WarRoom Battleground EP 959: Lead Up To The Texas Primaries
Stephen K. Bannon frames Texas’s March 3rd primaries as a frontline battle against "Sharia law," with Mike Lindell pushing his Lindale Plan to replace electronic voting machines amid claims of Venezuelan-Iranian election interference. Richard Barris warns weak GOP turnout risks Democratic gains, citing Hispanic voter shifts and John Cornyn’s unpopularity, while David Nino Rodriguez dismisses the Austin shooting as a lone-wolf act but warns of cartel-Hezbollah collusion. With Texas’s outcome shaping national politics, the episode ties election integrity, radicalization fears, and MAGA disillusionment into a high-stakes showdown. [Automatically generated summary]
In a moment, I'm going to go to Richard Barris, who's going to break down some numbers for us.
The Secretary of State has put out the results of early voting.
And remember, there's a huge amount of Texans, particularly people that support guys like Doc Chambers, who's running for governor.
The grassroots, the hardcore grassroots here, do not believe in early voting and do not early vote.
So there's always that tension when you look at these early voting numbers.
But something's happening big in Texas.
Many, many people have talked about the national media.
We knew this.
This is why we came down here.
Barrison will be in a moment.
And then David Nino Rodriguez, which has one of the biggest podcasts in the state of Texas from El Paso, he was on top of the story in Austin about this radical Islamic, let's call it what it is, a terrorist mass casualty event in Austin the other night.
He actually understood this and knew exactly kind of what was going on and thinking it through, something he's warned people about a lot Saturday night.
And he's going to join us here in a moment, but we got to finish.
So Mike Lindell, we had Brian Kennedy on a day.
Brian Kennedy wrote an amazing piece over at Glenn Beck's The Blaze, which was up this morning about this executive order that Kurt Olson and other, you know, you know Kurt Olson very well.
He's now the president's special assistant for elections.
People are quite concerned about the security of the 2026 election.
There's Peter Ticton and others.
Peter is Tina Peters' lawyer, and the president just put up on True Social a few minutes ago between updates on the war.
He said, free Tina Peters, a lot of people, particularly the war posse, are very, very concerned.
There's not enough focus on this.
We had things going on in Georgia.
You're about to have things going on in Maricopa County.
John Solomon's breaking all kind of news.
But this executive order, because I tell you, the Save America Act, I don't believe is really going to get a hearing in the Senate.
I think it's a lot of happy talk by Thun and these guys.
The House has passed it.
So therefore, we have to go to other alternatives.
You're going to, you need to go to lindaleplan.com.
It's my election crime bureau.
We've been working on this stuff for five years.
It's all posted there.
So I made it easy for you.
Go to lindaleplan.com.
You can see all of this, all the information we have there.
I've had teams of tens of thousands on the ground, but we've had teams of cyber guys and journalists and everything for the last five years putting all this together.
And this is the stuff we keep turning into the administration.
But you guys can check this out.
And we've got four different plans to replace all these machines.
So even if we end up with just partial machines here during the, for the 2026 primary.
And by the way, in Texas right now, Steve, there's at least three counties that are going or three precincts or counties.
I can't remember which one.
But they're doing paper ballots hand counting.
So these things, we're five years ahead of where we, if we would be in this position now, there's no way you could just, you know, hey, we're going to switch overnight and get because the China parts are all in these machines and they've been deemed critical infrastructure by Obama.
And you tell you, so they take over South America.
We all know it can be done because in 2022, Argentina, one judge said, hey, we've got to get rid of these voting machines and go to paper ballots and count it.
They did it in four months.
They beat the Netherlands by a month and it can be done and freed their country.
So I just want to encourage everybody, and you can get the information.
We've got, even if we're caught with part, let's say we have to keep the tabulators.
We've got, we've been doing, we did it in the 2024 election.
My teams did in California.
We've already done it in the election.
It's a whole new process.
It's almost like having another camera on the election.
I asked him, I said, what do you guys are calling for by taking the machines out?
When do we hit the tripwire when that actually has to be promulgated?
