,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't increase minority voter turnout. That was part
Speaker 1: of the argument that John reference between Roberts and Ginsburg.
Speaker 1: And they say, by the way, the drawback is here
Speaker 1: all quote again, it allows a significant portion of voters
Speaker 1: to cast their ballots for they have all of the
Speaker 1: information that will become available to the rest of the electorate.
Speaker 1: Crucial information about candidates may emerge in the final weeks
Speaker 1: or even days of an election campaign. I'll add here
Speaker 1: as a brief aside, and have won more. You know,
Speaker 1: Carl Row was convinced that the late hit of Thursday
Speaker 1: before the election in two thousand that George W. Bush
Speaker 1: had the long ago d y arrest cost him the
Speaker 1: popular vote. Who knows if that's true, but it's not
Speaker 1: implausible and that was a late piece of information, right.
Speaker 4: Bruce Hurshinson way back in Califora.
Speaker 1: Right, yes, well, yeah, he went.
Speaker 4: To a strip club with his wife girlfriend.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, yeah, that was a dumb thing to do,
Speaker 1: but he was being tailed and I actually thought that
Speaker 1: might put him over the top to win.
Speaker 3: The election in California.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: Finally he got the San Francisco prostitute vote, that's for sure.
Speaker 1: Right, One more excerpt from the Baker of the Carter
Speaker 1: Baker Commission report. Vote by mail is likely to increase
Speaker 1: the risks of fraud and of contested elections in other
Speaker 1: states where the population is more mobile, where there is
Speaker 1: some history of troubled elections, or where the safeguards for
Speaker 1: a bout integrity are weaker. All right, that's everything we've
Speaker 1: been saying, although it sort of nicer than Lucretia would
Speaker 1: put it. So what did they want? They said, And
Speaker 1: by the way, they convened again some of the members
Speaker 1: Carter's too old, and Baker probably moved on is he's
Speaker 1: still around. But some of the recommendations that they revisited
Speaker 1: here in twenty twenty one was, Okay, we need to
Speaker 1: have a national system to connect state and local voter
Speaker 1: registration lists, two others, and then the key one, and
Speaker 1: then we'll vote back to Lucretia to see where she
Speaker 1: wants to follow up. Stronger efforts to combat fraud, especially
Speaker 1: in absentee voting. Another one, auditible paper backups for all
Speaker 1: voting technology. Democrats are against all these things, right, But
Speaker 1: finally they say, what we need to do on a
Speaker 1: federal level is we need to have a voter identify
Speaker 1: based on a universally available real ID card. Now, the
Speaker 1: interesting thing is if you propose a national ight D card,
Speaker 1: it's been around a long time that you will have
Speaker 1: people on the right and on the left opposing it.
Speaker 1: The left because they don't want it because it would
Speaker 1: make it harder to do vote fraud or whatever, and
Speaker 1: the right because do we want the government doing an
Speaker 1: ID card for all of us? And at that point,
Speaker 1: I will stop and say that even the Baker Carter
Speaker 1: Commission said there's something wrong with our elections when they're
Speaker 1: this loose, And I'll just stop there and say there's
Speaker 1: some powerful establishment backup for things like you know, in
Speaker 1: person voting on election days. Lucretia's favorite reform idea I
Speaker 1: think I'll stop there.
Speaker 4: I just wonder what you guys think about this. You
Speaker 4: know I always tease I gave you that little anecdote
Speaker 4: about the little twit who's tried to register me to
Speaker 4: vote last week. I mentioned it right, But I honestly
Speaker 4: think that somehow we have to turn however you want
Speaker 4: to say, is turn the conversation around to the point
Speaker 4: where where a vote in and of itself is nearly meaningless,
Speaker 4: or in many cases, worse than meaningless. What we need
Speaker 4: is to return the mindset of the American people to
Speaker 4: the fact that your vote is your sacred responsibility, not
Speaker 4: just a rite. It's a sacred responsibility, and it should be.
Speaker 4: It's I'm not in favor of a day off for voting,
Speaker 4: a federal holiday for voting. I'm not in favor of
Speaker 4: loose mail in votes, not just because it's fraudulent. I
Speaker 4: don't think you should make it easier for people to vote.
Speaker 4: I really don't why, because I want the people and
Speaker 4: on both sides, I want the people voting who have
Speaker 4: at least paid enough attention to what's happening in an
Speaker 4: election and vote their own absolute self interest. I'm okay
Speaker 4: with that. That's fine, but I don't want idiots out
Speaker 4: there voting because somebody handed them a mail in ballot
Speaker 4: and said just fill anything out and give it back.
