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Ballot Harvesting Legal Battle
00:14:55
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| Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk show. | |
| Jennifer Van Law goes through ballot harvesting and Sean Davis helps diagnose the midterm elections. | |
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| Ballot harvesting is on the mind. | |
| And so we need to talk about this. | |
| We need to get better at it, especially in states where it is legal. | |
| Joining us now is Jennifer Van Law. | |
| She has been predicting this for quite some time, talking about how California ballot harvesting leads to insecure elections and what we can do to reform it. | |
| Jennifer joins us now. | |
| Jennifer, welcome to the program. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Jennifer, tell us, just let's get our terms right. | |
| What is ballot harvesting? | |
| Let's just start with there. | |
| Okay. | |
| Ballot harvesting is when someone who's not the voter and usually not their family member collects a ballot from a voter and returns it to the election official. | |
| So it can be someone affiliated with a campaign. | |
| It could be someone affiliated with a PAC. | |
| It can just be their neighbor or friend, anyone that that voter wants to give the ballot to. | |
| What ballot harvesting in an organized fashion has been evolving into generally is on the Democrat side, where they have unions or big super PACs hire a lot of people to go and they don't just go door to door. | |
| They get data on who their voters are going to be, usually Democrats, and they go to their houses, usually in a sales funnel type of way, where they go make the first contact, introduce themselves, talk about the candidates, come back and get the ballot the next time if the person isn't ready to do it then. | |
| They aren't supposed to be offering opinions or information on who to vote for, but oftentimes they do. | |
| They've even done this in 2018 at nursing homes in California. | |
| My daughter-in-law worked at one. | |
| They would go in the memory care unit and talk to voters there, and she wasn't permitted to stop that. | |
| Well, I don't know if they're talking to voters in the memory care unit. | |
| I think what they're doing is something much more sinister. | |
| Yeah, it's being generous. | |
| Yeah, they do a process called granny farming. | |
| It was actually tabulated by the New York Times. | |
| And I know they did this in Arizona and no one stopped them. | |
| And so in California, you have to give somebody your permission. | |
| Is that right? | |
| To take your ballot? | |
| You do. | |
| However, it's still going to be counted, even if there's a place on the ballot to have that person write their name. | |
| You don't even have to write it. | |
| They write their name as to who's taking it, but the ballot will still be counted even without that signature. | |
| And there's no verification that, you know, I could write that my name's Charlie Kirk. | |
| You know, some girls are named Charlie, right? | |
| They're not going to count. | |
| They're not going to check my ID to make sure that that's who I am. | |
| So I could write whatever name I want on that envelope. | |
| Right. | |
| So for years, Democrats have done this really effectively and they've been able to use it as a differentiator. | |
| But it seems as if that Republicans and churches are beginning to catch up. | |
| And I guess the only difference is that when a Democrat answers the door, are they more likely to give it up than a Republican? | |
| Right. | |
| I mean, what does your data or your analysis tell you about that? | |
| They are a lot more likely to give it up. | |
| Democrats in general are a lot more trusting of these groups that say they're going to get the ballot in. | |
| And who knows? | |
| There's really not any penalty for them not to get it. | |
| And Democrats could go try to go to Republican doors and take a ballot and just trash it. | |
| But within Republican circles, what we've been trying to do in California and did to some extent within the recall election and even this year is go with the power of churches and other trusted community groups that can put together maybe events at their church and have a ballot drop box there. | |
| During the recall election, the California Republican Party partnered with some various organizations to put out community drop boxes because it's not against the law to do that, as long as people do turn in those ballots within 72 hours. | |
| So at various churches had drop boxes and the Democrats just lost their mind over that. | |
| There was a court case and the Republican Party did prevail there. | |
| So what we're trying to do is get people to maybe even have a community gathering of conservative group maybe at a park that's adjacent to where there's a drop box in a secure location, like maybe in front of a city hall or something like that that's monitored and have everyone go ahead and put their ballots in directly themselves. | |
