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 official guest host Aaron Gulbransen in the studio to predict midterm election movement for Republicans in the House and a historically expensive Senate race.
Leahy: In-studio, the official guest host of The Tennessee Star Report, Aaron Gulbransen. Aaron will be guest-hosting on Friday all day. Are you looking forward to setting the alarm for 3:30 or 3:00?
Gulbransen: I do it at about three, yes.
Leahy: Isn’t that fun, to wake up at 3:00 in the morning?
Gulbransen: You do every week. (Leahy laughs)
Leahy: You could do it every once a month or so, right?
Gulbransen: I can do it once a month or so, yeah, definitely. And to train myself for this I’ve started on Tuesdays when I come in here and hang out with you. I started going to the gym at four. (Unintelligible crosstalk)
Leahy: Two weeks until Election Day, and then we’re going to have that special edition of The Tennessee Star Report on election night, November 8th, you’ll be here, Crom will be here. The usual suspects will be here. What’s it look like two weeks out?
Gulbransen: You’re looking at a strong Republican presence in the U.S. House. Right now I’m looking at the Cook Political Report. You’ve got 22 seats on the House side that are rated as toss-ups that are currently held by a Democrat. Compare that with only 10 Republican-held seats.
If the election were held today, according to Cook Political, Republicans would have roughly the margin they need to win the House. They’re going to win the House. We’ve been saying it the entire time. The question is how much? I mean, to pivot to a local thing.
You’re going to see Andy Ogles pick up that seat. That’s going to be the congressional district. He probably wins that race by eight to 10 points at this point. By the way, Ted Cruz is coming to town tomorrow night.
Leahy: Ted and Clay tomorrow night will be at The Factory, and there will be a rally to support Andy Ogles, so that’ll be a lot of fun. You are going to be there.
Gulbransen: I’m going to show up and wave the flag. Of course, the drama is on the Senate side, and of course, there’s been a lot of attention paid to Georgia. There have been things coming out on Herschel Walker. There have been things coming out on Warnock.
Cook is currently rating that one a toss-up probably because there are more than two candidates in that particular race, I think you are going to see the most expensive U.S. Senate race ever, because I think it will go into a runoff.
Leahy: The way it works in Georgia is their law is in the general election, if you don’t get 50 percent plus one vote, there’s a runoff between the top two, which would be December 6th.
Gulbransen: Which, if it had been a simple plurality, the Republicans would actually be in charge of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Leahy: And the U.S. Senate. There were two runoffs in 2020 that ended badly for the Republicans. They had two seats there and they lost them both.
Gulbransen: I don’t believe that former vice president and current President Biden were elected properly. However, you had the effect of grifters like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood basically telling Georgians not to go vote because their vote is not going to count. So you had depressed Republican turnout in that runoff. I don’t think you’ll see that this time …
Leahy: Georgia has sort of – grifters is not a bad description of them.
Gulbransen: As I always put it about the 2020 election. When the truth is bad enough, why do you have to exaggerate? Which is what Lin Wood and Sidney Powell did.
Leahy: But the other part about Georgia, which is interesting, after all the back-and-forth and we documented the race, that the 600,000 ballots didn’t have absentee ballots placed in drop boxes, didn’t have a chain of custody. But it’s well documented.
It didn’t make a difference in how it was certified, or the process. In the end, in the early morning of January 7th, the full Congress of the United States accepted the Electoral College vote of 306 for Biden and 232 for Trump.
And Joe Biden became the legal president of the United States two weeks later when he was inaugurated. Now, I say it wasn’t legitimate. Doesn’t matter. In Georgia, this battle between Trump and Secretary of State Raffensberger, who was involved in certifying – which I don’t think he should have certified it, for any number of reasons, nor Governor Kemp, certified in a very narrow election.
I don’t think he should have. But he did. That’s the process. And something is weird in Georgia because Raffensberger, who should have been easily defeated for secretary of state, easily won the primary there.
And part of it has to do with the basic blocking and tackling of politics. And as much as I’ve been a critic of Raffensberger, you have to say, given a very bad hand, he played a strong political communication role.
And Georgia, as a result, has kind of settled down. The Raffensberger-Kemp crowd is aligned with the Trump crowd, and they’re both supporting Walker.
Gulbransen: Right. Because they know that the U.S. Senate hangs in the balance. One, you got to pick up Nevada with Laxalt there.
Leahy: Laxalt will pick it up, the Republican.
Gulbransen: But the two pick-ups that everybody’s focusing on is Georgia and Nevada. Now, a little bit on the edge is Arizona with Blake Masters against U.S. Senator Kelly.
Leahy: The RealClearPolitics average has Kelly up by two points, but the RealClearPolitics is also predicting that Masters will win there. And I think what they’re looking at is, I will call it the Lake effect, or the Kari Lake effect, if you’d be more specific.
She’s so popular and the rallies are so large and the enthusiasm for Kari Lake’s candidacy as governor is so great I think just as they’re going to drag Herschel Walker across the goal line in Georgia.
I think there’s a good shot. They could drag Blake Masters across the finish line in Arizona. I think that’s a fair assessment.
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 Mark Fischer. CC BY-SA 2.0.