And he said, look, it should be today, but we could probably get a couple of weeks and maybe even go into the early spring.
Do you believe that?
My point is, are we already overcome by events on just processes that we couldn't, if we wanted to stop it, we couldn't stop it?
Or do you believe if a tough enough executive order came out and Brian walked through all types of legal things that have to happen that you could actually do it today in an executive order?
Or will you get hung up in court so much that we physically won't have the time to shift over to a different process?
Steve, if we didn't have my teams that have developed four different hand counting systems and all this over the last five years, I would tell you we're already, it's already too late.
But it's not too late because even if we go into April, May, I believe we can switch over the whole country in four months or less because of the canned county systems we already have in place.
Some of them we've already used here.
This goes back to Osage County, Missouri.
Use that one, I believe, in 2022.
So, a lot of the counties.
Now, do I believe that it should be centralized?
Uh, our voting center, no, I do not believe it should be centralized.
I should be what I had help put in, which the RNC endorsed, which was a resolution, paper ballots, hand counting, precinct level voter ID.
So, I think it's you have to keep it at that level.
And I don't think, Steve, I don't know if you're going to have that much pushback out there.
Everybody wants secure elections, even Democrats do.
We all, as people, I don't care what party you're in, the people want secure election.
I mean, the people want secure elections.
Obviously, our politicians, these uniparty Republicans and the Democrats, they don't want secure elections.
Steve, we've been fighting them for five years.
But I'm telling you, if you're the people out there, if you're watching this show, you guys go to your counties, go to your politics, say, hey, we've got to have secure elections because everybody wants that.
When you talk about Amy Klobuchar in my home state, what did she do?
She was 18 and 19 to get rid of the voting machines and go to paper ballots.
And I spent $50 million.
Amy do.
She takes all this money from the government and brings it into Minnesota and defraud takes it all these $25 billion.
And a little bonus, I'm going to bring back the Minnesota flag, which ended up being a Somalian flag.
Bring back the Minnesota flag, ban Sharia law, and take the satanic statue out of the Capitol that Waltz put in there and said we have to be fair to the devil.
We're going to do a Worm Texas as a pregame right after the five o'clock show from six to seven.
And then starting at eight, Studio 6B will pick up and start reviewing because that's when the polls close, 8 p.m. Eastern time.
We'll start the first 30 minutes of our Texas coverage and then Grant Stinchfield and ourselves, as soon as we get organized, will join at 8:30 and we'll take it from there.
And Ben Berquam, right now, is scheduled to be in Paxton headquarters.
Richard, talk to me about because this is the two things that have gotten national attention are the early vote totals for Republicans and Democrats.
I want you to break down.
Then I'll talk about the Democrat and the Republican Senate races because this also has people's hair on fire.
First off, knowing that traditionally there's a ton of Republicans here, particularly a lot of specifically a lot of the boarroom posse in the MAGA base that are just do not trust early voting.
They don't trust the machines.
They don't trust anything to do with any of this.
So they're game day voters.
And tomorrow's game day.
What's your assessment?
And what's been the national media's assessment of how the early vote has turned out?
Yeah, that's what I want to lead off with, Steve, which will give you an idea of what I think when I look at this early vote.
I'm going to lead off with this.
You have to go vote tomorrow, Republicans, because if you don't, you're going to give Harry Enton and CNN and the national media a huge PR win for Democrats.
And the reason why is because early vote is, or at least primary participation in total, which I think is more accurate to say. is definitely predictive of general election outcome.
All right.
So if it turns out that Republicans don't show up on game day tomorrow and Republicans have all of these talking points that they look like they're going to get from the early vote, we're going to get end and clip after end and clip about how the Republican seat in Texas is going to be gone.
You have got to go and vote tomorrow.
The totals right now, I'm just going to, look, they're abysmal to me.
Republicans need to learn how to vote in person.
If they don't like to vote by mail, that's fine.
Because what we have been seeing in 25 and even in the short time in 26 is that if there was a change in Republican behavior in 2024, meaning if there was a change from usually them voting on election day to them warming up and taking to early vote, then that pattern continued in 25.