| That way they're not trusting a third party. | |
| And I think that that's important because as you know, I know that your organization was greatly involved in elections in Arizona and other places. | |
| When you're trying to get out the vote, you're texting people, you're calling them to these people and you get up-to-date data on who's turned in their ballots and who hasn't. | |
| Each of those contacts costs money. | |
| If you can get all of your stalwart people, the people you know are going to vote your base to turn in those ballots a week ahead of time, say then you're not spending those resources to contact people. | |
| Yep, that's right. | |
| Now, of course, but what this does do, and this needs to be said, is that when you have this system, it does open it up for manipulation and ballot capturing and other nefarious practices. | |
| Can you walk us through some evidence of that? | |
| Yeah, so that we know in California, people have been paid for their ballot. | |
| Homeless people down on Skid Row have been same day signed up to register to vote, paid for their ballots. | |
| They've, like you mentioned, granny farming, got in there and told them who to vote for. | |
| And then the Democrats are also keeping up with that with that information. | |
| So they are knowing how many Republicans have gotten out to vote. | |
| So some Republicans have said, well, I don't want to turn in my ballot early because then they're going to know basically how many ballots they have to manufacture to overcome that. | |
| I think that, and I understand that line of thinking, but I think that overall, you know, we had 30% turnout in California, a little higher on the Dem side, but overall 30% turnout. | |
| The question isn't suppressing our vote. | |
| The question is getting more and more and more people out to vote so that those margins are not something that they can just make up. | |
| Right. | |
| And so do you think that just from a characteristic standpoint, do you think that Republicans are willing to embrace ballot harvesting as a new strategy? | |
| I think there's definitely going to be hesitancy. | |
| What I've seen just on the world of Twitter, which we all know isn't necessarily reflective of overall real life since last week, there's been a lot more openness to it overall. | |
| There's been a lot of misunderstandings of what it is. | |
| And so I think on the conservative side, they have to know that we can be successful in it. | |
| And one of my writers at Red State, Scott Hounclai, has been on your show a lot. | |
| He even came up with this modified program before ballot harvesting was legal in California with a stamp program where they gave a stamp to someone and watched them put it in their mailbox to whoever had an absentee ballot at their home at that time. | |
| And they flipped a Democrat plus 13 district in the Central Valley using that tactic. | |
| There's different targeting and voter modeling things that they used as well. | |
| But just to for conservatives to know that if you're doing this the right way with the right data, with the right consultants and with a good plan, that it is a viable strategy, not just for conservative districts, but within rural areas and with Democrat districts. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So I guess the question is: can you give us an update on some of the California House races? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So last night, finally, because in California, they have seven days after Election Day to receive ballots that were postmarked by Election Day. | |
| So we finally had kind of the known universe of what was out there. | |
| They were able to call a number of House races, including California 3, Kevin Kiley, a Republican hold, and Mike Garcia, NCA 27. | |
| That was definitely a hard-fought one. | |
| So those two races made it that the GOP has house control because of those. | |
| There's a few more Democrat holds that were able to be called, but within the next two days, they should have all of that completely fleshed out and have some final results. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So in closing here, just on this topic, what do you think is the greatest learning lesson and kind of thing of improvement for Republicans or conservatives on this topic? | |
| I think definitely to learn more about it and to embrace getting in those early votes, whether it's taking your mail ballot to a polling place and turning it in, or just gathering your friends together and making sure that we turn out even more of the vote than we have been. | |
| Yeah, that's well said. | |
| Jennifer Van Law from Red State, thank you so much for joining us. | |
| Deeply appreciate it. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Look, in the good old days, we Americans argued about which policies to pursue to improve this beautiful country. | |
