The Day After The Day After – Election 2022: What do we know today that we didn’t know yesterday? Who will control the House and Senate? What state will most likely determine Senate control? What are Libertarians thinking? Did the wording of ballot measures confuse voters? Tune in to hear more about what really happened in Tuesday’s election!

Air Date: 11/10/2022

On-air Personalities: David Barton, Rick Green, and Tim Barton

Listen:

Download: Click Here

Transcription note: As a courtesy for our listeners’ enjoyment, we are providing a transcription of this podcast. Transcription will be released shortly. However, as this is transcribed from a live talk show, words and sentence structure were not altered to fit grammatical, written norms in order to preserve the integrity of the actual dialogue between the speakers. Additionally, names may be misspelled or we might use an asterisk to indicate a missing word because of the difficulty in understanding the speaker at times. We apologize in advance.

Faith and the Culture

Rick:

Welcome to the intersection of faith and culture. Thanks for joining us today on WallBuilders. My name is Rick Green. I’m a former Texas legislator and America’s constitution coach.

Thrilled to be here with David and Tim Barton. David is America’s premier historian and our founder at WallBuilders; Tim, of course, a national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders. And you can learn more about all three of us at our website wallbuilders.com, wallbuilders.com, lots of great resources there for you as well.

We are beginning to enter the off-season, if you will, this is the time to dig deep, dive deep, start studying, get prepared for whatever the next cultural battle might be in your community. So what a great time to go to wallbuilders.com and start learning as much as you possibly can.

Alright, guys, it is the day after the day after of election 2022. We covered a lot of this yesterday, but of course a lot has still been coming in the last 24 hours. And well, we got a little bit of sleep, right, a little bit, not a whole lot but a little bit and even more still will not be known until maybe Friday, what did Arizona say Maricopa County, 90-99% would be counted by Friday, ridiculous, but that’s the situation. So what do we know today that we didn’t know yesterday?

In fact, let me just ask you directly, David, on House and Senate. That’s probably the top of everybody’s mind. That’s a Jean Pierre phrase “Top of mind”, top of mind for everyone is the House and Senate, will Republicans take either?

David:

At this point, now when we talked yesterday, there were still 70 some odd House seats that have not been decided. As we’re talking now, we’re down to about 30-34 House seats that have not been decided. And currently, the way it stands right now, the Republicans do have slight control of the House of Representatives. They project that they will be able to maintain control. And I think that’s probably locked, right. But it’s going to be a really narrow margin.

On the Senate side, with what appears to be the win of Laxalt in Nevada, that brings the Republicans back to 50 seats in the Senate, which is exactly where they were. Everything now falls into Georgia.

Tim:

Well, I guys, just to remember, I mean, Rick, you pointed out that Maricopa County was not going to have finished counting potentially or have any kind of results till maybe Friday. There is a Senate race still open in Arizona. And so if that Senate race ends up going Republican, then the runoff would just be for having an extra seats and the majority of the Senate.

Arizona

And so there’s still a lot of questions in the air in Arizona with what’s going to happen. It does look like what kind of the 5% points down approximately that master’s is trailing in Arizona that probably that is not totally insurmountable, but the odds are very low. I think the odds in Vegas are like 20% that he maybe wins that race. So odds aren’t looking great.

So dad, to your point, the most likely outcome for Republicans to gain the Senate would be for Herschel Walker to win the runoff in Georgia, which if we remember back in 2020, there were two runoffs in Georgia and we thought we had good chances to win both of those as Republicans and neither one went Republican. So I’m not feeling super optimistic about a runoff in Georgia at this point.

But Rick, to kind of summarise the main question, where do things look now with the house in the Senate, it looks like Republicans will have control of the House, although a small majority, and that looks like that they will be even at the minimum, they’re gonna be even in the Senate. And so that does give the capability to slow down some of the Biden agenda, but certainly, it does not give them the power to do a lot of what we would have liked to have seen done to correct some of the problems that have come out over the last couple of years.

David:

And by the way, just to comment on Georgia for a bit. Now, Georgia, if it turns out to be the deciding factor for Republicans and Democrats, you’re going to see billions poured into Georgia, and you’re going to have ads running on everything all the time, 24/7. And I don’t think there’s anybody in Georgia that doesn’t know the choice they’re going to make in this election right now.

They’ve already heard everything they need from Herschel, they’ve already heard everything they need from Warnock, there’s not going to be more people to decide, it’s going to come down to who shows up. And so it’s kind of like, alright, I’m gonna go early vote because I already know who I want and then I’m going to leave the state for three weeks so I don’t get fatigue of all the ads, because virtually every ad is going to be running on that Senate because everything’s coming down to that. You’re going to see money poured into that race, like we’ve never seen any of the race.

Tim:

Well, and one of the things we know about run offs is there’s usually a lower turnout in a runoff than there wasn’t a general election. And we also know that there was a Libertarian candidate who had 2%, or I mean, I guess it ended up being a little less than 2%, but had a significant portion of votes that had the Libertarian candidate not been there.

