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March 29, 2023 - The StoneZONE - Roger Stone
56:31
Can ANY Republican win 270 Electoral votes in 2024? Seth Keshel Joins Roger Stone in the StoneZONE
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And now, Lindell TV brings you The Stone Zone with legendary Republican strategist and political icon and pundit, Roger Stone.
Stone has served as a senior campaign aide to three Republican presidents.
He is a New York Times bestselling author and a longtime friend and advisor of President Donald Trump.
As an outspoken libertarian, Stone has appeared on thousands of broadcasts, spoken at countless venues, and lectured before the prestigious Oxford Political Union and the Cambridge Union Society.
Due to his four-plus decades in the political and cultural arena, Stone has become a pop culture icon.
And now, here's your host, Roger Stone!
Welcome.
I'm Roger Stone, and you are about to enter the Stone Zone.
Well, if you're a political junkie, you're really going to enjoy today's show.
Many Americans do not realize that the President of the United States is elected not through popular vote, but through the electoral college system set up by the founding fathers to protect the rights of the small states as well as the large states, and that each state is assigned a number of electors based on the number of congressional districts, which in turn are based on the population.
There have been, from time to time, proposals to do away with the Electoral College as an anachronism, is to move directly to popular vote for the purposes of electing a president.
Something I oppose because I think it would put an even greater premium on election fraud and the smaller states would never see a presidential candidate.
But in 1950, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, later campaign manager for President Dwight Eisenhower, and the 1960 nominee for Vice President of the United States on the Nixon Lodge ticket, Put forward a proposal in the U.S.
Senate, which actually passed the Senate but failed in the House, that would have changed the electoral college system to divide the electoral college votes in each state based on proportion of the popular vote as received by the presidential candidates.
Unfortunately, this proposal, which I thought was quite fair, a reasonable reform, passed the Senate but failed to gain any traction in the House.
The Electoral College also has some arcane rules, some of which are relevant today for the many, many people Who have contacted me or said on social media that the best way to bind up divisions in the current Republican Party would be to nominate Donald Trump for president and my governor, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, for vice president.
While the Electoral College does not specifically prohibit a party from nominating two individuals from the same state, it does penalize a party that does so in the event that the ticket carried a given state, in this case, Florida, where a Republican ticket that was comprised of Trump and DeSantis, if elected in the state, which they clearly would be,
Would forfeit the 37 electoral votes assigned to Florida, because our next guest is going to outline for you how incredibly narrow the path is for the election of a Republican president in 2024.
Well, those are 37 electoral votes that we could not possibly, under any circumstance, spare.
Interestingly enough, former President Richard Nixon memorized the votes of the Electoral College, at least as they stood in 1968, again in 1980, had actually done the mathematics in his head, and could quickly give you multiple scenarios, not only for himself in 1968, but when I sat in his home in Saddle River, New Jersey in 1980, game planning how
Ronald Reagan could defeat Vice President Walter Mondale.
The only other person I've ever met who was able to do this, interestingly enough, before the gentleman we're about to speak with, was Donald Trump.
First time I met him in 1979, I was told that he was non-political, but unhappy with the presidency of
Jimmy Carter, I found out that he, too, had memorized the Electoral College, almost like he memorized baseball box scores, and he could quickly give you several different scenarios by which the 1980 Republican candidate, in this case, Ronald Reagan, could win the presidency.
Joining us now is an election analyst with whom I am extraordinarily impressed, a man I did not get to know until the 2020 election, but who's very lively and extraordinarily well thought out and documented.
Substack speaks on all matters election related.
Seth Ketchel, better known as Captain Seth Ketchel.
Captain K, to his friends, joins us now on the Stone Zone.
I'm not sure fellows on the phone.
I'm not getting any audio there.
Back on with you, Roger.
You know, these mute buttons, of course, wreak havoc on us all.
It's great to be back on the show.
Really looking forward to getting into the details of what you were talking about.
Thank you very much for joining us.
We are going to put your Substack address up there on the screen.
If you are into politics, folks, if you are into Americana, if you're interested in who the next president is going to be, you're going to want to read all of this.
First hand, you're going to want to look at the colorized maps and see how well thought out it is.
Before we get into the four pathways that you have identified as potentially capable of electing the next president, let's dispose of this question first.
What, in your opinion, happened in 2020?
Let's get that out of the way.
Widespread manipulation of the entire map, and it's not just six counties and six states.
Sometimes you hear that, and I think that really deflates what has to be done to fix elections in the country.
You can see it from coast to coast, and there's only a few aberrations that stick out.
Florida being one, in which, of course, Florida trended right, while supposedly most of the rest of the country moved off to the left, which is not how our elections work, with Florida being a state bellwether.
And clearly, at least 322 electoral votes should have gone to Trump in the 2020 election, and that is a bare-bones minimum.
And that would include wins in all six of the contested states plus Minnesota.
So your thesis, if I may call it that, you lay out four very specific pathways to for any Republican to reach the presidency.
It's interesting right now, there's a lot of squabbling going on in the Republican Party about those who support Trump, those who prefer the candidacy of Governor DeSantis.