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| So, Andrew, I tweeted, and I am now of the opinion that, look, the rules are the rules. | |
| And if you're able to ballot harvest, then we need to do this. | |
| I mean, look, we are not going to just accept this below-average, depressing result. | |
| First of all, I think Carrie Lake needs to fight this thing to the bitter end legally. | |
| It is so wrong what happened in Maricopa County, and we support her completely and totally in this. | |
| And it's been very interesting, Andrew. | |
| The media has actually been very quiet in kind of how they've been talking about this. | |
| And I'm sure that's going to change. | |
| But I think even deep down, the media knows that there was a legitimate voter disenfranchisement and suppression that happened in Maricopa County. | |
| One in five voting centers went down on election day. | |
| Listen, I'm, I, you know, I'm usually pretty skeptical about the legal challenges. | |
| I think I've been a little bit jaded after 2020 and, you know, everything that we went through in that cycle. | |
| I think there's a really compelling case to be made in Maricopa. | |
| And I think, you know, again, no hopium here. | |
| It's an uphill battle anytime you say, hey, let's, let's run it back. | |
| Let's let's do this election again. | |
| I think there's a really, really compelling argument, just given the scale, given the number of testimonials. | |
| I mean, we have that clip that we could play for the audience here. | |
| I mean, it's amazing. | |
| And if you guys have that story, go to defenddemocracyaz.com. | |
| That's defenddemocracyaz.com. | |
| Your stories are going to be taken down for possible affidavits in a legal battle that's going to play out in Arizona. | |
| People are asking us how they can support the potential legal bills that are going to come with this legal challenge in Arizona. | |
| Just go to Carrie Lake's campaign. | |
| I know they're getting that ready right now. | |
| But yeah, I mean, it's a really compelling case, Charlie. | |
| When you have 70 voting polling places that are not able to tabulate ballots on day of, that's going to disenfranchise overwhelming majority conservative voters that are going to go Carrie Lake and Abe Homeday. | |
| Now, Carrie Lake's still down in the thousands, but Abe's down to like 500 votes right now, as of right now, as we're doing this. | |
| So you can't tell me. | |
| 500 votes. | |
| Yeah, you can't tell me that we can't find 500 people that got disenfranchised that day and that would have made Abe Homeday the next Attorney General of Arizona. | |
| Now, he might end up winning even without that. | |
| Doesn't matter. | |
| Still do it. | |
| Still do it. | |
| I think this is a legal battle worth having. | |
| Yes. | |
| I mean, it's just, so there's a ton of people emailing us right now. | |
| And by the way, I'm going to just say this. | |
| I think that Maricopa County is lying. | |
| I think there's more ballots to be cured out there than what people are saying. | |
| I got three emails today, three of people saying that they cured their ballots. | |
| There's no way there's only 3,000. | |
| It's just statistically impossible. | |
| If we know people that have to cure their ballots, we're talking about hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of ballots. | |
| And it just so happens that we know a couple in our own circle. | |
| It's statistically hard to believe. | |
| And Charlie, this is another point of hope, right? | |
| So we just had Jennifer Van Law. | |
| You've got house races in California that are being won because conservatives are finally getting on board with the harvesting thing in that state, that process, these church gatherings, whatever it is. | |
| Democrats have outpaced conservatives for years on ballot curing. | |
| In Arizona right now, we are on par to match Democrats. | |
| And if we keep getting the message out, we might cure more ballots in Arizona than the Democrats. | |
| Okay, so that's a sign of hope. | |
| This is the first year we'll ever be on par with them. | |
|
Turning Rallies Into Votes
00:02:03
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| They have known that ballot curing was just as important as ballot harvesting in some races, especially purple states with close races statewide level. | |
| So they've been ahead of us on this. | |
| This year, we're finally getting the word out. | |
| Finally, it took this much, which is unfortunate, but cure your ballots. | |
| It could make all the difference on whether or not we're able to prosecute some of these illegal harvesters in the state of Arizona. | |
| Email us freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to our podcast. | |
| Open up your podcast app and type in Charlie Kirk Show. | |
| And we have tweeted that it is now time for us to build the most aggressive and sophisticated legal ballot harvesting operation in California and Nevada. | |
