Live from Music Row Thursday 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 Clint Brewer in the studio to discuss election fraud and how Republicans need to develop the right message to win in future elections.
Leahy: In studio, our very good friend Clint Brewer.
Brewer: I like the background music, Mike.
Leahy: Well, you know.
Brewer: We got a Ben Crosby special.
Leahy: We brought it here this morning especially for you because we knew you liked Christmas.
Brewer: I love Christmas.
Leahy: Our listeners like Christmas as well.
Brewer: I love Christmas. It’s my favorite time of year.
Leahy: Yes, it’s a good time. And of course, it’s December 1st. We’ve actually been playing the bumper music here all week, and probably some people say, yeah, a little bit early. You should wait until December 1st. Right after Thanksgiving, let’s jump into Christmas.
Brewer: I actually started playing Christmas music in the car on the way to my parents on Thanksgiving.
Leahy: Well, there you go. On Thanksgiving.
Brewer: That’s my limit. Like Thanksgiving morning, you can start.
Leahy: Well, here we are again. We’ve got another presidential election. I will say this. You know Floyd Brown, the head of Western Journal, he’s been on Bannon’s WarRoom with me, talking about what’s going on in Arizona and all of the election irregularities.
Brewer: Are you going to take over WarRoom?
Leahy: You mean if somebody is indisposed? (Laughs)
Brewer: If somebody’s indisposed.
Leahy: No.
Brewer: You should make you an offer, man.
Leahy: A couple of things. First, those of you who watch Steve Bannon’s WarRoom and many in our audience do, I think he does a fantastic job. Let me just say this. He’s a little bit more amped up than I am.
Brewer: A little bit more vitriol.
Leahy: I wouldn’t say vitriol, but he’s amped up. And, I mean, that’s what he does. He does have 4 hours a day, and he’s very good. And he’s been probably the best broadcaster on the issue of Arizona in the entire country. I mean, he’s really all over it.
But I was on with Floyd Brown the other day talking about Arizona and the various details, the movements back and forth. Bannon’s angle is the election was illegitimate and Kari Lake ought to be governor.
I think Kari Lake ought to be governor.
But for the past month, I’ve been telling him there are legal procedures here. The way the system works, even if you were able to demonstrate fraudulent electoral activity, which I think they’ll be able to, the question is, is it sufficient enough to persuade a judge?
These judges are human beings who have careers to think about. You got to persuade a superior court judge first that these irregularities were sufficient to annull the election. There will be an election contest, but the judge is not going to do that.
Brewer: But here’s the other thing. This goes back to the sort of recurring narrative of former President Trump from the last presidential election that clearly is no longer connecting with people based on the last election results. They’ve moved on.
Leahy: That’s why I have retired the phrase, although it was accurate to describe Joe Biden as legal, but not legitimate for all of them if you go down the Zuckerbucks thing and all that kind of stuff. It doesn’t matter now because there’s been a subsequent election and it was a pink fizzle, not a red wine.
Brewer: That’s why I do not think another Trump candidacy can be effective or successful and stands a chance of dragging the party down even further.
Leahy: The phones are lighting up right now, Clint!
Brewer: Oh, boy. Is that he’ll never get off of it. He’ll never stop talking about it. And you can’t win an election that way. There are two separate issues here. First of all, I’ve got a good friend who works on and understands election law at a deep level, and I think any attorney on either for the Democrats or the Republicans who’s a serious election law attorney, would tell you this in every election, everywhere in America, there’s some kind of fraud. Somebody somewhere is going to do something wrong and it may be intentional.
Leahy: It’s a question of the scale.
Brewer: And that’s what I’m getting to. It’s a question of – because you could look at any election and say this wasn’t done right.
Leahy: You could actually, if you want to be honest, go back to the 1960 presidential election.
Brewer: Absolutely.
Leahy: People have criticized Richard Nixon. But Richard Nixon knew that there was cheating going on in Texas on the border, and he knew that there were thousands of dead people that voted in Chicago. And that made the change a difference in the outcome of the election.
Brewer: Is there a scale of it that would actually change the outcome of the election? But that is a legal question and that is a procedural question. And take that and set it aside.
The issue that comes before any of those things is whether or not you have a message that can motivate enough people so that it doesn’t really matter whether the procedural stuff is 100 percent right or not because it’s never really been 100 percent right.
And people won elections for a long time before we started with Hanging Chads’ and Russian collusion and the big steal. I mean, think about it. We’ve been talking about election fraud in this country since 2000 in some form or another,
Leahy: I suppose you could even say since 1824.
Brewer: You could.
Leahy: Thank you, Andrew Jackson.
Brewer: And so it seems to be the thing that the losing party goes to.
Leahy: Asterisk. The problem is, of course, that there were election irregularities and Republicans feel discouraged about it, which has resulted in, I think, some bad decisions about how they participate.
So the biggest bad decision came in states like Arizona where they have to vote by mail, where they were told, to vote on Election Day. If your enemy knows you’re going to be voting on Election Day, they might surreptitiously screw up the Election Day procedures where 70 of 223 voting centers don’t work.
Brewer: Exactly. Let’s talk about everything that happens before that. You said it in the previous segment. If candidates are not talking about the winning issues, they’re not going to win. And if you are out there still talking as a House candidate about the 2020 election to people who are paying over $5 for gas…
Leahy: There wasn’t so much of that, though I think a lot of it had to do, I mean, the message was kind of pale from the GOP. But they did win by 3 million votes even though they had only a 222 to 213 majority in the House.
The other part of it is that in the states that have vote by mail and centralized election procedures, the Democrats just went into the ballot harvesting business in a way that the Republicans never, never thought about, and should think about.
Brewer: And guess what? We should continue to push on that, explore it, and fight back against it. But unless we get the message right, and unless we give Americans not just on the far right, not just committed to conservative politics, but those center right and in the middle policies and a message that they can get on board with we are going to continue to lose.
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.
Background Photo “U.S. Capitol” by Paula Nardini.