I want to focus today on whether any Republican, although I expect the Republican nominee to be Donald Trump, can win the presidency, or whether we as a party or as Americans should be focused on the broader questions of election law reform.
Since I have this in front of me, let me try to do it.
You identify a core group for Donald Trump or for a Republican of Florida at 30 votes, Ohio at 17.
Indiana at 11.
Tennessee at 11.
Missouri at 10.
Alabama at 9.
South Carolina at 9.
Kentucky at 8.
Louisiana at 8.
Oklahoma at 7.
Arkansas at 6.
Iowa at 6.
Kansas at 6.
Mississippi at 6.
Utah at 6, Idaho at 4, Nebraska at 4, Montana at 4, West Virginia at 4, Wyoming at 3, North Dakota at 3, South Dakota at 3, and Maine, which is a unique situation that I'll allow you to explain, at 1 for a total of 176 electoral votes.
Why don't you address that to begin with?
The 176 electoral votes is Donald Trump's baseline.
That is the absolute starting point.
He could come out a week before the election and say, please, nobody vote for me, and he would still win 176.
And that includes Florida, which is a Republican win for any Republican nominee at this point, especially a populist like Donald Trump.
Now, the one vote for Maine, I think that that's the only vote unique to Trump that I don't think the other Republicans would be expected to carry Maine's second congressional district.
It's a very Trump-y district that he flipped back in his column in 2016 for the first time since it was carried by George Bush in 1988.
So, when we look at the 176th, any Republican is going to win that, including Trump or any other Republican that could potentially be a nominee, which I don't think that anyone has a shot against him.
And once we go from the 176, then I have three states that are in that middle column, that swing column, that I call Trump Pink.
And those are three states that were still carried by Trump in 2020, despite a lot of fraud in all three.
And they would be Texas, North Carolina, and Alaska.
And if Trump carries those three, he goes with the 176 plus 59, he's at what I call the Core 235.
So the Core 235 is a base camp for the entire election contest in 2024.
So, in your pink designation, your, let's call them soft Trump states, you include Texas.
Texas seems to me to have been trending to the Democrats recently.
A very close election for Ted Cruz there in his re-election bid.
A relatively narrow win by Donald Trump in 2020.
How strongly do you feel about Republican prospects in Texas?
The widespread election manipulation began in the 2018 midterms.
And, of course, that hit Texas as well.
Beto O'Rourke running against Ted Cruz had more votes in Texas in a midterm than Hillary Clinton had in the presidential election two years prior.
Texas, Arizona, all engulfed in lots of fraud in 2018.
And then in 2020 is when, of course, America discovered this was a big issue because it cost us the presidency.
Texas has at least 840,000 Biden votes.
I can't find a reasonable home for it.
So Trump's margin in Texas was comfortable at least 14 points.
If you had a real election, 20.
But unfortunately, Texas was certified for Trump at just 5.6%, which is right in line where Trump carried Georgia in 2016.
That's why I wrote in the article, don't let these states get Georgied, because now Texas and definitely North Carolina are in the danger zone in which they flip Georgia from five points Trump to a so-called Biden state.
And then, of course, we have Alaska in the same column now using ranked choice voting.
This is a difficult one.
Try to explain Ranked Choice Voting to our listeners because I've tried to say this in three sentences and I admit to you, I cannot do it.
Sure.
Well, Ranked Choice Voting is also called IRV, Instant Runoff Voting.
It's the same thing.
I have no problem with Ranked Choice Voting if you're talking about what to order a bunch of kids for lunch and you pass out a Ranked Choice Voting test.
That's fine.
But when you're talking about the presidency, Or representation, it's not.
What it does is it redistributes votes from the last place candidate in each round, and it scatters them all throughout the distribution.
And however many rounds it takes to find a majority for someone is how long it takes.
And it could be eight rounds to find a majority for a candidate.
And what happens is the moderate, more acceptable candidates, in many cases, get squeezed out by fringe radicals, which is how we have a Democrat in the U.S.
House seat in Alaska, with Republicans getting about 59% of the first choice round.
So what it does is it dumps the last place candidate for each round and then it takes his or her votes and scatters them through the remaining candidates and you wind up with some sort of a coefficient that pushes one candidate eventually to a majority.
You're likely to wind up with fringe candidates and you also have a lot of confusion with the voters or even our smartest people have a hard time explaining it.
And it drives down voter participation, creates major issues for security and chain of custody.
It's going to take a long time to tally this up and verify the election results and It even disenfranchises voters, because if you don't fill out all seven or eight choices, if that's how many candidates there are, eventually your ballot may wind up thrown out, not counting at all.
And that's called ballot exhaustion.
So it's just another way to keep the establishment candidates in power, and it was designed to make sure Lisa Murkowski stayed in the U.S.
Senate in Alaska.
Which it unfortunately did.
So in essence, when you win the vote, you vote for your first choice, but then you vote for your second choice, and those second choice votes are redistributed In a second round of voting, correct?
Correct.
So you have Sarah Palin and Nick Begich running for the U.S.
House in Alaska in the August special election last year.
And together they got 59 percent of the vote.
And then the Democrat Peltola got 39 percent.
And then there was a couple percent distributed among the write-in candidates.