Herschel Walker

Had those libertarians voted for Herschel Walker, then it could have pushed him over that 50%, he potentially could have won, maybe there was not a runoff. So it will be interesting to see if there is any drop off or the level of drop off of who shows up to vote because again we think enthusiasm is going to be a little lower.

And ultimately, I mean, people are just fatigued. After two long years, under COVID and under Trump, his Democratic leadership and all of the constant barrage of media and now inflation, people are just tired, and they want to be done. And so we’ve certainly encouraged people in Georgia, do not despair, don’t discourage. And everybody else not in Georgia, be praying for what’s happening in Georgia.

Man, we definitely want to see people still stay active, stay engaged and involved. Dad, I actually know that you’re going to be spending some time in Georgia doing some meetings and trying to encourage Christians and pastors to stay engaged in the process. But it will be interesting to see the level of drop off potential is there but the level of drop off from how many voters there were in this open election to now the runoff.

David:

Well, that was the whole difference in the last runoff in Georgia, 200,000 vote drop between the general and the runoff and that 200,000 is what allowed Warnock to get into that position.

One of the things Tim, you just mentioned that there was a libertarian who had about 2% and having been involved in politics for a good while, we always see third party and Libertarian independent Constitution party, all these different parties running on things.

And what we saw particularly on Tuesday night with the election, and by the way, the Libertarians, at least when they were actually involved, they were kind of a form of Republicans that did not align the Democrats, they more aligned with the Constitution, more aligned with with limited government and smaller government. And so, they got in and they said, look, we’re here to to give an option, give a choice. Well, right now, your choices aren’t between how much constitution you want, it’s between whether you want to have a constitution at all or not.

And so this is the most polarised we’ve seen the nation, and you got progressives on one side, and everybody else on the other. And we saw a number of races on Tuesday night where that Libertarians would take 2%, 5%, 7% and what it did was it guaranteed that progressive state in power in those states. And if it was the way Democrats were 20-30 years ago, that we’re just going to disagree over with the size of a tax cut or the size of a tax increase, that’s one thing, but now we’re disagreeing on whether we should have socialism or a free market or whatever.

And it really was unfortunate to say those Libertarians cost a number of seats on Tuesday night. They don’t support the Democrats, they’re not progressives, but they refuse to get on the side of the anti- progressive, and therefore they gave the race to progressives on several occasions.

Strategy

Tim:

And this is something too that we recognise that there are people that have different convictions. And this is not to be little or minimise the recognition that when when people look at a two party system, they get very frustrated thinking this kind of there’s only two options. And so when you’re looking at these choices that neither of them are really protecting the Constitution, neither of them are in favour of limited government, neither of them are going to be economically and fiscally responsible, like I totally understand the frustration, this is where we would also say the strategic move is to have those battles in the primary.

Because once you have now gone through the primaries, I mean, this is the Ross Perot, how did we get Bill Clinton? We got Bill Clinton because Ross Perot votes away from George Bush. And we can certainly speak to the fact that George Bush was not the strongest candidate that’s ever run on the Republican side for President. But the people that voted for Ross Perot absolutely would have been the people on the side of Bush.

But when you split that vote, it allows somebody else to come in and get a victory that is not always reflective of the position of the majority of the Americans, but it’s because there was moves that were made that weren’t tactical or strategic.

And when you have these third party candidates running in a scenario where you really do have very extreme positions, when you have Democrats that are saying we want to protect abortion all the way through the third trimester, in fact, maybe even after that child is born, we still should be able to kill that child, when you have Democrats that are holding the position that we shouldn’t have any kind of drilling, there shouldn’t be oil and natural gas in America and let’s deplete all of these strategic oil reserve, we don’t need to worry about military and maybe having a time when we go to war, and we need to utilise that and inflation is happening everywhere, so it’s fine it’s happening here.

I mean when you start looking at these extreme positions that people have, and then somebody’s going to come and say yes, but to me, it’s just more important that I vote my conscience, like I again, I’m not trying to belittle the fact that we we understand and as Christians, it’s a big deal that we want to respect the rights of conscience. The Bible speaks to this very strongly, so we want to absolutely recognise this.

But it’s interesting to me that in 1 Corinthians where the Apostle Paul talks about, in 1 Corinthians 8, respecting the rights of conscience, he does talk about even respecting the rights of the conscience of a weaker brethren, the weaker-minded conscience, as if what the Apostle Paul suggesting is that like their position might be really dumb and we still need to be respectful of that.

So with this being said, we want to be respectful position, but recognise this is a dumb position, because of what it is producing, and the potential outcome it is having by letting people who are evil go to power because we are splitting the votes and pulling votes away from a candidate who, although maybe certainly not the greatest candidate is definitely not on the same category of evil as some of these Democrat policies.

