Breaking Battlegrounds Primary Election Night Coverage - Hour 2
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Now on 960 The Patriot, you're listening to live primary coverage with Chuck Warren and Sam Stone. Brought to you by Breaking Battlegrounds. All right, well, Chuck, as we were in the break there, we got some bad news we got to talk about. You know what? We're here to talk about election coverage, but you and I are sports guys. We're baseball guys. Dan Scully, the greatest baseball announcer in history, has passed away today. You know, I really...

I am not a Dodger fan, as you might imagine, right? I'm Diamondbacks, Red Sox, definitely not the Dodgers. But I would listen to a Dodgers game to see Renskully any time. And his last game when he broadcast, I mean, I had tears in my eyes almost throughout that entire game. Well, I could have listened to him read a phone book.

Absolutely. And he would make a narrative out of it. Of course, he would probably know a third of the people in that phone book if you're talking the L.A. phone book. Exactly. I think we have on our line Peter Graves. Peter, are you there?

Oh, we're not. Peter's not with us yet. Well, let's talk briefly here, Sam, about the election results. And let's talk about some races that we've not talked about. Let's first of all go. So it has been declared by some national pundits that Finchman has won. Finchum. Finchum, I mean. Has won the secretary of state race. There's still votes counting, but he has a solid 40,000 plus lead. And second is Bolane.

Third, Shauna Bullock. And coming up fourth is Michelle Ugenti-Rita. That is a race we talked about with Matt here and we talked about with Henry. Mark got 35% in a multi-candidate field with, frankly, four good candidates. Mm-hmm.

That Trump endorsement means something. Once you get more than two qualified candidates, that 30, 35 percent means a heck of a lot. Yeah. No, it's a it's a baseline number at that point. Right. Which gives you a huge advantage. So we see Fincham ahead there. Adrian Fontes holding on the Democrat side ahead of Reggie Boulding. Tightening up a little bit. Tightening up a little bit here in the.

Race for Attorney General, Abe Homaday, 28.82 percent. Rodney Glassman right behind him, 24.32. I think that one is still up in the air. Kimberly Yee looks to be in. She is running with 57.53 percent of the vote to Jeff Winninger in second place at 25.88. Bob Letary at 16.6. That's another field, by the way, with three awfully qualified people.

in it. Tom Horn, as kind of expected, I think, but at 42.38%, he is leading the race for the Republican nomination for superintendent of public instructions. Shiri Sapir, second at 30%. Michelle Udall at 27.6%. I guess I got to editorialize and say, quite frankly, I'm really glad it wasn't Michelle Udall. Well, I...

She's always been very anti-school choice. She's been a lot anti-school reform, it seems like. She's really pro-teachers union. I mean, she has really followed their agenda. So why she thought that she could win a Republican primary is quite stunning to me. Well, I think it's easy when you're an elected official and have been an elected official to fool yourself, right? Yeah.

And I think that's a case of that. So in Utah, we had an old congressman, Wayne Owens, and he always had this comment, which was perfect. He said...

A whisper in a politician's ear is like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. And I think Michelle had some people probably in her district say, you should run for this. And some teachers are going to say, well, do this. And as we know, most of these groups, when they say they're going to do something for you, rarely do it. Right. And tonight she is seeing the effects of that. I can tell you as someone on the Carrie Lake campaign, we had a lot of groups reach out and say they were going to get involved with IEs on Carrie's behalf or going after Karen Taylor Robeson.

you know, that they were going to get, their organization was going to get involved, and none of them ever did. None of them spent that money. I know firsthand Matt Salmon had two entities tell him they were going to spend $5 million each on an IE for him. None of that materialized.

Yeah. When that doesn't happen, it changes the game, especially when you have one candidate who has a lot of money. Yeah. When you're expecting that to be part of your equation, it doesn't mean that he coordinated with them or could coordinate with them. But when people say they're going to do that, you sort of take in the calculation, OK, I can raise this much for my campaign. They're going to do X and you go from there. Yeah. I mean, for instance, if you know that someone does a lot of TV ads and they're going to come into your race, you can refocus resources in other areas. And that's a big deal.

Continuing on with the results here, Corporation Commission, where you're picking two of three, Kevin Thompson and Nick Myers appear to be in the lead there. Kim Owens running third. That's a pretty close race. Owens was probably the most conservative of those. So that could be very interesting, obviously, with a lot of energy issues on the table in the near future here. Yeah.