Speaker 4: And I worry less even out the fraud than I
Speaker 4: do about going to a bunch of dumb eighteen year
Speaker 4: olds in a college you don't know, you know what
Speaker 4: from there, you know what, friendly show and having them vote.
Speaker 4: It used to be. I had a discussion with somebody
Speaker 4: who said the founding fathers created that system where everybody
Speaker 4: gets to vote. I said, they most certainly did not.
Speaker 4: What are you talking about, No, they did not. You
Speaker 4: way back in the day, you had property qualifications. Why
Speaker 4: property qualifications. It's not because they like rich white men.
Speaker 4: It's because somebody who owns property has a stake in
Speaker 4: their community and cares about it. I mean, there's all
Speaker 4: of these things that come back to the idea that
Speaker 4: if you vote, it should be because you care about
Speaker 4: what happens to your country.
Speaker 1: By the way, can I can I just interject briefly
Speaker 1: because a lot of I think listeners will be curious
Speaker 1: about this. I studied these ones very closely. Those property
Speaker 1: qualifications in the early Republic were very easy to satisfy.
Speaker 1: It didn't mean you needed to order own a farm.
Speaker 1: If you were a blacksmith and you're a tradesman and
Speaker 1: you own some tools, that satisfied the voting requirement.
Speaker 4: In most cases cases. Yep.
Speaker 3: Anyway, So wasn't it a way of trying to just
Speaker 3: like that? How would you They didn't construct voter rolls
Speaker 3: right property lists to figure out who was there?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4: One of my best example of that is, you know,
Speaker 4: I went to school at Davis. I didn't live in Davis,
Speaker 4: but when they decided that it was perfectly appropriate for
Speaker 4: students to be able to vote, even though that was
Speaker 4: not their permanent address, it destroyed the town of Davis
Speaker 4: because you had all those dumb lefty uh you know,
Speaker 4: ideological hacked students who took over the city council and
Speaker 4: just absolutely destroyed the place. I don't know if they've
Speaker 4: turned it around. That's the way it was when I
Speaker 4: was there. Yeah, just as an example of someone who
Speaker 4: who can you know, who can play experiments, ideological experiments
Speaker 4: with political power because they have no stake in the
Speaker 4: community I needs, you know, So if you.
Speaker 3: Did to say it though, isn't it rational though for
Speaker 3: any one individual not to vote because right, you would
Speaker 3: think rationally your one vote isn't going to make a difference.
Speaker 3: And you could say, oh, I depend on all the
Speaker 3: other people like Steven Lucretia who are fully informed to choose,
Speaker 3: and I'll just rely on them. I don't need to vote,
Speaker 3: And that's why you have very low voter participation. Half
Speaker 3: Otherwise I could take two hours and work and make like,
Speaker 3: you know, forty bucks a McDonald's again, free pig mac.
Speaker 4: There you go. My only half joking argument about the
Speaker 4: Nineteenth Amendment, John, is that the idea that a family
Speaker 4: has a vote. Believe it or not, a family has
Speaker 4: a vote. Do I care about the child a scott ladies, No,
Speaker 4: I don't you know? If you want to vote, get
Speaker 4: a husband.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 4: I'm only I'm joking about that, But I'm using it
Speaker 4: as an example to say I'm perfectly okay with somebody deciding. Look,
Speaker 4: I don't know enough about what's happening. How often? How
Speaker 4: often do I go to some local election and I
Speaker 4: haven't had the time to look up what's really happening
Speaker 4: with this judge or that this or this corporate commissioner,
Speaker 4: and I don't vote in that election, and then the
Speaker 4: thing goes back. Are you sure you didn't mean to?
Speaker 4: But I don't vote, or I write somebody in, you know,
Speaker 4: like Steve.
Speaker 1: I summarize your point. I can't. I can't quite make
Speaker 1: an acronym out of this. It works, but your slogan
Speaker 1: or your cause is make citizenship meaningful again m C
Speaker 1: M A or make uh make a citizenship great again,
Speaker 1: which is uh. Now it doesn't work.
Speaker 4: Last anecdote, I'm on a commission at the university. We
Speaker 4: have no requirement for American government, American history, or American civics.
Speaker 4: And enough of the governing board was appointed when Doug
Speaker 4: Doosey was governor of Arizona that care about those things
Speaker 4: that they've now demanded that the universities add that. So
Speaker 4: I'm on the commission at my university to come up
Speaker 4: with first the standards, then the rubric to impose the standards,
Speaker 4: and then the course or courses that will fulfill it.