And what happens when you take the write-in candidates and you scratch them, they get distributed out.
And then the moderate Republican Begich finished third.
And he got dumped in the moderate rhinos supposedly voted for the Democrat over Sarah Palin.
So what we have is an electorate that turns out nearly 60% Republican in the first choice round and you have a Democrat elected in the in the second maximum round to beat Sarah Palin.
So it's a very roundabout way to get very curious results.
And unless somebody gets a majority on the first choice round, like ranked choice voting in Wyoming, Trump is going to pull a majority in the first round.
Then it's like any election.
But if you get a state where a Republican can win it, but he might only get 48, 49 percent, like a Nevada type scenario, then you're going to wind up having these votes redistributed to make sure they keep the House in power.
Thanks for clarifying that.
We get a lot of questions on that.
Before we move to the swing states, the states you've identified as swing, any observations on North Carolina?
North Carolina is in big time danger.
A couple of years ago, the Biden campaign or the Biden team put out they would not be contesting Florida or Ohio, and of course I have them in the safe column for any Republican, but they were going to be spending money in North Carolina.
And Georgia.
So North Carolina's got a growing population, lots of it in what they call the research triangle between Raleigh-Durham and Charlotte.
But you have a major Trump shift all throughout the state.
I think 93 counties out of 100 became more Republican in registration during Trump's term.
It was pointing me to a big finding that Trump would carry North Carolina by more than six points, and my numbers have him carrying North Carolina by nine.
But they abuse the mail-in voting system there.
The voter rolls are corrupt.
And still the Republicans in North Carolina don't really want to do much to deal with it.
Trump's win in North Carolina was extremely narrow, and it was by about 1.3 percent, 77,000 votes, and it's off by about eight points.
So North Carolina is in position to be snatched here in the next election.
All right, so the states you identify in your analysis, which you can go to, Seth, is a sub stack.
I strongly recommend that you subscribe for some of the most erudite and shrewd election analysis you'll find any place.
We're going to put that back up on the screen here in a second.
But I strongly urge you to go there.
I have subscribed.
It's that good.
I don't have a spare dollar to my name.
The swing states as you identify them are Pennsylvania at 19, Georgia at 16, Michigan at 15, Arizona at 11, Wisconsin at 10, Minnesota at 10, Nevada at 6, New Hampshire at 4, Nebraska 2nd District 1.
Obviously there are a few states that do proportion their electoral vote.
Do I have that right?
Maine and Nebraska are the only two states that split their electoral votes.
Maine has two votes for the statewide winner, and then one for each district.
So the Trump district is the second district up north, and then the Democrat district is the one down south.
It's pretty much connected to Boston, Massachusetts area.
And then we have Nebraska, which splits.
You have the statewide winner, and then you have three different districts.
Statewide winner gets two, and you have three districts.
And the second district is Metro Omaha.
And Obama won that district in 2008, then it flipped back to Romney, and Trump even held it narrowly in 2016 with a lot of third party sit-outs for the Republican Party.
And it appears that he's got the Republican coalition back together just by sheer vote count in 2020, but gets the end around as done by Biden.
And there's actually a few scenarios for 2020 if you don't have that one vote going to Joe Biden where he could have been stuck under B27.
But if Nebraska's legislature is considering a bill to make its electoral votes winner-take-all, which would move Trump's forecast up by one more electoral vote.
What we have with all those states considered, we have what I would call the swing states, those decisive states that are going to determine who takes home the Oval Office in 2024.
And that is also, this is my map here that I've given you, including the Democrat electoral votes, is considering the current state of election rigging going on.
So there's a number of states I've allocated at the Democrat column like Hawaii, New Jersey, Washington, Oregon, states that look to be pretty close.
That have been engineered to produce only Democrat electoral outcomes.
So my slate for Trump to carry is based in reality.
And they're all all the scenarios stipulate if this state is not on the table, what has to be won.
And we have four very narrow pathways to victory in 2024.
We will get to the four pathways in just a moment, just to keep everybody up to speed.
Those states that Seth believes are incapable of producing Republican electoral votes would include California at 54, New York at 28, Illinois at 19, New Jersey at 14, Washington at 12, Massachusetts New Jersey at 14, Washington at 12, Massachusetts at 11, Colorado at 10, Maryland at 10, Oregon where you have eight, Connecticut at seven, Rhode Island at 14.
Hawaii at four, Delaware at three, Vermont at three, of course the District of Columbia at three, and that other electoral vote in Maine for a total of 191, which would be the district.
Democrat base, if one were trying to assemble 270 electoral votes for the Democrats.
Now we take a look and we'll talk about the swing states, but three states that you identify as a stretch, I guess that means unable to be categorized.
Those would be Virginia, New Mexico, and the other two votes in Maine, which I think you have adequately described.
Talk for a moment about Virginia and New Mexico.
Those three states that I have described as stretch, that is if you have a Trump blowout landslide, I think those are the three furthest left states that are going to be carrying a realistic outcome.
I have New Mexico going to Biden by less than two points in 2020.
I have Virginia within four and Maine statewide is the closest Biden won state at 1.4% according to my 2020 models.