| I mean, imagine the next time Donald Trump goes to election cycle in Nevada or whoever then, you know, I think Donald Trump will be the nominee, but whoever it is, and he says, come turn in your ballot, you know, bring it in this big, beautiful locked box. | |
| And our staff will bring it right to the county office. | |
| That right there, you're guaranteeing that your base is voting that way. | |
| You're guaranteeing it. | |
| It's not a matter of go out and vote. | |
| That's it. | |
| That's you're doing your job. | |
| You're turning your rallies into literal votes. | |
| Charlie, it's a brilliant idea. | |
| Can you imagine a Trump rally where you bring your ballot to the rally? | |
| That's power. | |
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|
Building Party Infrastructure Now
00:15:02
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| With today's still historically low interest rates, it's easier than you think to become a homeowner. | |
| I've relied on them and producer Andrew has as well. | |
| I highly recommend you take action now. | |
| And if you knew someone paying rent, tell them about Andrew and Todd. | |
| Go to andrewandtodd.com and tell them the Charlie Kirk show sent you. | |
| Joining us now is Sean Davis and the Federalist. | |
| Andrew is also here co-piloting this third hour. | |
| Sean, welcome to the program. | |
| I want to just get your first initial reaction on the midterms. | |
| It was underwhelming, not what we wanted it to be. | |
| How should we think about what happened a week ago? | |
| I think that's a great question. | |
| It was disappointing. | |
| It wasn't what we wanted to see. | |
| I guess my instinct when stuff like that happens is I want to know what went wrong. | |
| I want to know things that the other side did, they did well, things that we did poorly. | |
| And then I want to find a way to fix the problems that I think kept us down. | |
| And to me, there's, look, failure has a thousand bothers. | |
| So I'm not going to say there's one particular thing that was the main reason for everything because it wasn't. | |
| But I think the biggest determinant in the disappointing results was the machinery for electioneering that the Dems have set up is an absolute behemoth. | |
| It's how they were able to basically in four to five states have the exact same results in 2022 as they did two years ago, despite wildly different political circumstances. | |
| And until the Republican Party gets that through its skull and wises up and starts building out its own machinery and using the same rules and processes to get back to an even playing field as far as mail-in balloting or ballot harvesting, whatever you want to call it, until they get back there, they're going to be a minority party nationally, as far as the eye can see. | |
| So that to me is the number one thing. | |
| It's fixable. | |
| It's addressable. | |
| They can do it. | |
| The only question is whether they have the will. | |
| So, Sean, some people are trying to, they're scratching their head. | |
| And, you know, we talked about this the other day when actually early in the show about the independence that seemed nationwide to skew a little bit more in the Democrat direction than anyone would have anticipated, more than national trends would have suggested. | |
| Why do you think that is? | |
| It seemed as if the opposite was happening, right? | |
| I mean, you saw the Wall Street Journal stories and the polls. | |
| It looked like independents were breaking our way steadily, but it wasn't just Arizona. | |
| It was Georgia. | |
| It was Pennsylvania. | |
| It was Colorado. | |
| It was Nevada. | |
| It was Michigan. | |
| It was those last late, early, those late independent voters that usually break our way significantly. | |
| That remember, Trump won in 16, right? | |
| That was one of the reasons why he won. | |
| What happened? | |
| So it's interesting. | |
| I actually think if you look at the polls, a lot of people want to say they were wrong. | |
| I'm not sure they were. | |
| You bring up 2016. | |
| 2016 was a wildly different year because we didn't have three months of voting. | |
| We didn't have this post-COVID. mail-in balloting apparatus. | |
| And the result of that is that kind of the polls that you saw towards the end actually reflected your ultimate electorate. | |
| We didn't have that this year. | |
| And so if you're looking at polls in late October or early November, trying to help you figure out what's going to happen, you're going to be wrong because so much of the voting started in late September in mid-October. | |
| And I think that's what really changed is the Dems through very targeted, sophisticated, deliberate scheduling and messaging, they started bringing in their voters. | |
| So they got them amped up, they got them activated, and then they got them in the mail in September. | |
| And then we were just sitting around on the right, kind of thinking we were operating under this old model where, oh, we've just got to get our people to the polls on election day. | |