And on the obviously Democrat side, they literally have no competitive primaries. No. There's nothing there.

Well, Democrats do this pretty much all across the country in many ways. I mean, you hear about the outliers that happen, but they do clear the field. Right. And, you know, for again, for a party that always accuses Republicans of being fascists and dictators, we sure have these open Wild West primaries and they just say to everybody else on their side, get in line. Yeah. You're going to do what we tell you to do. It's quite amazing. But they really are pawns to their small donor base.

Yes. And you're seeing that more and more and more about it on the legislative side. Let's look at legislative side real quick here, Sam. Something tonight, which I heard I heard a lot of people in Mesa who were fans of Rusty Bauer saying, you know, I think he's going to lose, but I'm going to have faith. I mean, he's just getting crushed. He's getting annihilated. Which I'm really surprised he's getting crushed.

I am not. Aren't you?

and State House, who have blocked a lot of Republican legislation, he's also sponsored some things that are really out of line for the Republican Party. He was a sponsor of the transgender bathroom bill.

And those are the type of votes that will turn out your primary activists. Yeah. 100%. It looks like, oh boy, in State Senate District 3, John Kavanaugh is leading by the hair of his chinny-chin-chin two points.

He is. Jan Dubauskas. Jan Dubauskas. You know, again, that that's a battle. Kavanaugh came out early and endorsed Kerry Lake. He is a very conservative member of the legislature. He just didn't actively buy into the Trump election stuff. Jan Dubauskas has come at him from from the right.

But there it's unlike Rusty Powers. There's not a lot of votes that John Kavanaugh has not stood with the Republican Party on. Jan is a wonderful woman. She called me. She called me for a donation. And I said, well, what's the difference between you and Kavanaugh? And it was it was just unacceptable to say, OK, well, yeah, then we need to throw him out. I mean, there was nothing really liberal. It's more like I'll be a bigger leader. Right. That was her pitch. And that's that's a pretty hard pitch. And she look, I think she could have.

She could have been a very good leader for this thing. I think that race is still up in the air. There's obviously very few votes being counted there so far. So I think that one's up. Ken Bennett, ahead of Steve Zipperman, also very, very interesting. On the line coming up, we have Chad Haywood. I'm going to kind of step back a little bit from the mic because this one ties into the race that I'm involved in. But I'll be listening in. If I got any questions, I might not be able to hold back. Chuck. Chad, how are you?

Well, guys, I'm doing great, and I'm happy to talk to Sam anytime.

So for our audience, Chad Haywood is the managing partner at Camelback Strategies. He's the former executive director of the Arizona Republican Party. And he is a general consultant and been very key with Karen Robson's campaign. And how are people feeling over there? I think we feel cautiously optimistic. You know, all of our early survey work showed us winning with early voters.

So I don't think this was a big surprise for us. I probably am in agreement with both of you that more activist folks, folks that were more concerned with the election being stolen through mail are probably Election Day voters or early ballot drop off voters. So we're definitely not spiking the football over here. We're

We're grateful for the lead, cautiously optimistic. Anything surprise you so far tonight? Besides, obviously, you have a sizable lead, almost 10 points. But is there anything statewide that has surprised you today? I would say, you know, the national media loves national stories, and they've tried to make every race or referendum really on Trump, you know, sort of for the direction of the party.

I was under the opinion that most local races, state races, focus on state issues. I'm probably wrong in that bet, looking at some of these legislative races where Trump weighed in. I mean, the Trump-endorsed candidates down at the local race, in particular, where folks don't know their legislators, was the gold standard. And you see it with all of these other statewide races. Outside of the governor's race and these multiple candidate races, I mean,

I mean, it looks like that endorsement really catapulted a lot of these folks. And I don't know that I have a ton of surprises other than in those legislative races, I think some of those margins are pretty big. The one thing I'm trying to figure out, too, right now is if Trump endorsed candidates or Trump...

candidates that I would view as more activist and grassroots driven are winning by that big a margin on early voting, it makes me question, too,

Maybe some of my priors I just mentioned on early voting versus Election Day. Chad, I want to bring up one of the other races you've got because you guys are working with Abe Hamadeh, who, frankly, I think would be probably running third or fourth right now without that Trump endorsement and, frankly, without Trump coming to town right ahead. I thought he was the one who benefited the most from Trump coming into town last week.