So those are the three states I call stretch because I think that that's the most that a big time Trump blowout would win in addition to all the swing states.
So again, just before we go into the four pathways, which is the greatest thing about this print piece.
I want to reiterate that under Seth's scenario, Trump must carry Texas, North Carolina, and Alaska, in addition to the floor guarantee of 176 electoral votes, which I outlined for you.
He also mentioned that Nebraska is considering a bill to make its Electoral College winner take all, which would avoid that split we talked about.
So now let us go through the For paths, the first one you call, let's call it path number one.
These are ranked on the basis of the order of difficulty.
You call this the power move.
Walk us through it.
The power move is the shortest distance to the goal, and that would be the core 235.
In all scenarios, Trump has to carry Texas, North Carolina, and Alaska.
But the power move That's the shortest path to victory.
plus Georgia with 16 electoral votes, plus Pennsylvania with 19, and that is an even 270.
And both states are home run, slam dunk Trump states in 2020.
Georgia by at least seven and a half points and Pennsylvania by 6.4.
That's the shortest path to victory.
But of course, both states have numerous issues with the administration of their elections.
And you will find through the four paths that Georgia, after the three Trump pink states, Georgia is the most important of the swing states because it's involved in all four of my victory scenarios.
So, So, just to be clear, under path number one you are not including Wisconsin and you are not including Nevada, correct?
Right, or Michigan.
Michigan and Pennsylvania are what I call political cousins.
They trend in the same direction.
And that's, by the way, another tell for the 2020 election.
As Florida moved off and became more Republican as a percentage of victory, even in the fraudulent results, it was still 3.4% to Trump.
My number suggests it was more than eight points.
However, Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania have moved in the same direction in every election since 1932.
So Florida becomes more Republican.
Pennsylvania and Michigan have also become more Republican, whether that's in a winning or losing effort, and then vice versa back to the left.
So that's a big tell for 2020.
But Pennsylvania is easily a Trump state in 2020 and should be in 2024, if not for the fraud But if Pennsylvania doesn't go to Trump in 2024, neither will Michigan, because Michigan is a tougher lift fundamentally because of the impact of metropolitan Detroit and also the corruption that has been put in that state with the three ladies who run the state right now all throughout.
And Michigan has a horribly, fundamentally bankrupt election system.
And Tudor Dixon didn't really do much to combat that in the midterms either.
I have to question the Republicans, unfortunately, ability to carry Pennsylvania.
Now, Pennsylvania is a state I know very well, having run campaigns for Senator Arlen Specter, having run the campaign, the state, for President Ronald Reagan.
But I wonder, since Pennsylvania has mail-in voting, It's a very heavy lift, and that's why I've had to create the other scenarios.
But the state Supreme Court essentially reinstated whether you believe any Republican under the current electoral scheme of Pennsylvania can carry the state.
It's a very heavy lift, and that's why I've had to create the other scenarios.
The Democrats have mastered ballot harvesting in the Midwest, even though in a number of those states it's illegal or it's somewhat undefined.
The mail-in voting system, of course, was put in place in 2020 to make sure that they could use all these tricks of the trade and send out ballot harvesters to collect mail ballots that are registered to people who can't actually vote.
These are invalid voter registrations, which is the key precept of massive election fraud, which is different than voter fraud.
But Pennsylvania, other than southeastern Pennsylvania and some of these suburban Philadelphia counties, Almost the entire state, 60 out of 67 counties in both of Trump's campaigns, became more Republican leading up to that election.
It's one of the easiest cases to make on Pennsylvania, but until we can start trimming back these fraudulent registrations, Tony Shoup from Audit to Vote Pennsylvania, she can show you going into conservative counties in Pennsylvania, 40 plus percent discrepancy rates in which you show up at a house, If you show up at five houses, then at least two of them are going to have registration discrepancies—someone who's dead that's still registered to vote at the address, people that have moved away, phantom registrations present.
And then when you attach these to the mail-in ballots that are being put out—Pennsylvania, Michigan had massive reported numbers of requested mail ballots in 2020, and that was pointing exactly to what we know—is that those are being harvested up and deposited once you see these massive Trump totals come in, and his totals in 2020 dwarfed his gains there in 2016.
The biggest problem in Georgia for a Republican right now is the rural areas are mostly maxed out.
Republicans in its congressional delegation.
The governor of Georgia won by, I think, almost 12 points.
Do you think Georgia is really within reach in the next presidential race?
The biggest problem in Georgia for a Republican right now is the rural areas are mostly maxed out.
So you have limited population growth in these rural areas that are either overwhelmingly Republican, 80, 90% Republican, or they're Democrat because of demographics, but they're not big or they're not growing and the margins don't change much.
But there's eight counties in metro Atlanta.
I call them the Gang of Eight.
They're absolutely filthy.
Their voter registration rolls exploded in the run-up from 2016 to 2020 in a way that did not match the growth patterns in the state.
In fact, Georgia, just like Arizona, was suppressed for a new electoral vote, despite Oregon and Colorado both gaining electoral votes.
So somehow we have all these hundreds of thousands of new votes in one election, but these states are not worthy of a new electoral vote.
But with that said, I think that Trump's best ticket for beating a manipulated election system is to focus on the urban areas.