| Well, by that point, it was already too late. | |
| So I think the Republican Party and everyone on the right needs to kind of trash everything they thought they knew about politics pre-mass mail-in balloting. | |
| And they need to accept the reality of what they're in right now. | |
| Now, granted, I wish we just had Election Day and you only got to do the mail and absentee thing in extenuating circumstances that you had approved. | |
| That's not where we are now. | |
| Mail and mail is pretty popular and we need to just deal with it. | |
| Yeah, but here's what my big frustration is. | |
| I want to answer in on this, Sean. | |
| And I just want your thoughts. | |
| I'm not asking for, you know, to put you on the spot or anything. | |
| I'm just curious, is that why did nobody really see this? | |
| There were so few alarm bells, right? | |
| I mean, we probably have a thousand what I would consider to be smart, highly dedicated people on the right, like people like you, people like Tucker that are on Twitter, you know, people that are just nonstop on Molly Hemingway. | |
| Why is it that we didn't get the proper warnings of this, right? | |
| It just seemed to be the opposite, right? | |
| I mean, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday going into the election, there was maybe a whisper that something might not break our way. | |
| But do you have any insights into that? | |
| Well, again, I think it depended on how you looked at the polls. | |
| So we last went into the field in Arizona, for example, in mid-October. | |
| The last poll that we put out showed a generic ballot tie, and it showed Republicans losing each statewide race. | |
| And then you looked at the polls at the end of November or end of October, beginning in November, and you thought, oh, things have gone our way. | |
| At that point, the election was over. | |
| And to me, if you were looking for warning signs in October, you were way too late. | |
| The warning sign was 2020. | |
| And unfortunately, our party was more interested in kind of casting blame and going after election deniers or blaming Trump rather than doing the hard work of building machinery and party infrastructure, which I can't do. | |
| You can't do. | |
| Andrew can't do it. | |
| That is something that just because of its scale and the amount of capital involved has to be done by the party. | |
| And they didn't do it. | |
| Andrew, your thoughts. | |
| Yeah, I mean, you know, Charlie, I go back to that tweet that you just put up. | |
| You know, it was kind of a, it's kind of a big, you know, moment. | |
| You drew a line in the sand. | |
| And just to bring you up to speed, Sean, this is this is what Charlie tweeted. | |
| The Rubicon has been crossed. | |
| I don't like it, but it's time to win. | |
| We will build the most sophisticated and aggressive legal ballot harvesting operation in America and never let this garbage happen again. | |
| And the response is like off the charts. | |
| I mean, this, this, A, the tweet is flying, but B, every like cool kid on Twitter right is chiming in saying, yeah, it's time to go. | |
| I think there's a, you know, there's a recognition that, you know, with this economy, with inflation being what it is, with illegal immigration being just out of control with a historically unpopular president, this should have gone a different way. | |
| But to your point, we had already lost the election in a lot of these places, probably in September, you know, late October, right? | |
| I mean, different states had early voting starting well before, for example, Fetterman Oz, right? | |
| That was an election where they had already been early voting for weeks by the time that disastrous debate performance happened with Fetterman. | |
| You know, so I think you're totally right. | |
| We have to reimagine how we do this. | |
| And it's got to start at the top. | |
| I mean, it really does. | |
| I mean, I think, you know, as we see, I mean, if you, if Trump really wants to do this, can you imagine bring your ballot to a MAGA rally? | |
| I mean, the guy can turn out voters like nobody else. | |
| I mean, that would be a really remarkable thing to see. | |
| But to your point, I think it's well taken. | |
| Has to start at the top. | |
| We need leadership that gets it. | |
| Yeah, we can switch gears here. | |
| So talking, I want to talk about this, one of these stories here. | |
| So Donald Trump running for the presidency, Sean, what do you think that means for the movement? | |
| And what do you think about some of the new kind of DeSantis rumblings on the right? | |
| Well, so it's, I'll tell you what, I'm going to take a little different hack here. | |
| What I am not interested in doing is reliving 2015 and 2016 again and that whole nonsensical season where everyone in Washington decided it was their job to tell everyone outside of Washington what they had to do and who they had to vote for. | |
| And I have zero interest in that little game playing out. | |
