Live from Music Row, Monday 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 the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, I hear a lot of pundits and whatnot talk about the midterm elections and what the Republicans did wrong. I may have used this before, but I want to use it again if I did, and that is the metaphor of two football teams: the red team, and the blue team.
And the rules of the football game are that all of the rules that both teams play by must be exactly the same, except the blue team is allowed to hold as many times on every play as they’d like to.
And then when the blue team wins the game, even though the red team may have a superior group of players and actually a superior group of plays, the blue team wins anyway because they were allowed to hold and nobody called any penalties.
What I now see is a lot of pundits trying to figure out what is it the Republicans did wrong in the midterm elections? Why did they lose? And really, when you look at the results and you look at the data, it’s really quite simple.
In those states where, if voters wanted to vote by mail, they had to make a request where they sent in – they made a formal request, their signature was compared before the ballot went out, and then the ballot was mailed to their home and they could then vote by mail.
They could vote early or they could vote on Election Day. And in every one of those states that did that, Republicans, did as well as they were expected to do, which was the expectation was to do quite well and the Democrats did not do well.
But in every state where they mailed ballots out, where the states mailed ballots out to every registered voter, in those states, Democrats did very well and Republicans did not do well.
And coincidentally, in those states, it took a very long time to count the votes. In fact, we’re still counting. So what I’m saying is that when you mail ballots out to every registered voter’s address, you end up mailing out a lot of ballots to addresses where the people who live there are not the registered voter.
That’s number one. Number two, when you do that and you mail them out 30 days, 60 days ahead of time, then you give the Democrat side, which spends billions and billions of dollars on fully paid staffers who then go around and vote-harvest.
Now, I don’t know if vote harvesting is legal in the sense that you go and knock door to door and ask if the person there has received a ballot, and would they please go ahead and fill it out while [they’re] looking over your shoulder? And by the way, here’s a lunch coupon or something.
I don’t know whether or not that is considered legal. I know that in North Carolina, a Democrat who used to do that got mad at the Democrat Party a couple of years ago and then did it for Republicans and then boasted about it, and ended up getting convicted of vote harvesting in North Carolina.
So I don’t think that vote harvesting is legal in North Carolina. But in other states where you mail out the ballots, then vote harvesting, whether it’s legal or illegal, is determined by the person who handles the law, meaning the attorney general of that state or perhaps the federal attorney general.
And so I will say that this election here in the midterms, you have a president whom you have the country says it’s on the wrong track by 75 percent, every major issue favored Republicans over Democrats.
The only single issue that might have favored Democrats over Republicans would have been the abortion issue. And that would have been a fairly narrow constituency. But the election results – we don’t know the final House results yet – but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the Democrats don’t retain control of the House because they’re still counting ballots.
Joseph Stalin once said “I don’t care who gets to vote. I only care about who gets to count the ballots.” And Joseph Stalin had a remarkable way of winning elections by greater than 98 percent of the Soviet Union’s citizens.
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 “Ballot Drop Box” by Cindy Shebley. CC BY 2.0.