You can see a number of urban areas in 2020 that were not manipulated, like Bronx or Manhattan, in which Trump had massive trends.
So Donald Trump campaigning in the heart of Fulton or DeKalb County, splitting off 10% of that Democrat vote, is going to cripple the ability to fraudulently run the next election.
He has to carry Georgia, and that is a place in which 30 plus percent of the electorate is black.
Black men are trending heavily to conservative populism, not just for Donald Trump, but for other candidates.
And I think that that's going to be the way ahead in Georgia, rather than going to hold rallies in the heart of Georgia, in which you're already going to take 75, 80% of the vote.
That leads us, of course, to Nevada, a state where even at the end of the last election, we saw a three-point lead for Adam Laxalt, a good friend of mine, former Attorney General, who had previously lost a race for governor, now subsequently lost a race for the U.S.
Senate, at the same time that the Republican candidate For a governor who is a machine establishment type, handily won the governorship.
That's counterintuitive.
Now, when I spoke in Nevada before the election, a man approached me and he had five ballots in his hands, all of which had been mailed to his home.
Only one of those ballots had his name on it.
The other four ballots had the names of other people, four different other people.
I said, who are they?
He said, well, These are the people who rented my apartment long before I lived there.
And I said, are any of them still around?
He said, no, I think two of them are dead.
I think the other two moved out of state, but I still get ballots in the mail.
Evidently, Nevada mails a ballot to every single voter, an absentee ballot, whether they request it or not.
How in the world could you ever beat such a system?
Well, what could possibly go wrong than to send ballots out like that?
In other states, like in Hawaii, you can just go online and request the new ballot be sent to you, regardless of what your intentions are, and they just take you at your word.
But Nevada, They do.
They mailed a ballot to every single voter on the rolls.
And I use the term voter very loosely because not everything registered on the rolls is a valid active voter.
Some of them are completely fictitious.
There's election integrity groups in Florida that have identified fraudulent addresses.
The streets themselves don't even exist in which voters are registered on.
But with Nevada, it factors into two of my victory scenarios.
Scenario number three and number four.
And that is one of the states where if the Team Trump push to do more mail-in balloting and ballot harvesting is intentional, then that's one that is designed to impact because ballot harvesting is the law of the land in Nevada.
And the Democrats are exploiting not only that, but the law in the state, which allows them to count for seven days and to count the drop boxes last.
And that's why you have Laxalt putting out, as long as we win at least 37% of the remaining drop box ballots we win, well, he only won 36%.
So we have major problems in that state and also in regard to Clark and Washoe counties, which make up together, they make up 87% of the vote in the state.
That way you can get the reports in on election night from the smaller counties and then two large counties, especially Clark, can overwhelm any margins that you can possibly produce there.
Go to scenario number two, the second path under which a Republican could, hopefully Donald Trump, could presumably win the presidency.
Your core, once again, you begin with 235 electoral votes, which I think we have delineated pretty specifically.
Where does it go from there?
The second scenario hinges on Pennsylvania and Michigan not being winnable.
So that's something we've already mentioned in the first scenario is that Pennsylvania may be underwater based on who's running that state and how they're running their elections.
Philadelphia's elections director is now the Secretary of State in Pennsylvania.
So if PA is off the table, then Michigan is also off the table.
And it's going to require Georgia, Wisconsin for 10, And Arizona for 11.
And that's going to be 272 electoral votes.
Wisconsin is obviously a Trump-y state.
I've got an 8-point margin for Trump in 2020.
But some of the establishment types have been successful in carrying Wisconsin in recent years in state elections.
So, that's going to be the second most likely path to victory.
Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
And people are listening right now saying Arizona's shaking their heads.
And we've got a scenario in case Arizona's not playable as well.
That makes 272.
Well, it is interesting that Senator Ron Johnson was narrowly re-elected in Wisconsin in this last election.
I think that is evidence of some hope.
Arizona continues to be the greatest outrage that I've seen in my 43 years in American politics.
It's the most egregious out-in-the-open example of election fraud I've ever seen.
It's not a conspiracy theory.
Conjecture, it's not our imagination.
Seems to me that in a vast number of precincts in Maricopa County, they purposely sent ballots that did not fit in the tabulators.
Am I right about that?
Yes, they resized some of the ballots and of course they configured these machines to not work properly on election day, which was three and a half to one Republican.
They also take advantage of the late, early ballot, in which, of course, you can drop off these ballots late.
And the way that they impact the system is they're unable to be counted in a reasonable timeframe.
And what happens there is you create a system in which votes are counted for 7, 10, 12 days, which leads to the distrust in our system of elections.
Arizona also, uniquely enough, had their Republican treasurer re-elected by 12 points, which kind of corresponds with the congressional numbers in Arizona, which were overwhelmingly Republican.
But somehow Carrie Lake, Blake Masters, Mark Fincham, Abe Hombuday get shafted after 10 or 12 days of counting, and that was with Katie Hobbs overseeing her own election.
Arizona is without a doubt ground zero for the election integrity crisis because it was called first on election night 2020, sending the signal to the rest of the states to stop the counting of the vote, and then we woke up with a completely different trajectory in that election.