I think that's a fair assessment. You know, Abe comes out of the Liberty Movement. When I met Abe a decade ago, this is someone who'd worked for FreedomWorks, was close to sort of Rand Paul, Ron Paul's operation.

And so he had great relationships with liberty-oriented grassroots folks. I don't know that that's a huge percentage of the overall statewide electorate, but it gave him a great grassroots base to launch from. But yeah, I mean, that race and every survey we saw, and I'd be interested to hear what you all saw too, I mean, all of the candidates were really in single digits. Yeah.

Folks, there is so much spending, so much no races that I think people couldn't focus as much on all of these down ballot races. And that Trump endorsement and the stop seems to really have catapulted him. And his numbers look really good for us. I think we're.

We're feeling pretty good about where he's going to be after these election day votes come in. You know, for him and the others, I mean, I really think we have to go to break here in just a couple of seconds. But that was the field that I felt had the deepest candidate candidate roster. I don't think there was a bad candidate in that field. And it's a big field. Yeah, for sure. Breaking Battlegrounds coming back in just a moment after this break.

Now back to Chuck Warren and Sam Stone with your live primary election coverage brought to you by Breaking Battlegrounds. Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your hosts Sam Stone and Chuck Warren.

fascinating night so far here in Arizona and across the country. Kansas really surprised me, Chuck. Yeah, I'm not. You and I have talked about this issue on abortion. It doesn't surprise me, but we have Chad Haywood still with us. He is the managing partner at Camelback Strategies. Chad, what's going on down at Pima regarding they ran out of ballots? Do you know? Pinal County, the run out of ballots, the first thing I had heard is that they were directing

uh folks to vote in the same way that um people with special needs do they have some sort of screen and they were trying to direct people to those oh my god i don't know how many have actually been left out from getting a ballot or not i don't know if there's a legal remedy to extend the time to vote uh i'm in the dark on that um we talked to our lawyers about it this afternoon i don't know if you all saw this come through during the show but the rnc chair

she called for the election director in Pinal County to resign. I think there's no question they should resign immediately given what's happened in that county. I don't know if you guys have tracked that county in the past, but when I was executive director at the state party, we blew that county up in a press release because we could never get any of the data on the ballot returns during the early voting period.

I mean, it was just a constant source of frustration for us at just how slow they were and competent or just ignored us. So we blew them up in a press release. Virginia, the recorder there, very nice lady. We didn't make any friends, but we finally started to get those early returns. Yeah.

Well, you know, I mean, look, I think if you ran out of ballots in Pinal and Pima, then there are people that need to pay the price for that because this should not have been unexpected.

Not at all. Well, not with all the attention we're putting on elections. No, and we're not breaking turnout records at all here, guys. No. I mean, that's what's amazing. We're tracking just like a typical summer primary. I don't understand how they were not prepared for this. By the way, the three of us really need to put our heads together and make sure we start having these primaries in May.

Boy, amen. I mean, this is just ridiculous. We're doing this in August. Well, I think it benefits incumbents so much to have essentially only 60 days between your primary and when the ballots go out again for the general election. That's so little time to get your message out if you're new to the scene. Look, people have been asking me, why in Arizona are these elections so divisive? And I'm like, look, elections are tough, right? They're about contrast. They're always knife fights.

But when you have essentially 21, 22 months to fight each other in a primary and 60 days before voting starts, it's hard to really feel like a united party. I'm all for moving these things up. Chad, are you surprised by the turnout for this primary? No.

I am, but with this caveat. So we don't know, we don't have numbers on those that drop ballots in the box. Arizona, very unique. A lot of states have absentee voting, but we've had a permanent early voter list for over a decade.

So when you register, you know, you check a box, you get a ballot every election. So if folks develop the skepticism of the U.S. Postal Service or that mail-in voting and they became uncomfortable with that, many of them are still on that list. And so we don't know how many of those ballots are being dropped off at the polls and were dropped off today.

And we won't even start to count those as a state until tomorrow. And so it just makes it really hard to, you know, if we're just looking at someone who showed up with an ID, got a ballot, ran it through, those numbers were lower than I expected. But we might more than make up for that in people who had early ballots and dropped them in the box. And I'd be curious what your all's opinion is on that.