So if they didn't show up and the early vote was weak, then it turned out the election day vote was also rather weak.
Texas, you have to prove this.
You have to break that trend tomorrow.
It's not good enough when I'm seeing right now.
And if you don't break it, it's going to spell, it's going to foreshadow a bad November.
Right now, Republican, I mean, Democrats are about at 240% of their 2022 total at the end of early vote.
And they're even outperforming 2024.
So they're at like 250.
So the problem is Republicans are doing well as well.
They're at 120, but that's not good enough.
Here's Star County, which I think is important to highlight.
This is the Democratic total right now for early vote in Star County.
Why did I pick this?
It's heavily Hispanic.
Hillary Clinton won it by 33 points in 16.
Trump shifted it all the way to Biden plus five in 2020, and then he won it by 16 flat, a 21-point swing from 2020.
It's heavily Hispanic.
And these were, I mean, this was the county on election night, Steve, where I was looking when you, I, and John Solomon were talking about the magic of the Trump coalition and NUMAGA, how it's more diverse, it's non-white, it's younger, it's the future, it could govern for 30 years.
This is what scares me.
That's already more votes than Kamala Harris got in the entire election.
And this compared to right there, you can see that's the Republican early vote total.
I don't know if it's one Trump vote disgruntled that voted before.
I think what they're seeing is what this controversy about closed primaries.
They're seeing people that have voted in Republican primaries, these Democrats, to try to get Rhino candidates now go home because they've got, number one, Trump derangement syndrome.
They want to put up huge numbers.
Also, they've got this hotly contested U.S. Senate race.
So I think that's by the way, the two things on the Trump side, I think, number one, there are a significant amount of people that think, hey, President Trump's in.
He's getting everything done.
I want him to get done.
You got the House and the Senate.
This is just not important.
Maybe I'll come in in November, but we've seen this in these special elections.
The other is that there's not an insignificant portion of his people are saying, hey, this is not what I voted for.
Their energy is like the kind of Mendami, what I call DSA, working family party with tons of dark money in back of it that are funding this.
If you have Harry Enton on Tuesday night that are spiking the football because he win, you're going to have a billion dollars of outside money pour into here.
It's going to be a tsunami.
And why?
Because their plan to take over Texas, which was a five or 10-year plan.
And remember, they already put $400 million of sources money in it.
And Trump won by 14 points in 24.
So it thwarted them.
But they have gotten this DSA.
And I got to tell you, this is one of the reasons we have the Sharia law proposition on the ballot.
They have the universities because all the universities are incubators for this.
If they put these numbers up through, if Election Day, tomorrow night, if it's this bad, you're going to just have CNN and MSNBC, Rachel Maddows, going to say, hey, Texas is in the gun sights.
We can do this.
You can stop Trump.
You can stop President Trump and impeach him.
And that's why he went to Corpus Christi, because South Texas, as you just said, the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas could be where the fight, particularly if Virginia.
We lose this referendum.
It goes 10 to 1.
I think the control of the House of Representatives could come down to a handful of these new seats in South Texas.
I mean, the donors, they'll say, this is our year.
We're going to do it.
It's an extra.
It's an extra seat that we can get to vote to convict and remove folks.
I mean, wake up to remove Donald Trump, not just, you know, do it for show.
If they get Texas, if they get this primary vote, this disproportionate primary vote when it's a PR victory, they're going to open up their checkbooks and they're going to spend a ridiculous amount of money that, frankly, Republicans can't afford to spend defending Texas.
Michael Watley's down in North Carolina.
They got a lot of work to do in that race.
I mean, we can just go all over the map.
People have to vote because they will do it.
I guarantee you that clip, that ending clip that you were just saying, I guarantee you that comes before end of day on Wednesday.
It will be out there.
It'll be cut and it'll be circulated in all the Democrat literature and all the Democrat memos and all Democrat social media.
Because one of the concerns is the amount of money spent in this Republican primary.
And having been down here for four or five weeks and curating all the news, I have never seen a more vicious campaign against an individual as Cornyn's negative ad campaign against Ken Paxton, who, as you know, is a hero to the grassroots and a hero to the MAGA base.