Same thing in 2018.
There's 390,000 more votes than can possibly be forecast in 2018, which led to Katie Hobbs being put in position as Secretary of State and also cost the Republicans a U.S.
Senate seat.
So Arizona absolutely is ground zero for all the evil perpetrated on this country thanks to the problems with our elections.
Well, normally I would stop now and take a commercial break from MyPillow.com, but we're going to do it at the end instead because The intensity of this conversation and my gratitude to for Captain K for sticking with us calling in actually from vacation to to participate in the Stone Zone today.
Let's go to scenario number three.
Scenario number three is if Pennsylvania, Michigan.
And if Pennsylvania and Michigan are off the table along with Arizona off the table as well.
I'm gonna pull that for you real quick since we weren't able to get the graphics.
This is the second scenario in which Pennsylvania and Michigan are not able to be one.
And we can't get both Arizona and Wisconsin on board.
That's going to require Georgia and then New Hampshire, which is worth four electoral votes.
New Hampshire politically has some has some issues that make carrying that state difficult.
And then we're going to need to get one of Arizona or Wisconsin, and then Nevada for six.
So once we get into scenario three, we're going to need to carry some pretty difficult cars to pick up, New Hampshire and Nevada.
That would make a total of 272 if Arizona is carried, but if Arizona is lost and Wisconsin is won, that would make 271.
Uh, God, it almost takes my breath away.
Um, I see.
because they require a lot more things to go right rather than a straight line.
You get Georgia, you get Pennsylvania, you're done.
So once we start having to pull these inside straights, things become a lot more difficult.
All right.
Let us then move to scenario number four.
Scenario number four is if Arizona is completely off the table.
And that requires Georgia, New Hampshire has to win Wisconsin and then Nevada.
And that's worth 271.
And the reason I made a special scenario for that one is because Arizona is 100 percent ground zero.
When you bring up any of these scenarios, without mentioning Arizona, then you have to have a path that is direct for that, with Arizona completely off the table.
Now, does that scenario include the Republican-carrying Minnesota?
No, Minnesota is a Trump state from 2020 by a small margin, a little bit under a point according to my methodology.
But again, I'm very generous in my estimates towards your Minneapolis's, your St.
Paul's, that would be Hennepin and Ramsey counties, which carry the Democrats across every single election.
But you'd have to be a fool to believe Trump was going to go campaign in New Hampshire and Minnesota when he didn't even carry those electoral votes in 2016.
He would be sitting in his fortress of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
So Trump knew that he had the inside edge on Minnesota in a real election.
So Minnesota won't be won unless Wisconsin is also won because it's a very similar demographic.
That's the upper Midwest.
You have a different blend of voter You have a different methodology and how they came back to the to the vote in 2020 from a large third party share in 2016.
So Wisconsin is going to be to the right of Minnesota and always will be.
Wisconsin is going to go to Trump first, and if it's by a big enough number, then only then can you pull in Minnesota.
You won't have a Minnesota goes to Trump and Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin go to Biden or whoever the Democrats run.
So Minnesota is absolutely the last reach of a swing state, and it is completely under Democrat machinery.
They're pushing for ranked choice voting there.
They have a corrupt mail-in voting system there.
And the vote from Hennepin County is very dominant.
Now we're going to go through some of your ironclad rules as it were.
I'll go through these.
You can add a few words if you wish.
First of all, you reiterated that Texas, North Carolina, and Alaska must be won by Trump or the Republican under any scenario in order to be competitive in 2024.
Correct.
I would say that if Texas or North Carolina were stolen from Trump, Then that's evidence of a nationwide plan to ensure that the key swing states are gone as well.
I think that Texas and North Carolina were both lined up to be taken from Trump in 2020.
And because of his major gains with the Latino working class in Texas and also in North Carolina with more of a minority vote, then you weren't able to grab those.
Alaska was held for more than a week.
This is a tiny state that has about 1 30th of the amount of votes that Florida has.
And they kept us there for a long time.
And I think Alaska was on hold in case Biden got stuck at 268 electoral votes and they could have pushed him over with three more and just forced everybody to buy it.
But yes, if either of those three are missing from the quiver, including Alaska, I see it very hard for us to get over that magic 270 marker based on where Michigan sits according to Pennsylvania, based on where Nevada and Arizona sit to Georgia.
So yes, we have to carry those to be at base camp to get to 270.
It's also Republican Party under George Bush gave away four key Republican states that make up 34 electoral votes and they would be New Mexico, Virginia, Nevada, and Colorado.
You also reiterate that Georgia is the most important swing state in 2024.
It is a must-win in addition to the core 235 as I guess available, any of the available paths to victory.
You must carry those 16 electors, correct?
Yep, that's a lot of electoral votes.
So Georgia to me is, Arizona's the closest of the swing states in 2020 based on number of votes between the two candidates.
But Arizona's also only worth 11 electoral votes and Georgia's worth 16.
Georgia's about 12,000 for Biden.
So what we have there is Georgia's extremely narrow and it's a very fundamental Trump win.
It's a Republican state, still is.
And if we don't have Georgia, I don't see a scenario in which we're going to somehow pull these difficult Rust Belt states or Arizona.