Yeah. Go ahead, Sam. I mean, I think that's going to be a significant number. But the one thing I was not seeing today was a huge number of people turning up to the polls. Now, whether they did over the last couple of days, kind of a steady stream,

you know, that's certainly possible, you know, Friday, Saturday. You were bemoaning that tonight. I was. Yeah. When we came on, my first inclination from the day was for Kerry, who was really counting on day of voting for Kerry Lake, that there was not a huge surge of turnout today. Not a lot of people at the polls that I saw. Yeah. Look, in our view, and this

you know, as a firm split candidates where Abe was Trump endorsed, Karen Taylor Robeson was not. We thought we would be up in these early and that Lake would have a bigger showing and that the trend would trend younger. I haven't seen that for Election Day voters. I don't know what those ballots look like that are getting dropped off if they look more like Election Day voters, if they look like the early voters that just, you know, drop them in late.

That remains to be seen, but there was definitely a feeling on our end that Lake would have an advantage with Election Day voters, and it would need to be big to make the electorate younger, which is why we are cautiously optimistic. It's also why I would say all of these other Trump-endorsed candidates that have been campaigning together the last few days are likely to grow their margins. So if I'm Blake Masters or Abe Hamadeh, I'm feeling pretty good.

Correct. Yeah, absolutely. You should be. Chad, tell our audience this. Okay, you're part of those two campaigns. Without giving away any trade secrets, what are you going to be looking at the next 48 hours? As a person who's a general consultant and you're having very nervous candidates at you and very nervous young staffers wondering if they have a job by Friday, what are you looking for as the votes come in right now? Well, one of the unique things that happened today that I think shocked us

And I would love to take credit and say it was an intentional strategy, but it really wasn't. It was the number of independents that randomly showed up today to request a GOP ballot. Henry Olson of the Washington Post, who we had on earlier, said there was 27%. Is that what he said today? 23%. 23% of independents today.

So the last number I saw was just Maricopa County's, so they gave us an hourly tracking, and they were at 26% in Maricopa. I don't know what it averaged out, if it's 23 statewide, but that's still unusually high. I mean, you're looking at like 8% to 12% in a typical primary? Yeah, that's double what we normally see.

And for all of the chatter, I mean, you go back to other elections, like John McCain never had this type of independent in the primary turnout. It's remarkable. So it really is. And I don't know if those are new independents that have left the party because they're disaffected. I don't know if they're moderates. We don't know who they are. And it's too late for us to sort of track those back.

like we could with early voters. Right. These are people that showed up today, and we don't know who they are. So it'll be kind of an interesting thing for us to see as these results come out. Surprises are always fun. It will be a lot of guessing work going on and a lot of research trying to figure out what was driving those voters. Yeah, for sure. It'll be an interesting outcome. When do you expect the next dump, by the way, on the SOS site?

Oh, I think Maricopa County's dump should be starting to happen here any minute. All right. I may drop off here. No, we're going to let you get off and go back and do what you need to do to earn your paycheck. We appreciate you coming on tonight, Chad. Appreciate you both. Sam, I look forward to getting together in a few days when the dust settles. Thank you both. Appreciate it. Likewise. Good luck. Thanks a lot. Breaking Battlegrounds coming back in just a moment with more. We're going to have Stephen Richer, Maricopa County recorder, coming up.

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Now, back to Chuck Warren and Sam Stone with your live primary election coverage brought to you by Breaking Battlegrounds. And yes, Breaking Battlegrounds does have the answers tonight, at least the answers that are being provided to us largely by this man joining us right now, Stephen Richer, Maricopa County recorder, friend of the program. Thank you, Stephen, for joining us. Busy night for you. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, God. Am I supposed to have the answer? That's a lot of pressure. You do. You're supposed to exactly have it. Well, let's start with something I think you can answer is when can people expect the next drops? You know, tonight, tomorrow. When do they expect that you expect to have the rest of the data coming out?

Yeah, let me lay out how we're going to be doing things. And what we released at 8 o'clock was the ballots that we had received by Sunday. So those are your early ballots that were either mailed back or dropped off. Now what we're going to be loading throughout the night, we've loaded some already, is the memory drives from the location-based tabulator. So if you're somebody who voted in person today,

You fed your ballot right into a tabulator. So we're going to be bringing those back from our 210 voting locations. We've already loaded six. Probably in another under 30 minutes, we'll load some more, probably a more substantial load. And we're going to be doing that throughout the night as those secure memory drives come back. Very nice. So then that'll be the next up.