Speaker 4: So I get the rubric in an email the other day,
Speaker 4: and everywhere in the rubric is something something our US
Speaker 4: constitutional democracy. So I write in because I can't make
Speaker 4: the meeting, of course, and I say, we cannot use
Speaker 4: the term US constitutional democracy. We don't have a democracy.
Speaker 4: We have a republic. And the answer I get back
Speaker 4: from the person in charge of doing this for the
Speaker 4: entire state of Arizona is well, that's what we decided
Speaker 4: and it's going to stay that way.
Speaker 1: Oh see, this is we have to do a whole
Speaker 1: separate show on civic education, partly because all three of
Speaker 1: us are involved in it in ways we can disclose later.
Speaker 1: But the point is everybody, including you know, these establishment
Speaker 1: liberals like the person you're dealing with, I'm guessing Lucretia. Oh,
Speaker 1: civic education is terrible from K twelve all the way through.
Speaker 1: We need to fix this. How are you going to
Speaker 1: fix it when the dominant ideology of K twelve education,
Speaker 1: not to mention universities, is you know, we're racist, oppressive country.
Speaker 1: Our constitution is terrible and it stinks. That's what civic
Speaker 1: education is going to mean if you try and ramp
Speaker 1: it up. So I'm up two minds of this. I'm
Speaker 1: going to do a series on our political questions, substack.
Speaker 1: I'm going to draw you into it, and I have
Speaker 1: a lot to say about this, because well a lot
Speaker 1: to say about this, but I won't say it now, Okay,
Speaker 1: I now.
Speaker 4: Either, I do want one quick thing, John, because I'm
Speaker 4: here with two of my favorite genuinely masculine role models.
Speaker 3: We entered the room.
Speaker 1: Yes, right, you're looking at people behind John there wherever
Speaker 1: the heck, he is a notre dame.
Speaker 4: Okay, I actually have I been watching that whole That
Speaker 4: whole thing fold out with a lot of amusement. So
Speaker 4: this is kind of how it went. We were told
Speaker 4: that Walsh, Walls, sorry, Walls, and Doug Emhoff were the
Speaker 4: new men, the new masculinity, the unthreatening. The women love
Speaker 4: this kind of softer, more effeminate masculinity. Right, and after
Speaker 4: years of being talked about toxic masculinity and all those things,
Speaker 4: wasn't all that well received. Perhaps maybe I see it
Speaker 4: differently because I don't travel in all the circles out there.
Speaker 4: But you know, everybody I saw made fun of walts Waltz.
Speaker 4: You can't see that listeners, but I'm doing my very
Speaker 4: best bird cage imitation about Walls. However, they're so invested
Speaker 4: in that that the Kamlama Ding Dong campaign put out
Speaker 4: an ad did you see the oh yeah, oh.
Speaker 3: My god, oh John? Well, people think that they weren't
Speaker 3: showing these in Pennsylvania, I think because I want to
Speaker 3: win the state.
Speaker 1: Well, the ad is John Hinderrocker posted on Powerline. It's
Speaker 1: a preposterous ad about real men who are for Kamala
Speaker 1: har It's just it's and.
Speaker 4: That would be fine in and of itself, but it's
Speaker 4: their their twisted views of what made you a real man?
Speaker 4: Like I eat carburetors for breakfast rborators.
Speaker 1: What I mean this?
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I mean the.
Speaker 1: Carburetors sold thirty years ago.
Speaker 4: At least I'm not afraid of bears. That's what bear
Speaker 4: hugs are for.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: People said this looks like the Trump campaign infiltrated the
Speaker 1: Harris campaign and put this ad out as a satire.
Speaker 1: But no, apparently it's real.
Speaker 4: It's anyway, yes, and so anyway this I think.
Speaker 3: That this Does it say anything about punching your girlfriend?
Speaker 1: No? Yeah, this is that one.
Speaker 4: And your girlfriend.
Speaker 1: Boy. The Harris vetting operations seems to be pretty bad.
Speaker 1: I mean with Waltz and then well, of course she
Speaker 1: married the guy, so there's no choice there. You can't
Speaker 1: kick him off the spousal ticket as second gentleman. OK.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but you know what I've last comment on that
Speaker 4: before we go to Babylon Be's. It has been my
Speaker 4: absolute experience knowing people over the years, never personally in
Speaker 4: this case, that men who hit women are in fact
Speaker 4: the least kind of masculine men out there, because I've
Speaker 4: never known a truly masculine man who thought it was
Speaker 4: appropriate under any circumstances, no matter how drunk you were,
Speaker 4: to physically harm a woman. I've never known it. And
Speaker 4: I've known a lot of great men in my life,
Speaker 4: like you two, and you know, it would never worry
Speaker 4: me to be slapped or spunched by either one of
Speaker 4: you or so there's something really wrong with that new
Speaker 4: definition of masculine that they're trying to shove down our
Speaker 4: throats so tried really hard to do so. By the way,
Speaker 4: I say, we rise up in arms and say no
Speaker 4: to it. That's what I say.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 4: Back to the Babylon Bee Uh, terrorists added to the
Speaker 4: list on the Statue of Liberty plaque. You have to
Speaker 4: kind of that one. But experts say Kamala can still
Speaker 4: win if she doesn't appear in public again between now
Speaker 4: an election day.