So Georgia to me fits right in as a Trump winning hand will have that Georgia card in it.
You said it earlier, Minnesota will not be won unless the Republican, in this case, Trump, also carries Wisconsin.
and Correct.
Wisconsin is a Trump state pretty easily in 2020, but Minnesota with its lean to the left.
Minnesota is to the Democrats what Arizona is to the Republicans in terms of party loyalty.
It's not won by a Republican since Nixon won it in 72.
Trump got within a point and a half in 2016, and that trend suggested that there would be a Trump win in 2020.
And then when you look at the Trump gain in votes in 2020, then you would suggest you would think that the GOP or Trump had it.
And not only Trump, but Jason Lewis for U.S. Senate, another populist up there, he ran about four points ahead of Trump in 2020.
And he we've discussed this as well.
And he thought that he would have his seat.
No, no doubt.
And I've got Trump carrying it as well.
But it won't go to Trump unless we've got Wisconsin in the bag as well.
And then those special electors out of Maine that we discussed, in which case, if you're winning those, you foresee a Republican or Trump landslide, correct?
It worked.
Thank you.
Correct.
Maine is dominated by York and Cumberland counties in the South, so that would be the ones that are closest to Metro Boston.
New England is riddled with election fraud issues.
Same-day voter registration all over the place.
Ballot trafficking rings operating out of metropolitan Boston.
People from Massachusetts have actually been going across into New Hampshire for years, signing up to vote on Election Day and casting a ballot.
That probably cost Trump New Hampshire in 2016 and 2020.
But yes, Maine is a state that has got a very Trump-y trend as well.
Trump has more votes in 2020 than Hillary Clinton had there in 2016.
My models are very generous for Biden in the metro areas and afford him a 10,000 vote win statewide, with Trump carrying the 2nd District by a much wider margin than he actually did.
As you stressed in all four of these pathways, they're very, very narrow.
So do you see any scenario in which the Republicans could afford to nominate Donald Trump for president and Governor Ron DeSantis for vice president, guaranteeing the carrying of Florida but forfeiting the 37 votes, I think it is, of the state of Florida?
That's been a bit of a hairy issue, the two candidates running out of the same state.
I've seen arguments against that being an issue.
Obviously, nobody would forfeit Florida's electors deliberately.
Trump is the only candidate on the Republican slate In a real election scenario, that's the issue, is the media wants to push to you that DeSantis would go in and he would carry Michigan or Pennsylvania, which is not the case.
Donald Trump is the only Republican with the message to carry the Rust Belt states.
Because you have to get out the conservative vote.
They have a standard conservative vote there, evangelical white conservative vote.
But then you have the Key Block, which is also known as Reagan Democrats, these non-collar, or these non-college, blue-collar white Democrats.
That if they don't like the woke agenda, they'll sit out.
That's what happened to Obama in 2012.
They sat him out.
But they didn't come out to vote for the nominee Mitt Romney.
They came out to vote for Trump.
And when you get that, you get a two-to-one effect in which the margins move in opposing directions.
So most of the candidates on the GOP field, in fact, I would say all except for Donald Trump, don't have the quality to turn out the white conservative vote and also the blue-collar former Democrat vote, the working man vote.
That's Trump.
So Trump is the one that's going to play the states, and that's it.
So DeSantis' VP I don't think would be a very good choice, number one, because DeSantis just signed up to run for four more years as governor of Florida, and knowing that Trump was going to run the entire time I think is a bit snaky.
I correct myself, by the way.
Florida has 30 electoral votes, not 37.
I misspoke.
So the top 10... Say again?
It probably should have 37 if you had the Census Bureau doing its job.
Maybe I'm not as wrong as I thought I was.
Again then, the top 10 most important states.
Texas, where you say we cannot afford to get Georgian.
No, we can't lose Texas.
Texas is worth 40 electoral votes.
It's really the heartbeat of electoral vote in the Republican column.
In order to replace 40 lost electoral votes from Texas, you'd have to pick up Pennsylvania for 19, Michigan for 16, which is 35, and then grab up Wisconsin, which would be 45.
That's the only way you could make that trade, and you still wouldn't want to do it, given that we hold Texas now, and we still have to pick those three states up to get across 270.
So it's absolutely mission critical.
If you take Texas out of the Republican column, it's the GOP's toast.
North Carolina, or once again, you say we cannot get Georgia?
I don't think we'll be in a scenario where you would have a national election giving you Pennsylvania and Michigan if you didn't have North Carolina also going Republican.
I don't see a scenario in which that's possible.
Alaska, which I think we have addressed adequately.
Pennsylvania again.
Pardon me, Georgia, which is, under all four of these scenarios I noticed, Georgia is must win.
If you take Georgia away from Trump, so if Georgia is not winnable, then there's no way that the heavier lifts like Pennsylvania and Michigan are going to be going to Trump as well.
I look at the national elections like a light switch on a dimmer, in which, you know, in order to pull a difficult blue state, like if Trump were to pull New Jersey, then you'd see amazing Reagan-esque margins in Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin pulling the rest of the working class states like Minnesota and New Jersey and Connecticut along with it.
