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 recommend a strategy for the Republican Party going forward in order to win future elections.
Leahy: I’m a positive guy, Clint. I’d like to see a positive vision for the future.
Brewer: (Chuckles) I’m not laughing at you, Mike.
(Laughter) I’m laughing at the look on your face when you say I’m a positive guy.
Leahy: And the look on my face is: I’m irritated. That’s what the look of my face is.
Brewer: The comment and the look are not reconciling.
Leahy: They were incongruent. They were very incongruent. We got to get video in here. We’re going to do live video. The problem with the video is…
Brewer: We got to look presentable enough early in the morning. That’s the problem in the morning.
Leahy: The content is very interesting, what we present here. But when we go video, I’m just saying people don’t want to see me at this hour of the morning. I don’t want to see me at this hour of the morning. You know what I mean? I’m going to have to clean up my act, and it’s going to be a lot of work to do.
Brewer: There’ll be a lot of work.
Leahy: Now, I’m a positive guy, but the solution to saving the Constitutional Republic is very clear. There are rules about elections and rules in a number of key states. Battleground states allow early voting and vote by mail. And the Democrats are just kicking our you know what by succeeding in that arena and succeeding legally and probably, illegally.
And so the path going forward, particularly in those key battleground states such as Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. And it all comes down to those states for Republicans to compete in early voting, to compete in vote by mail, and to watch like crazy and stop the Democrats from cheating in those states. That’s the path forward, in my view.
Brewer: It’s the only path forward.
Leahy: So we are in agreement on that. So here’s the problem. Who’s going to lead that? Is it going to be Ronna, “I’ve lost three consecutive elections” McDaniel, chairman of the Republican National Committee. Is it Ronna? I don’t think so. She’s a very nice person, but other than being the niece of [Mitt Romney] and a very nice person, she has no accomplishments to speak of other than she can raise some money.
Okay, that’s great. But in terms of doing the actual nuts and bolts, the tactical operations of winning an election, the Republican National Committee are complete and total disasters. And she’s running for re-election. She’s got a letter to 168 members of the Republican National Committee said, we want Ronna again.
Not sure I believe all that, but okay, that’s what she’s claiming. This election is going to be in January. There was going to be a challenger, Lee Zeldin, who did well in a losing battle running for Governor of New York. He lost by 5.6 percent.
Was a member of Congress, but he kind of chickened out. He said, I’m not going to run now why? There are all sorts of reasons for it. He probably didn’t think he could win. But then somebody else offered himself.
Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy. Let me say this about Mike Lindell. I like his pillows, I like his products. But as a political operator, he’s a debacle. I like Mike.
Mike, I like you.
Brewer: He tends to get himself in trouble when he talks.
Leahy: He’s got the litigation thing.
Brewer: We don’t need any more drama.
Leahy: So it’s not Michael Lindell.
Brewer: No. Definitely not.
Leahy: We got one other person that’s offered themselves, Harmeet Dhillon. Harmeet Dhillon is the attorney who is a member of the Republican National Committee out of California, out of San Francisco, because nothing says electoral success for conservatives like California in San Francisco.
Brewer: She’s so welcome there.
Leahy: You see her on Tucker. You see her on Laura Ingraham. As an attorney, she’s a high-profile attorney. But as a political operative, she doesn’t have a lot of success. And Harmeet, her law firm sued the Tennessee Republican Party for following its rules on behalf of Robby Starbuck, who had lost in federal court and in state court when he challenged his qualifications.
Brewer: So if this is the list of candidates, what I’m hearing is no one wants the job.
Leahy: Ronna wants the job. Harmeet wants the job.
Brewer: That’s what I’m saying. I think Chairwoman McDaniel is going to get reelected.
Leahy: Yes, I agree. This leads me to the next point. Chairwoman McDaniel is not the answer. She’s not the leader. So don’t look to the Republican National Committee for the solution. Would you like to know where the solution shall be found?
Brewer: Yes, I would like to.
Leahy: State level. It’s going to have to be leaders from conservative activists and they need to get a state party chair who knows what they’re doing and who can go after early voting and vote by mail starting tomorrow in Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Brewer: I’m going to say this. And it may not be a popular comment. It usually isn’t a popular comment. I know.
Leahy: Clint, you understand what your role here is.
Brewer: To be unpopular.
Leahy: It’s to be unpopular.
Brewer: And to argue with you.
Leahy: We don’t argue.
Brewer: Not always.
Leahy: We have different points of view.
Brewer: Here’s what I’m going to say.
Leahy: Wait for it, ladies and gentlemen, the phone number to call in to complain about Clint. (Inaudible crosstalk)
Brewer: Ronna McDaniel, or whoever in whichever committee you want to point a finger at. I want to see this Republican Party, however it’s going to emerge with whoever is at the top of the ticket for the presidential election, whoever’s the vice president, who the field is, whoever’s leading the committee’s, blah, blah, blah.
All those folks. I want to see them take a run at winning in this environment where we stop blaming the refs. We lose, we lose, we lose, we lose. It’s always the system’s fault. It’s always all the election was stolen, all the mail-in ballots. To your point, let’s just deal with reality and win.
To your point, mail-in ballots, early voting, et cetera, et cetera. Don’t leave it up to the weather, your children’s health, your boss on election day, and your mood and whatever. Let’s just deal with the current landscape and go win and quit blaming everything. It’s not an ideological problem. It’s a tactical problem.
Leahy: I agree it’s a tactical problem, but let me kind of come back to this. You know the famous we was robbed claim? In 2020, in the presidential election, we was robbed. In 2022, in the Arizona gubernatorial election, we was robbed.
However, having said that, here’s the way it works. People think that our current electoral system actually has a method and a process by which the instant replay can be redone and the results can be reversed. No!
Brewer: It doesn’t work like that.
Leahy: It doesn’t work like that!
Brewer: Here’s the other problem. Every time you lose and you keep talking about it being somebody else’s fault and the system is broken and blah, blah blah. What that does is depresses the base for the next election which makes them think that they can’t win.
Leahy: Every Republican out there has got to say, I’m going to go and vote. I’m going to vote, I’m going to vote. And you hear often, well, I’m not going to vote because it’s not fair. Well, grow up!
Brewer: You’re not going to vote because it’s inconvenient to go vote.
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 “People Voting” by Phil Roeder. CC BY 2.0.
