Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist, official guest host, and Faith and Freedom Coalition’s State of Tennessee Director Aaron Gulbransen in-studio to comment upon trending Republican polling.
Leahy: We are delighted to welcome to our microphones in-studio, all-star panelist, former lead political reporter for The Tennessee Star here in Tennessee and also now the State Director for the Faith and Freedom Coalition and the official guest host of The Tennessee Star Report – have I covered it all? – Aaron Gulbransen, welcome.
Gulbransen: My résumé is getting lengthier at the minute. Good morning, sir.
Leahy: Yes, it’s quite a résumé . A lot of good stuff. What we like about you, Aaron, is you know the score. You know where all the bodies are buried politically, if you will.
Gulbransen: There is that.
Leahy: Because those of you who may not be familiar with Aaron’s background, you’re like me, a Yankee. However, you come from the worst of the Yankee land. You come, actually, from New York City and Long Island.
Gulbransen: Brooklyn and eastern Long Island is where I grew up.
Leahy: Yeah, I come from upstate New York. So you probably are a Giants and Jets fan. I was more of a Bills fan.
Gulbransen: No, well, actually, there are two things. As a former New Yorker, I always used to torment the Jets and the Giants fans by saying, if you guys are rooting for the real New York team, you’re rooting for the Bills because there are no New York Giants. Both the Giants and the Jets play in Jersey.
Leahy: The Jersey Giants and the Jersey Jets.
Gulbransen: I’m a strange bird. Just to clarify on the football front, my best friend growing up – and football was the last sport I started watching – my best friend growing up was a Cowboys fan.
Leahy: Aaron, you were a producer for Sean Hannity for about a year.
Gulbransen: Yes.
Leahy: And that’s quite an intense job, isn’t it, to be a producer? How many producers were there when you were working for Sean?
Gulbransen: It was the smaller operation, because it was just before he had cut the deal to go national on the radio. Of course, he was already on Fox News, so it was Sweet Baby James who was the head producer. Then there was me.
There was Flirty Flipper, who was the call screener. There were the engineers. There was more than one of those. And then there was the variety of interns and that sort of thing. So it was not the huge operation it is today, but it was a lot of fun.
And you got a lot of face time with Hannity. And I used to work out of what they call the bullpen at WABC radio and running The Steve Malzberg Show – these names are all like blasts from the past – and Curtis Sliwa, running into Curtis Sliwa after the Nathan’s Hot Dog eating contest, in which he participated, is an interesting experience.
Leahy: Did he have too many hot dogs?
Gulbransen: He had too many hot dogs.
Leahy: Was he a little green around the gills?
Gulbransen: Just a smidge. In turn, we were too.
Leahy: So you did that and then you spent like 20 years as a political consultant. Then you came here to Tennessee and worked for ACLJ [American Center for Law and Justice].
And then we grabbed you up, and then somebody else grabbed you up. So this is what happens when you do a good job. You get promoted to the next level.
Gulbransen: It’s always a lot of fun.
Leahy: Now you know the score, and we’ve been talking about the midterms that are taking forever to get here. The reason they’re taking forever is that our constitutional republic hangs by a thread.
And right now the hope is that Republicans will take over the House of Representatives, and thwart the out-of-control spending. And we could go down the list of all the stupid, lunatic things that the Democrats and the legal-but-not-legitimate grifter in chief Joe Biden have been doing.
And that’s why this, I think, seems to take forever. Six weeks from today is Election Day. We’ve been talking about this for some time. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. Where are we at this moment? How does the House race look for you?
Gulbransen: The House is virtually unchanged. You have these upticks and downticks in the generic ballot. Of course, remember the old phrase, you’re probably familiar with it, Michael: everybody hates Congress, but a lot of people love their congressmen.
But this is just historically speaking, this is the year that we’d be talking about how Republicans were probably going to lose the House if there were a Republican president. So this is past as prologue here.
And I’m trying to remember when the last time that the Republicans – or the party in power, excuse me – didn’t lose seats when they had the White House, but that might have been 2002 in the wake of 9/11.
I need to go and double-check that. But the Republicans are going to get the House. And the only question, as it’s been, is what’s the margin going to be?
Leahy: There does seem to be, in terms of the polls, a movement over the past, I would say, 10 days, away from Democrats, towards Republicans. Let me make the case here. If you look at the Real Clear Politics average of polls on that 2022 generic congressional vote.
If you go back to – again, I’m going to say some groups that I think they’re polling lean left. But there’s a whole series of polls between I think it’s September 14th and September 20th, go down the list:
The Economist, lean left. Politico/Morning Consult, lean left. NBC News, leans left. Fox News, the Fox News poll, leans left.
The New York Times–CNN poll, they all lean left. But those polls showed Democrats in the generic vote with a plus-2 to plus-5 advantage. But since then, from the 21st until the 23rd, three polls, four polls have come out. The ABC News-Washington Post, Republicans plus-5.
Rasmussen Reports, Republicans plus-2. Emerson, a tie – and Emerson is problematic sometimes. And then the CBS News Battleground Tracker – again, that’s more of a Democrat leaning-left poll, Republicans plus-1. So to me, there does seem to be over and all a trend towards Republicans over the past 10 days. Your thoughts?
Gulbransen: Yes, I completely agree with that. And of course, you’re also seeing the voter enthusiasm numbers – I’m reading this Rasmussen thing right now. They want me to pay to get the exact numbers, but the headline is: “Republicans Still Have an Edge in Voter Enthusiasm.” And that makes sense given Biden’s policies, the historical nature of the elections, and that sort of thing.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Election Day” by Phil Roeder. CC BY 2.0.