So no, without Georgia going to Trump, I don't see any way that Pennsylvania or Michigan would be more Republican than Georgia on a national setting.
Pennsylvania, which we have addressed.
Wisconsin, which is required in three of the four pathways that you have outlined.
Big time white evangelical vote.
Catholic vote in the southeast.
Suburban vote in the southeast.
That's your old GOP suburbs.
You have the Paul Ryan type voter in southeastern Wisconsin.
And then we have the Trumpier southwestern areas, the working class areas of Wisconsin.
And then a very conservative vote in the north.
And if you can amplify Democrat turnout artificially in Milwaukee counties or in Dane counties, then you have an unstoppable machine of ballot harvesting taking advantage of their indefinitely confined, can't show up to vote in person thanks to a virus categories that prevent anybody from carrying that state as the Republicans in 2022 found out the hard way and in 2020 with Trump and also 2018 with Scott Walker in the middle of the night being knocked off by Milwaukee County.
Arizona, again, in the top 10.
I think we've addressed that pretty adequately.
Nevada, which we have also addressed.
New Hampshire, where you have a huge influx of voters from Massachusetts.
New Hampshire, that was once one of the most reliably Republican states in the country, did not go for Trump in 16 or 20.
It seems to me that's a difficult stretch.
New Hampshire is difficult because of Rockingham and Hillsborough counties, which, once again, just like the southernmost counties in Maine, are heavily influenced by Boston and all the cheating that happens thanks to the loopholes in their election procedures.
All of the states that are listed as month-win states are plagued by loopholes and certain unique things that make them difficult to win or, in some cases, impossible to win.
In the case of New Hampshire, the rural, more conservative counties, They're not big enough or they're not won by the Republican Party nominee by a large enough number to overcome the counties on the South, like Hillsborough or Rockingham.
Rockingham was a Trump county in 2016, somehow flipped away in 2020.
So New Hampshire, small state, not a lot of swing in the vote.
And that makes it a very difficult play when you combine it with the loopholes that leave it open for fraud.
Not won by the GOP since Bush in 2000.
All right, there you have it.
For those of you who are about to give up hope, do not give up hope.
Hope springs eternal.
Keep hope alive through prayer and through fortune.
I think that Seth Ketchum has shown you four different ways in which the country can be saved.
It's kind of refreshing, Seth, because the only person I've ever met Able to do this kind of math in their head saying, well if you lose this, you need a combination of these two.
If you lose that, you need a combination of these three.
The only other person I've ever met who could do that was Richard Milhouse Nixon.
And he did it with the same alacrity and as quickly as you were able to do.
As I have told you, I think it is vitally important for you to sit down with President Trump and go through these scenarios and do a little bit more of an in-depth analysis when you actually get into the counties.
In some of these states and how they have trended and what is going on.
But I thank you for joining us on The Stone Zone.
I thank you for your incredible analysis.
And for those of you who are about to give up hope, as you can see, there is no reason to give up hope.
Let's put up the Seth's Substack once again, if we may.
There it is, folks, sketchel.substack.com.
Please go there now.
Subscribe.
You will find it more than worthwhile.
We call him Captain K, Captain Seth Ketchel, a man for whom I have enormous respect after today's show, but even before today's show.
Thank you so much for joining us on The Stone Zone.
Well, thank you very much, Roger.
And as for the two presidents you mentioned, President Nixon.
Of course, I feel the same way about the mainstream media as he did.
And with President Trump, I'll drop everything anytime for that for that meeting.
And of course, he's gonna, he's gonna be putting it all in the field for the country in 2023 2024 and already is.
But it's critical for the audience to understand we're not going to get where we need to be.
If we're just sitting back hoping things go better.
I've had some meetings in Maricopa County recently with some of the legislative chairs.
And there's hundreds of unfilled precinct-level leadership positions within the Republican Party in Maricopa County, which is one of the most critical counties, as you saw on the maps and the scenarios I presented.
We cannot continue to hope that someone else volunteers.
Volunteering and working, that's what the Democrats do.
They bought the voter rolls in Wisconsin 16 times in the last three months of the 2020 election for $12,000 a pop.
They're in it to win it, and we have to do the same.
General Michael Flynn says local involvement has national impact, and Seth is absolutely right.
People need to get involved at the local level, fill those precinct committee slots, run for the school board, run for the county commission, run for the town council, let no office ever, no matter what the odds, go uncontested.
That is one of the absolute requirements for building a viable Republican Party.
The only shame is not in losing.
The shame is in not running.
I admire people who get in the arena, who take the shot regardless of how overwhelming the odds may appear at the beginning.
Sometimes such candidates actually win.
Seth, thank you again for joining us on The Stone Zone.
Thank you, Roger.
There you have it, folks, four very straightforward, mathematically-based scenarios working with the Electoral College map to explain how we can get Donald Trump back in the White House.
It is entirely possible, as you just heard.
I do need, at this point, to ask you fervently to go to MyPillow.com to support our work here at the Stone Zone.
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Tomorrow on The Stone Zone, I am joined by Gavin Mario Wax, Chairman of the New York Young Republican Club, the largest, oldest, and most vibrant
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