| And you already saw it with a bunch of the so-called conservative publications yesterday immediately coming out and say, you voters must not reelect him and this and that. | |
| And I guess my view of this is I'm sick and tired of people in Washington. | |
| And I'm sick and tired of people in the party telling us what we have to do and who we have to vote for. | |
| They work for us. | |
| They need to do their actual jobs. | |
| They need to focus on the new reality that we have and they need to stop trying to tell us everything we need to do. | |
| You know, it was fascinating after last week watching people like Mitch McConnell come out and say, oh, the problem's candidate quality. | |
| It's Trump and it's candidate quality. | |
| And I want people to understand. | |
| Yeah, candidate quality is code for we lost this because Republican voters are stupid. | |
| That's actually what Mitch McConnell was saying is that I'm sick and tired of these voters thinking they get to run this party. | |
| That's my job. | |
| And so extrapolating that to the whole 2024 race, I'm eager to see anyone who wants to get in, fight it out, and I'm eager to see what the voters choose. | |
| And you know what? | |
| Given Trump's record as president, I'm not going to be surprised one bit if they come in and say everyone else in this party is corrupt. | |
| He was a great president. | |
| Things were good when he was in charge. | |
| I'm going to vote for him again. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Andrew, what are your thoughts? | |
| No, I think that's wise. | |
| I mean, you guys have a story at the Federalists that says that. | |
| It says Donald Trump. | |
| I think we have the graphic here. | |
| Donald Trump is running for president again. | |
| Washington would be wise to remember 2016. | |
| I mean, I think you're absolutely right when you have these, you know, the Paul Ryans of the world re-emerging on the scene. | |
| I mean, I think it strikes the voter as completely corrupt. | |
| And what I think they don't realize what they're doing, they don't realize how unpopular they are. | |
| And I think they're also going to be surprised that it's going to have the exact opposite reaction. | |
| I think that's what you're getting in your piece. | |
| They're actually giving him a leg up, wouldn't you say, Sean? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| I mean, it's kind of fascinating. | |
| The guy was president. | |
| He's the ostensible party leader. | |
| And yet, because of the establishment and DC's just total hatred of him, they're setting him up to be the outsider again, which is where he thrives, is being the guy who's up against the forces that want to keep people down. | |
| So I just find it kind of fascinating. | |
| And look, I get why a lot of people on the right who weren't anti-Trump might be concerned that he can't win in 2024. | |
| And I think that's a debate that the party absolutely needs to have and that we need to duke it out. | |
| But this notion that a couple magazines in DC and a couple failed leaders in the party are going to decide who the presidential nominee is going to be. | |
| Yeah, they can get out of town with that. | |
| I've got no appetite for that nonsense. | |
| Yeah, so Sean, who do you think are going to be some of the challengers that you think actually could have a little bit of a spark? | |
| The obvious is DeSantis, but I mean, a little deeper than that. | |
| What are you hearing or seeing in that regard? | |
| Well, obviously, DeSantis. | |
| He's got charisma. | |
| He's got a great record in Florida. | |
| I think another star was Carrie Lake. | |
| And I actually think that's why the Democrats and the establishment on the right were so invested in her losing because her ability to rally a crowd, to get people to her side, the energy and fervor she had. | |
| We haven't seen that in the party in a long time. | |
| It was funny watching her. | |
| I actually thought she was the heir to Trump and just her ability to tap into the base. | |
| But, you know, I look at Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence. | |
| I think they're kind of yawners. | |
| They're good people. | |
| I don't have anything against them. | |
| But all the excitement right now seems to be between DeSantis and Trump. | |
| But look, two years is a really, really long time. | |
| We're not actually going to be casting votes in the primary until January 2024. | |
| So we have lots and lots of time. | |
| And I don't want to let my lack of imagination somehow dictate how I view this because who knows what can happen between now and then. | |
| And in January 2020, I didn't think COVID would destroy the whole world and wreck our political system. | |
| And yet here we are. | |
| Very good. | |
| Andrew, you want to take a lead? | |
| You know, Charlie and I are both pro-life from conception. | |
| I mean, we've devoted so much time in the past couple of years to that topic. | |