What time, and then obviously you have people who have dropped them off in collection boxes and that sort of thing yesterday and today. When did those get counted? So that's the great unknown in terms of the quantity. So like I said, we loaded roughly 600,000 ballots at 8 p.m., and then we know that a

approximately 108,000 people voted by feeding it into the tabulator. That's the memory drive results that we'll be loading. And then what we don't know yet is how many people took their early non-vote, their early ballot and dropped it off on election day. Those are the ones that we'll have to bring back and then we'll have to scan them. We'll have to signature verify them and we'll be posting them tomorrow and the next day. I hope that, you know,

You know, within 48 hours, we have a very, very, very high percentage of the votes of the total. Was the turnout today what you've seen? And you don't have the exact numbers yet, but is it what you expected? A little lighter, a little heavier?

What's your perception? It was significantly bigger than August 2020. Now, obviously, that was an unusual circumstance, but it was about what we predicted, maybe a tiny bit on the light side that we had prepared for. We didn't face any significant line challenges until the very end of the day in just a few locations, Anthem being one of them. But so we felt like we were

prepared in terms of the volume of people who are going to show up and vote in person today. So what percentage at the end of, I mean, this is purely guesstimate because you don't have it, but what percentage do you think were mail-in ballots versus voting today at the end of the day? Well, we expect about 850,000 total votes.

voters in Maricopa County. And I just said that 108,000 were people who voted in person on Election Day. Now, there were people who voted in person earlier to today, but that number is pretty low. So it's going to remain a heavy early ballot state, a heavy mail ballot state. Maybe I don't think it will be nearly as high as

as November 2020 in the midst of the pandemic, and because I think a few voting patterns are changing. But by and large, people like convenience. That's not news, I don't think. What is this I've seen today on Twitter about pens? What is the pen controversy today?

Yeah, I think this was a fun one to grab on because someone even walked out with a bunch of county pens. And another candidate was encouraging people to steal county pens. And then the county attorney, Rachel Mitchell, had to say, you know, hey, that thou shalt not steal thing is still in effect here in Maricopa County. Yeah.

Hey, what is she doing getting involved? This is a misdemeanor. Catch and release. Catch and release. I don't know. I think this is maybe a capital punishment type situation. Like I said before on your show and on Twitter, we gave people –

a pen that we wanted them to use just because it dried quickly and it read well with the tabulators and, you know, not everyone did. Still, everything worked. No election is perfect. Anyone who says that hasn't worked elections. We had issues that came up throughout the day. Fortunately, we have a pretty good system built in where we can send somebody out and, you know, correct a printer, replace the tabulator, things of that nature.

At the end of the day, people got to vote. They didn't have to wait too long, and we feel good about it. We have just about 30 seconds before we go back to break here, but Stephen, I've got to ask, how happy are you not to be the Pima or Pinal County recorder tonight? Oh, gosh. You know, I got blamed for a lot of that stuff. You know, someone as prominent as Charlie Kirk starts listing off these things, and I was like, that looks a lot like Pinal County going on right now. It's a week.

We recognize that the elections community rises and falls together. So I'm tired enough as it is, and I'm not going through one-tenth of what they're going through right now. We're going to let you get back to that. Breaking Battlegrounds coming back in just a moment. Now back to Chuck Warren and Sam Stone with your live primary election coverage brought to you by Breaking Battlegrounds.

Welcome back to the election night breakdown special by Breaking Battlegrounds. On the line with us next, Peter Graves, managing director at FPI Strategies. I can't tell if that's FP1. Maybe I'm getting this wrong, Peter, but thank you for joining us either way. He provides consulting and media services. He has run political operations in 17 Western and Plain states in the last few cycles and is a longtime friend of mine.

Chuck Warren. And, you know, I haven't known him quite as long, but I consider him a friend also. Peter, thank you again for joining us. What do you see out there tonight? A longtime friend. It's FP1, so 50 plus one strategies is the company. OK, see, that is a much better name. Now it makes sense. Yeah, it makes sense. All right. Well, this interview is over now. Now we know you can go. We got it. The mystery is over. Peter, what are you seeing in Washington tonight?

You know, so Washington State, it's an odd duck. So statewide, Tiffany Smiley looks great. Like, she's going to – she's obviously the – the candidate that's going to make it through the top two to face Patty Murray. And, like, she's done a good job of framing it that way. In state, it's weird, honestly. Yeah.