Right now, that looks like Paxton's up, but there's a lot of questions of whether any of them, because Hunt joined the race, anybody can get to 50% plus one vote.
So you therefore might have to go into a runoff that would take place at least through the middle of May and cost.
They've already spent, I think, overall, almost $100 million.
I think Cornyn with the outside groups is almost $80 million, virtually all of it in negative ads to destroy a combat helicopter pilot in West Point grad, Wesley Hunt, and of course, the legendary Ken Paxon.
Yeah, all of that money to save a loser incumbent who wouldn't be in trouble if he actually represented his coalition, if he actually represented his constituency.
This is what Republicans do to themselves.
It's beyond shooting themselves in the foot.
And listen, Wesley Hunt, nice guy.
He's not going to win.
All right.
I'm not telling people how to vote, but the sooner you put this away, the better.
Paxton, if it doesn't go to 50%, Paxton will be a heavy favorite into the runoff anyway.
But you're also telling me, I want to, in the time, you're also telling me, hey, if Paxon can't get to 50% and put this way now, there's a magic number.
And you say it may be 8%.
If he has an eight-point spread, I'm not saying it's going to happen, but he had eight-point spread.
That may get the Senate Leadership Fund and others to say, look, Cornyn's, we're going to have to spend too much money destroying Ken Paxton.
We'll destroy him for the general election, particularly if it's against Tallerico.
And so we don't want to do that.
Is there a number tomorrow that you think is the magic number if Paxton can't win outright?
What kind of spread does he have to have to have the Senate Leadership Fund just tell Cornyn, we're not going to pour more money into this to destroy Ken Paxton anymore?
It's just so statistically unlikely that you'll get the rest of the Hunt voters to break for Cornyn at a level that can keep Paxton from gaining eight points in a two-way race.
That's crazy.
The Bushes did this, if you remember, and when Louis Gomert as well, Judge Gomert was running in that primary for Attorney General.
The Bushies threw their candidate on there.
It was ridiculous.
Paxton was at 40, 42%.
There was never any chance.
I mean, that is a huge mountain to climb, guys, to keep someone who's at 40, 42% from getting to 50.
It's massive.
The amount of money, again, it's a waste.
I mean, you got to at least get him to the point where, and I think that's around 42%, give or take a little bit, even 40, Steve.
It's crazy.
I mean, if Wesley Hunt gets round 13% and Paxton's at 40, it's put it away.
This thing's over.
You're going to waste tens of millions more dollars on a race that is should, again, you really can't afford to waste that money defending a seat all because look, the incumbent wouldn't be in trouble, Steve, if he was popular.
And here's another number I want to throw at you from our own polling.
Almost 30% of the Republican primary electorate is telling us they won't show up for John Cornyn in November if he's the nominee.
Look, MAGA's pissed, right?
They're telling us the same thing with Lindsey Graham.
Particularly, what they don't understand is the viciousness.
He has one ad that he runs that you think he's like living in the Lincoln bedroom.
He's so close to Trump, which everybody in D.C. knows is a lie.
He's there for the wall.
That's a joke.
He actually, after we started the Prop 10 of the prohibiting Sharia law in Texas, he put out a Sharia law ad.
He's never done anything in 24 years.
And then last week, he announced he launched a banned Sharia law bill in the Senate, which is just the old political thing that worked in the old days when you didn't have social media or shows like War Room Texas to expose the lies.
Just a joke.
But the viciousness against Ken Paxon has been so horrible, I think it's turned a lot of people off.
We had a call came in that shooting that someone was shooting around the bar, Buford's bar.
We know that a vehicle, a large SUV, drove several times around the block in that area.
At one point, he put his flashers on, rolled down his window, and began using a pistol shooting out of his car windows, striking patrons of the bar that were on the patio and that were in front of the bar.
He then proceeds westbound on 6th Street, goes to Wood Street, where he parks his car, gets out, once again, starts shooting his gun at some people that are walking by.
He then walks east on 6th Street.