| But, you know, at the same time, when we are forced to assess what happened in the midterms, I mean, the first question, Sean, is what effects did you see that Dobbs had, especially when you consider single women that went so heavily Democratic, more so than they had in previous cycles? | |
| I mean, it seems obvious that that had an impact. | |
| I mean, but it's not just, it's not all women, right? | |
| We know that women with children are more pro-life than most men. | |
| Actually, the polling indicates that. | |
| So, what's the does the conservative movement need to find? | |
| How do we thread this needle where we can reassure women that on one hand, but also hold true to our values? | |
| Well, I think I'd probably disagree on the impact on Dobbs in the midterms. | |
| I think it was a wash, really, at worst. | |
| You look at the kind of generic ballot, if you just add up all the votes in all the house races across the country, Republicans won by four to five points. | |
| That's a pretty massive swing, especially compared to 2020. | |
| So, if Dobbs was this albatross around the neck of the Republican Party, why do we see such a national shift towards Republicans? | |
| Because people score tickets. | |
| That's why. | |
| That's why. | |
| Well, no, I think on the contrary, Dobbs was 7%. | |
| The Republicans were 7% up on Katie Hobbs. | |
| I think Dobbs was a motivator for base Democrat voters. | |
| I think that was its primary value that they used to activate people, get them riled up in September and October so that when the mail-in ballots went out, they were ready and angry and champing at the bit to send in those votes. | |
| But as far as like a big determining factor, I really didn't see it. | |
| I didn't see it in the data. | |
| I didn't see it in the numbers. | |
| So I'm not looking at Dobbs and thinking, well, geez, if only that had gone differently, we would have won. | |
| No, the Democrats used that to juice their base. | |
| And when you look at these poll numbers, you saw two issues. | |
| People said they either cared about the economy or they either cared about abortion. | |
| And I actually think people are getting cause and effect mixed up on those. | |
| If half your voters are Republicans and half your voters are Democrats, I'll tell you right now, the Democrats aren't going in there saying, oh, the economy, that's what I'm voting on. | |
| They had to have some sort of issue to tell pollsters to pretend that they were really, really mad about so that they wouldn't have to acknowledge that the economy sucked and it was Obama's Biden's fault. | |
|
Economy Versus Abortion Focus
00:02:06
|
|
| So yeah, I'm sorry. | |
| I just don't buy that Dobbs was this big determining factor in the election at all. | |
| Well, in Arizona, it was for sure. | |
| Yeah, I was going to say, we've gotten just anecdotal evidence here. | |
| Well, no data, too. | |
| I mean, yeah, well, there's data. | |
| Certainly there's data. | |
| I think a lot of the moderate Republicans, you know, to Charlie's point, seven to nine percent were voting for Republican treasurer. | |
| But because they hammered home on both Kerry Lake and Blake Masters, that they were too extreme on abortion, I mean, they hammered 100 million bucks. | |
| I'm convinced that we saw some attrition there, at least at the top of the ticket where we didn't see it down ticket. | |
| But, you know, perhaps you're right. | |
| I mean, I would be encouraged if you're right, honestly. | |
| But then you have to look at Pennsylvania, Michigan. | |
| Michigan, we lost huge. | |
| I mean, and also the Wisconsin governor's race. | |
| I mean, that was the only issue that ever Evers ran in was abortion. | |
| That was it. | |
| And he won by like four points. | |
| Yeah. | |
| He literally spent 30 million bucks on abortion. | |
| So. | |
| So that's actually my question. | |
| Was that an abortion issue or is that a money issue? | |
| Because I think you could pick any issue, spend $100 million on someone and destroy them with it, and then say, oh, yeah, that's the issue that cost them. | |
| The big problem we had in addition to the voter mobilization was we got absolutely crushed on air. | |
| Absolutely crushed. | |
| And I think ad-wise, there were $400 million spent on abortion ads from Dems and $10 million from Republicans. | |
| So you give me a 40 to 1 odd, I can take any issue with a 40 to 1 multiplier and destroy someone. | |
| And I think we'll agree on this. | |
| Dobbs gave the reason for the oligarchs on the left, a lot of the pro-abortion, like Lorene Powell Jobs and Mackenzie Bezos to just throw money at this election like they otherwise didn't. | |
| So we're out of time. | |
| Sean Davis, great commentary as always. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you, guys. | |
| Thanks so much for listening, everybody. | |
| Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com. | |
| Thank you so much for listening. | |
| God bless. | |
| For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com. | |