A lot of the in-state incumbent, or not in-state incumbent, but like the in-state legislative leaders that the House caucus and Senate caucus like wanted to win are not winning. So we'll see how things go for the next couple days. You know, Washington State is a top two state, whatever

But it's also an absentee ballot state where we're going to have another six days of votes come in before we have a good picture of who actually makes it through. So it's weird. So those things exist.

uh yeah boy if they tried that here in arizona peter i think we would have multiple uh elections officials not make it out of the building yeah yep yep yeah no doubt no doubt about that i you know like the difference honestly is you know we've we've had absentee ballots here now for um since 2000 i think 2008 um we're just used to it um

You know, like some of the more recent stuff, I don't know the politics of the whole thing, but for me it seems to be just... It's not building the party, to be honest. Like...

you go out there and claim election fraud or stuff like that. Like it doesn't, that's not how you build a party. So, um, you know, those things like are just not helpful, but, but here, again, like I said, like, um, the, the race to watch here in Washington state is the eighth congressional district election. Um, I would have told you last night that it was a race between Jesse, Jesse and Reagan done today. It looks like it's a race between, um,

Reagan Dunn and Matt Larkin. So we'll see where things go for the next 48 to 72 hours on that race. But it's close. I mean, that's the best race to watch outside of California and Oregon. So, you know, we'll see where that thing all goes.

The nice thing, though, is West Coast, Tiffany Smiley, she's looking to easily become a top two candidate. You want to say, how do you actually have a good upset victory on the West Coast? I think her against Patty Murray, that's the best case you can get. Somebody who's only spent $1 million or $2 million against somebody who's spent $12 million.

She seems to be, like, very much in the throes of something that could actually beat her. That would be, I mean, obviously, that would be one of those big turning points for control of the U.S. Senate if that were to happen, right? Right. And you know what? Honestly, like, you know, you go to D.C. and you talk to people, like, the D.C. Republicans still think, like, we're going to take the Senate or the House.

So, you know, how do you take the Senate? The Senate isn't that far off, but, you know, we've got a lot of flawed candidates, you know, down there in Arizona, Blake Masters and those guys, like they're not like the typical Republican you would go and say this person's in the clear field and go elect. Look at Pennsylvania, same thing. You start looking like how do you actually elect people that can become the 51st vote and

And, you know, in D.C., you start looking at, like, Tiffany Smiley. She's, you know, she's not a partisan. She's not somebody who's, like, collective office. She's just the next mom in tennis shoes. And, you know, people there are very excited about the possibility of what that could become, and we'll see where it goes. Yeah.

I feel like Eric Schmidt, he's going to go become a United States Senator in Missouri. I do, too. I do, too. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think about the results of Michigan tonight and Kansas? They had the initiative there on the constitutional right to an abortion and soundly defeated. Chuck, I didn't see Kansas. Tell me what happened.

Well, as you know, they had in Kansas tonight, they had the amendment to eliminate abortion rights from the state constitution, and it got defeated 60 to 40. I mean, it wasn't even close. And Sam and I have talked about this. You know, the pro-life movement, if they're serious about doing this, they've got to get better at politics.

They just agree with you. They just a lot of the ways. And this is going to offend a lot of our listeners, but they are a paper tiger. Well, they talk to voters the wrong way. Well, yeah. But they also don't even have what they say they have on their list, their memberships. That's true, too. And, you know, you're not going to go with me. Look, this is ground zero voting.

for a lot of Democrats and suburban women. And when you say you have this type of influence and you really don't, you really don't have the list. You really don't have the memberships and you really don't have the donors. This is a tough uphill climb. So, so flashback to, uh, 20, the 2014, um, I worked for the RNC and we came in and we needed a bunch of, uh, paid gamesters and, and, um,

we brought in Chuck, we brought a new Chuck and, um, uh, your, your firm to come work in Kansas. It was, it was the first time that like the RNC had actually had to invest inside that state in probably 15 years or maybe even 20 years. And, and I think it's the entire time, you know, I, I said, when we got like evening, evening canvassing reports back and stuff, I said, you know, um,

I don't understand why a state that's a 65% Republican registration state is this close. The only thing that makes sense to me is you've got a lot of people who just don't... They're not actually Republicans, they're just kind of professional Republicans. But I said, if you throw those people, you still say, how do you win statewide? You still have to take 65% of Republican voters.