Speaker 1: True, well, yes, that's a true statement. Yeah, maybe I know.
Speaker 4: Isn't that awful? Democrats perplexed why candidate nobody ever voted
Speaker 4: for is slipping in the polls be true again, Genius
Speaker 4: Kamala announces plan to tell Hurricane Milton don't and we
Speaker 4: didn't even we didn't even get to this. I mean,
Speaker 4: what a some time, we'll have to do an entire show,
Speaker 4: guys on the fall of journalism. I know we talk
Speaker 4: about it in you know, anecdotally frequently, but CBS reveals
Speaker 4: they interviewed Kamala for seven hundred and twenty out one
Speaker 4: hours in order to compile sixty minutes of usable footage.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well that's also true almost, Yeah right, just.
Speaker 4: A couple more Democrats clarify that black lives will only
Speaker 4: matter until November.
Speaker 1: Who that also cuts pretty close to the truth, right, Yeah?
Speaker 4: Yeah, Opinion concerns about FBI raids have been overblown and
Speaker 4: there's no need to hang on there's a knock at
Speaker 4: my door.
Speaker 1: Uh oh that was the joke.
Speaker 3: Oh I thought that was true.
Speaker 4: Yeah, if you're not on an FBI watch list, you
Speaker 4: ought to be ashamed of yourself. Yeah nowadays, Okay, I'm
Speaker 4: through Steve.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you have to say for us, Well, John's gonna write, don't.
Speaker 3: We know whiskey. Always drink your whiskey. Need let's go
Speaker 3: Brandon and Steve. What's our new signf I.
Speaker 1: You know, I I got nothing. I don't I got nothing.
Speaker 1: I can't keep up. The latest one that's on Twitter
Speaker 1: is Campbell is saying there's a lot going on out
Speaker 1: there right now. Ha ha ha ha he cackle, cackle,
Speaker 1: And I know, yeah, I'll work on that. I'll work
Speaker 1: on that and all the rest. Anyway, I'm gonna end
Speaker 1: this thing. I'm gonna improvise though, John and say, go
Speaker 1: Stanford beat Notre Dame and we'll be thinking of you
Speaker 1: with the game today.
Speaker 4: Wait wait, can I can I do? Can I break protocol?
Speaker 4: And just somehow I missed this one because you guys
Speaker 4: heard that what's his name in Colorado finally won his
Speaker 4: his suit the Colorado Supreme Court. What's his name?
Speaker 1: Jack Phillips? Yeah, Jack Phillips, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, probably one of the best of all time Bebylon Bees.
Speaker 4: Millions of gay people will die of hunger as one
Speaker 4: bakery in Colorado no longer forced to bake them wedding cakes.
Speaker 1: Yeah. By the way, I don't understand why no one
Speaker 1: whether there's not a second bakery in the state of
Speaker 1: Coloradoer seems to be this one.
Speaker 3: It's amazing, one one wonderful. Well, Notre Dame's gonna crush them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're all gonna be together in person next weekend,
Speaker 1: which raises possibilities for what we do.
Speaker 3: So oh yeah, oh yeah, we're all going to be
Speaker 3: together broadcasting from my office probably right, okay, all right,
Speaker 3: bye bye everybody, see everybody.
Speaker 4: Bye.
Speaker 5: Well, we got a lot a lot of hard work today.
Speaker 5: We gotta rock at the government center to make the
Speaker 5: secretaries feel better.
Speaker 6: One, they put the stamps on the letter. They got
Speaker 6: a lot a lot of great desks and chairs now
Speaker 6: at the governments where they put the stamps on the letter,
Speaker 6: and then they write it down in the ledger.
Speaker 5: Two, we gotta rock the lock, the lock, and don't
Speaker 5: stop tonight about that the government save where they put
Speaker 5: the stamps on the letter, write it down.
Speaker 1: In the ledger. We won't stop until we see secret
Speaker 1: Ricochet join the conversation.