At that point, everyone knows the amount of resources we use on East 6th Street.
a large crowd, a large entertainment area here in Austin where officers along with EMS and fire are staged for the weekend.
And so you're talking, when this came out, we were about 55, 56 seconds away coming from East to West Austin, and that saved multiple lives.
As the officers were responding again, our suspect was coming toward East Austin or East 6th Street.
Officers were coming toward him, and at the intersection, he was shot and he was killed.
unidentified
So you heard from a source that there were potentially, that they were told that there were explosives under the suspect's car.
Like I said, he drove by, was firing outside the window with a pistol.
Once he exited the vehicle after parking on wood, he exited with a rifle at that point.
unidentified
Okay.
Do you have any questions?
No.
Okay.
Two minutes for it.
All right.
Can you kind of just describe the general setup of police and DMS presence in this area of town on a typical Saturday and a little more of what happened last time?
Number one, you've been giving warnings now for about six months about people, particularly Canadians and American citizens, traveling to Mexico to these big resorts or people just going over and hanging out because you're saying, hey, I've seen these drug cartel wars in the past.
I know President Trump and the military are working on something that Shine Bomb is not doing and just be advised.
You don't want to be in the crossfire.
And that came, what, last weekend?
You've also been someone, and particularly when we had this attack the other day, contacted me right away and said, hey, you watch.
You're going to see this start to spread.
You're going to see it start to spread in places like Texas.
Late Saturday night, I think you and I talked.
You had a pretty good feel for what's going on Sunday morning.
You essentially had it nailed.
We made a decision because we didn't feel we had it enough locked down that we didn't want to go with it.
So we didn't do it on our special edition of the Sunday morning show.
But everything that's played out with this event in Austin, you kind of had a feel for.
So walk me through it.
What has been, why have you been on this particular topic?
And why you were the person that was the least surprised when this happened?
Well, I've been anticipating this for quite a while, to be quite honest with you.
And I knew it was just going to be, it was just going to take an action from Trump to kick it off, right?
So obviously, you got to know that Hezbollah, the cartels, Hamas, they all work together.
They benefit from working together.
And Trump is now taking the fight to them.
So they have to fight back to survive.
Now, what we saw in Austin, in my opinion, is just the one-off, whack job lunatic that takes matters into his own hands, his own hands, and goes up and shoots a bar.
By the way, I've been to that bar many times, and where the people were sitting, I've sat in those chairs.
It's crazy to see it.
It's home, hits home big time.
But what I believe is coming is a coordinated event.
We're still going to get some of these one-offs, you know, wild cards, you know, lunatics that take matters into their own hands.
But I think more of a coordinated event is coming.
Most likely, probably after the infrastructure.
If you look at Greg Abbott, Greg Abbott's deploying the National Guard and DPS to ramp up patrols at energy facilities, ports, and the southern border.
And I'm telling you, you know, I'm on both sides of the border here.
I know people there and here.
And I'm just saying that, you know, when families in Mexico are saying, I don't think their American relatives should not come visit Mexico.
This is what it felt like before it kicked off in Cedar Juarez.
And what I think is going to happen, and this is just opinion, but I think I'm pretty good at strategy here from being a fighter.
I think a coordinated attack's going to come where they try to take out our infrastructure and they'll benefit most at that, take out our infrastructure, get the police to conglomerate in one area and then take the other part of the city in another with other attacks.
So I think that if I was thinking like them, you know, that's how I would do it.
And that's just the most logical way.
I think having these lunatics come off and shoot here, shoot there, there's no real game plan.
You got to remember, cartels and these people are very well organized.
They're not just these rogue games, rogue gangs running the streets just mindlessly.
They're very coordinated.
They're very sophisticated and they have good intel.
Talk to me about The Austin police went out of their way, knowing what we know now with the sweatshirt and the Quran and everything that was there.
In fact, our show started at 10 o'clock and we felt uncomfortable doing it because the Austin police were going out of their way to say there's nothing to see here.
I think I told them of when you have such overwhelming evidence of this, why are they still hesitant to call it what it was, sir?
