Wednesday, on the heels of Georgia Democrat Sen. Raphael Warnock’s victory over Republican nominee Herschel Walker on Tuesday, FNC host Sean Hannity warned of a bleak future for the GOP if it did not address early voting and mail-in ballots.
The Fox News host said Republicans needed to have “a sense of urgency” to improve on those tactics before the election in November 2024.
Transcript as follows:
But, first, we do need to ask and look at this objectively. What did last night tell us? What can we learn from it? You know, if you’re a football team and you go in in at halftime and sometimes a sideline reporter will ask the coach, what are you going to talk about with your team? Well, we’ve got to figure out how to stop the run game, the pass game, we got to figure out how to get our offense moving a little bit better. They make adjustments, they come out on the field and hopefully they have a better second half.
This entire midterm cycle, what did that tell us? It’s time now for Republicans to start paying a little bit of attention and embracing the voting system that we have and not the one that they wish that they had. They need to accept the rules as they are not as they want them to be. And then after they win governorships, after they win state legislatures, then they can change laws over time, add all the integrity measures for elections that they want and put it in the process of our elections.
But that means they need to play what is the early voting game, the ballot harvesting game, they need to do it well, if not better than the Democrats, all legally of course and I’ll explain that. They — they can’t start out every election day down hundreds of thousands of votes.
It was estimated last — yesterday, when voting started in Georgia, that Herschel Walker, because early voting mail-in voting in Georgia, that he went into yesterday’s election down 200,000 to 250,000 votes, that’s insane. There’s a reluctance and resistance of Republicans to vote by mail or to vote early.
So if you take a step back and you take a glimpse into how the system currently stands, there are currently 15 states and Washington, D.C., they don’t even have voter ID laws, including key states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, New York, New Jersey.
Then there’s literally dozens of states that have some form of legalized ballot harvesting meaning that any third party can come and pick up your ballot for you and then states like California, Nevada and others, they just send out a ballot to every voter on their voter rolls whether they request one or not. This is the system. This is the current reality. Do I think it’s the best system? No, I think it’s bad.
Now, Democrats have embraced this system. Republicans have not to their own detriment. They have ignored this reality.
Look, I’ve been very clear. In my world, in a Hannity perfect world, if I laid out what would have the most integrity and everybody would have confidence in the results of elections — well, when Republicans win gubernatorial races and state legislatures, I’d make election day a national holiday. I’d have paper ballots only. I would have partisan observers, people from every party, they would watch the voting in every precinct and the vote counting after the polls close, up close and personal.
Every state should require signature verification, voter ID, chain of custody controls, updated voter rolls. But like I said, right now, we need to work within the system as it exists because Democrats they’re playing a very different game on election day and the days leading up to election day than Republicans are.
Democrats are not as interested in the quality of a candidate or holding rallies or exciting voters or kissing babies or shaking hands or going affairs. No, Democrats, they’re hiding, they’re avoiding debates, they’re avoiding their adoring media fans. They’re raising hundreds of millions of dollars, they’re using those on negative ads against Republicans. And most importantly, they are playing — they’re not playing it let’s get a vote game, they’re playing a ballot game.
Democrats are only interested in getting their hands on enough ballots that they believe will put them over the top to win an election. That means big ballot harvesting operations, that means big early voting numbers, that means big mail-in ballots for Democrats and a huge disadvantage for Republicans, it’s obvious.
Yesterday is a great case in point. Herschel was down over 220 votes before the day even started. Look at this new piece from “Axios” laying out how thousands of Georgians were paid to bring up Warnock just in conversations with friends and family and get them to vote for the far left senator.
The tactic, it’s known as a relational organizing used by Democrats across many different races in this election cycle. It is but another example of how Republicans did not only playing catch-up, they are running elections on an old outdated — imagine, this is my iPhone 1.0 version of elections and Democrats over here they’ve got a 10.0 version of elections. And Republicans, they need to catch up and build out a 14.0 election model.
Republicans can’t just accept that they’re going to be down big on election day and then try and make it all back up on election day voting. It’s just not going to work. It is too steep of a hill to climb. The GOP can’t just totally cede early voting, mail-in voting to Democrats and put themselves into one deep hole after another.
Look at the state of Florida, for example. Their voting system was a complete, utter, total mess. Remember the 2000 elections, hanging, swinging, dented, perforated chads, et cetera, et cetera. They fixed that system. I don’t think anybody could ever say with any confidence that it was only 537 votes that was the difference in that race, but at some point, the Supreme Court weighed in and that was the end of that.
But now, they fixed their system. They put integrity measures in the system. Now, Florida has one of the best run voting systems in the entire country. And by the way, Republicans in Florida, they’ve embraced voting early. Republicans in Florida, they’ve embraced voting by mail.
Every voter has to have a voter ID, signature verification is required. Whatever the Democrats are doing with early voting, Republicans need to at least match it in these other states, like Arizona, like Georgia, like Pennsylvania and Michigan.
In some cases, Republicans do need better candidates. I’ll give you one example, not to pick on Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, but you look at his position on abortion. He had no exceptions for rape, incest, the mother’s life. You — in Pennsylvania, I’m talking politically, not morally here, you cannot win Pennsylvania with that position. It is simply mathematically impossible, a bad candidate for that race and it had impact on the entire Republican ticket.
Now, I have confidence that with the right leadership, Republicans can get this done and when these swing state seats in 2024. But it’s not easy, but it is doable.
Now, also remember, there’s another major part to all of this. I think I’m the only one talking about it. I call it accelerated migration. Now that refers to Republicans fed up with far left failures in blue states and seeking refuge in states like Florida, the Carolinas, Texas, Tennessee, et cetera.
They’re sick of high taxes. They’re sick of high costs, and a burdensome bureaucracy. They don’t like high crime. They’re tired of schools being shut down, COVID mandates being shoved down their throat. They want in- school learning for their kids. They want a better quality of life. They want to keep more of their hard-earned money.
And by the way, they would prefer the warmer weather especially with more and more baby boomers that are retiring. And they’re now moving in droves to red states. Now, look at your screen, look at the U-haul index. It costs nearly three times as much to go from California to Texas.
Look at that, four grand. You want to go from San Francisco to Dallas, four grand. You want to go from Dallas to San Francisco, you’re doing U-Haul a favor. It’s only 1,400 bucks. That speaks volumes, doesn’t it?
Anyway, Americans now are voting with their feet they’re saying goodbye to fail far left states day after day, and the people that tend to be leaving in a lot of these states are conservative a lot of people are moving to Florida. They have about 800 new residents a day. It’s great. The weather’s great. The economy grows, the prosperity is there.
And the state gets stronger and stronger and stronger as states in the Midwest like Michigan and Wisconsin are getting weaker. Pennsylvania, weaker, New York, New Jersey, weaker. California weaker.
And guess what? That means those states have less conservatives what does that mean for a presidential election year. That means those states that were hard to win already are going to be harder. You have states then like Nevada and Arizona, well, sadly for them, they are doing well in terms of population influx. However, a lot of those people from California and the vast majority of them happen to be liberal. They generally tend to be more left-wing, so it makes those states even harder to win for Republicans.
Here’s the point. This may all seem very complicated and it’s going to take deliberate and a well-thought-out strategy. And it’s why Republicans need to have a sense of urgency now before the election in November 2024, especially when it comes to the issue of perfecting the ground game, perfecting the ballot game, embracing early voting and mail-in voting, and legal ballot harvesting and start winning these close elections and outdo the Democrats at their own game.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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