And, you know, for a number like that, like I said, I haven't even seen it yet. I'll see it tomorrow. We're doing Derek Schmidt for governor. So, like, you know, I'll have a lot different thing to say tomorrow about, like, where things are standing. But, you know, for an initiative like that, it's still a professional thing.

primary state. People don't vote partisan lines. You have to give them a good argument, and if you can't present it, that state is going to go opposite of the conservative cause. Being the first state out of the gun that's going that direction, I'm not so surprised, just because

You go and see how things kind of go. My guess is they just don't have enough money there. Peter, one of the things I think you're kind of alluding to, and I just want to drill down on this point a little bit, is the national media really is pushing everything around the Trump-endorsed versus not Trump-endorsed narrative. But if you look underneath that surface, and that's a major factor.

But if you look underneath that service, what you see is candidates matter. Right? I mean, isn't that part of what we're seeing tonight is that good candidates win regardless? Yeah.

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. I mean, you know, like the, uh, you guys are there in Arizona. I mean, you know, Blake masters one, I'm not sure he's the best candidate, but he, you know, he ran the best race probably, um, given everything else out there, um, in other States, uh, you know,

Let's take Missouri. Somebody who sits there and can go and do four or five messages on TV against somebody who can't is spending all their time on earning social media. That's not how you win any election. So yeah, campaigns still matter. Mechanics still matter. All these things still matter. Yeah, absolutely. What do you give the odds the Republicans picking up that Senate seat in Washington come November?

it's, you know, it's, it's, it's very close to my heart. So I, you know, I would say, I think, I think in Patty, Patty Murray in 20, uh, let's see, 2010, when she ran into Dina Rossi, you know, she had the full weight of, uh, set of a Georgia behind her. Um,

I still think it's there. You know, the question for me is like, what does Roe become? You know, the Dobbs decision. If it's not a thing, if it's still, you know, 10 plus percent inflation, gas prices are crazy. I think it's, you know, 50-50. If this whole thing becomes, oh, these things have subsided and we're just talking about like electing somebody who's not Patty Murray, I think it's, you know,

more like a 60-25 type thing. I would say that Tiffany Smiley has a good chance, but I think she needs a lot of things to happen for her. It's an uphill battle for sure. I think...

The Roe thing plays more in states that are bluer, obviously, even if you've got a state like Washington, I don't know offhand, but I assume has reasonably liberal laws surrounding abortion in state, right? Right, totally. You can elect a Republican U.S. senator. It makes no difference at all to abortion access states.

in Washington. Yes, but, you know, let's put the foot in their shoes. So if I'm running Democrat outfits here in Washington State, I start running and I start saying, oh, you know, Peter Graves is trying to overturn all of these reasonable abortion measures, right? And in a state like Washington where...

You know, like, the... I haven't seen, like, a poll number where it's, you know, the right to kill a baby is... It happens at 20 weeks, like, or 10 weeks, or 15 weeks, or 25 weeks. We haven't seen that. Just because Washington State is a state where, after 15 weeks, like...

You still have a right, but it just doesn't happen. Because people don't abort babies after the point where they can hear the heartbeat and see an ultrasound. Once the state legislature comes back in, they start saying, oh, we want to give every full opportunity like we saw in Virginia. We'll see where things kind of move, but we haven't had that opportunity in the state for...

I don't know, 45 months. So, you know, call it 10 years. Right. Yeah. We're with Peter. We're with Peter. I'm going to we're running out of time here, but I want to go to a real question here. Since Peter Graves is managing director at FP1 Strategies is a national political consulting firm. Is there going to be a red wave in the House of Representatives? You think this cycle?

I'd say yes. I mean, you know, folks in D.C. are not saying, hey, you know, who's the third, fourth, or fifth seat? They're saying who's the 25th

to the 40th seat. So I'd say yes. And I, and I still say that like that wave does not stop the house representative. I still think it like helps himself for Congress seats or for Senate seats. Sorry. That's why, like, you know, if you look at where, where we're looking on the, just on the Senate side, I think, I think you've, you've got four or five Senate seats that, you know,

538 like the Democrats nationally think can still be Democrat seats that the Republicans will just win just because of how the cycle is going to go. Absolutely. We have just about 30 seconds left before we have to go to break. But Peter, I really appreciate you being on here with us tonight. Thank you for joining us. And yeah, I agree. I think we're going to take the House and the Senate. And Joe Biden is a great reason why we're going to take both.

Breaking Battlegrounds, election night special coming back in just a moment. No colors anymore, I want them to turn. I dressed in them to turn my head dark as gold.

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