You know, this state is still run by, you know, a lot of corrupt politicians, Democratic, especially El Paso.
But it's, you know, they just, they want to be extra sensitive.
You know, they don't want to rile people up and show that MAGA's right, you know?
So like I'm saying, I think this is just beginning.
Now, I know the raids that the protesters were, you know, interfering with in Minnesota, places like that, those raids were the first wave of taking out the coordinators, the hefe, the patrons, the real heavy violent criminals, the organizers that could structure or plan an attack on the United States.
You got to understand Biden was the one bringing in these millions of immigrants to take down America for such a time as now.
You're in one of the toughest Democratic strongholds with, quite frankly, some of the most radical people.
I don't think people realize the radical congressmen you have and just the whole radical, how radical it is down in El Paso and what you have to live with.
But the biggest national news story going into tomorrow politically is this massive turnout for the for the Democrats, particularly driven by the DSA and the Working Family Party in other parts of the state, not the Democratic strongholds, but they've done it all over.
What is your sense of what's driven that?
Do they think the Trump derangement syndrome?
Because there's no policy.
You don't see any political debate.
The ads aren't saying, oh, he can do this.
It's pure Trump derangement syndrome.
But But why?
Is it outside money?
Are they organized?
Is Mamdani showing them how to organize this DSA?
Because Trump just won by 14 points last November.
And it's not that, I want to make sure people know, it's not that the Republican numbers are horrible.
You're kind of up from a midterm election.
It's that the Democrats have a tsunami now.
And I keep warning people, if they put these numbers up through game day tomorrow, you're going to have Harry Antony's people on TV tomorrow night, Rachel Maddow, and $1 billion. of dark outside money by the George sources and others that are even worse than him are going to flood into the state because they think they're going to take a couple of three House seats.
They think they're actually going to, with Virginia, have enough House seats to be able to impeach Trump.
And they believe that they're going to take this Senate seat.
And I think they even think they take the governorship.
Well, I think it's all the above, but also a lot of MAGA or once MAGA people are, you know, or moderates are going over to the Democrats because they're not in line with these wars that basically they have no understanding of what this really is.
Do you think it's the, do you think it's moderates going over?
Or a lot of people are saying that because of the open primaries, that the great ball, because you do have people that have taken Republican ballots in the past and they're taking Democratic ballots.
What some people are saying is that this is this whole corruption with the open primary process, that these people actually are Democrats.
They've been voting.
And so this is the reason you get so many rhino candidates in the Senate.
This is why you got so many guys in the House.
This is why you have so many rhinos at the Texas state level, that this has been the game they've played.
And it's quite frankly why the establishment never, the Republican establishment didn't want to start.
Do you buy that?
Or do you think it's just people saying, it's too much for me and I'm going to vote for the Democrats?
David, Nino Rodriguez, we had to make a call tomorrow of how the turnout's going to be on game day.
Do you believe?
I think it's a 225,000 vote gap right now from early voting.
And remember, a huge portion, particularly Doc Chambers, all these really hardcore MAGA, hardcore grassroots organizations, don't believe in early voting at all.
And so it's a natural hesitancy there.
How do you think it turns out?
Just given your sense of what's going on, how do you think it turns out tomorrow with turnout Republican versus Democrat?
We're going to be back at 10 a.m. tomorrow morning, obviously, with the Warrum of the Morning Show, 10 to noon Eastern Standard Time in the afternoon.
Natalie's going to join me at 5 o'clock.
We've got a lot to go through in this war coverage.
Then at 6, we're going to do a War Room Texas to tee everything up.
Then at 8.30, Grant Stinchfield and Stephen K. Bannon, Warham, Texas, special coverage on Real America's Voice all the way through the evening until we can give you some, we can ascertain which way this is going in Texas.
Game day is tomorrow.
If you haven't voted, make sure you get out and vote if you're in the great state of Texas and North Carolina.
I think also Arkansas.
We're going to cover them all tomorrow night with a special emphasis in the jewel of the crown, the great state of Texas.
We'll see you tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time where you'll be back in the war room.