PATRIOT ACADEMY

Rick:

Well, and Tim, this is just part of the our responsibility, be paying attention for anybody that doesn’t understand the evil we’re up against. And like you’re saying, these are policies that must be defeated.

I mean, they’re just not paying attention and they’re certainly not in God’s word to know true so that they recognise just how evil these lies are that are being told in our culture and perpetrated through those policies.

Hey, quick break, guys, I know we’ve got a lot more updates to talk about. We’ve also got some additional victories that we found out about that we didn’t know yesterday, still counting in some states. Stay with us, folks, you’re listening to WallBuilders.

Have you noticed the vacuum of leadership in America? We’re looking around for leaders of principle to step up and too often, no one is there. God is raising up a generation of young leaders with a passion for impacting the world around them. They’re crying out for the mentorship and leadership training they need.

Patriot Academy was created to meet that need. Patriot Academy graduates now serve in state capitals around America in the halls of Congress, in business, in the film industry, in the pulpit and every area of the culture. They’re leading effectively and impacting the world around them. Patriot Academy is now expanding across the nation and now’s your chance to experience this life changing week that trains champions to change the world.

Visit patriotacademy.com for dates and locations. Our core program is still for young leaders 16 to 25 years old, but we also now have a citizen track for adults, so visit the website today to learn more. Help us fill the void of leadership in America. Join us in training champions to change the world at patriotacademy.com.

Rick:

We’re back here on WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us. It’s the day after the day after, I’m going to try to keep up with this and see if I get that right for the next few days. But we’re still getting election results. And of course, guys, our friend, Juan Ciscomani, former Patriot Academy governor and also served on our board for a while, so he actually started our first regional Academy for Patriot Academy out in Arizona.

He won District Six, the sixth congressional district in Arizona, that wasn’t decided until late yesterday. And so that’s another pickup. That was a flip that from a Democrat to a Republican. And of course, solid biblical worldview. Guys, so excited about that one as well.

Tim:

Well, this is something, guys, that we talked about internally. There were a lot of races, we were tracking where there was potential for flips. And we mentioned it yesterday, actually late the night, finishing up the election wee hours of the morning, that there were some people that were challenged that it was a little boggling that they were challenged. There were some flips that went against Republicans, but there were some interesting flips that happened in favour of Republicans.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair

Because when you look at, for example, in New York, when you look at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair, Sean Patrick Maloney, getting defeated in New York, this is the person who is in charge of helping get Democrats elected all over the United States and he’s from New York, and he loses, there were some very interesting upsets, some very interesting flips of the Democrats that lost, Republicans that won. And so there really were some great victories along the way. There were some very frustrating defeats along the way as well.

And we really could get into talking about maybe, where a lot of this failed, some of the Republican leaders for the Republican National Committee and where they thought they were going to put their ground game and they didn’t or where they thought we didn’t need a ground game and only ads, and there’s a lot of failures we can talk about.

But with that being said, and Rick, to your point, there were some awesome victories that we saw. And so even though we didn’t see the level of victory and successes we wanted, there really were some great victories and some interesting flips, again, with some some notable Democrats being defeated in some areas that is certainly worthy of recognition and really could be a Good News Friday programme.

We’re not to tomorrow yet, but tomorrow we’ll probably get into some of these races, individuals and maybe even talk to some of the individuals that won. But that to me, that is interesting recognition. When you’re looking at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair being defeated in New York, that’s a major victory.

Rick:

That’s a big one, man. That’s kind of like, what was it a few years ago, there was the Senate majority leader, was it Dashiell or Tom Foley or somebody that lost while in that position, do you guys remember that? I mean, that was a big deal. So when, even if we don’t end up with a 50 seat swing, and all the big things, those are key races, and the people that have their fingers on a tonne of money to be able to spin in those races still getting defeated is a really good sign.

David:

On election night, there was also a bunch of ballot initiatives and these are pretty good indications of where the people are thinking and where there are a number of areas. And so there were 132 of those. Let me just run through some of the things because I have not heard anybody in the media talk about any of these to any great degree.

At least, I’ve heard a couple of them individually talked about, but on abortion, there were five states that voted on abortion, what to do with it. And unfortunately, all five states went in a pro-abortion direction, even including Kentucky, they had a good prolife amendment and voted it down.

If you look at states like California and Michigan and Vermont, they went very far on abortion. In michigan, they essentially the PROP 3 killed all the prolife laws they’ve had over the last 20-30 years and so they have now enshrined abortion right up to the time of birth. So Kentucky was a disappointment the way it went.

The Born Alive Act

And Montana actually had what was called the Born Alive and for Protection Act that, hey, if a child survives an abortion, you’re going to try to provide medical care, and they got voted down in Montana. So those prolife positions went down.

There was a couple of religious freedom amendments, one was in Arkansas. And as of now, they still haven’t called that one in Arkansas. But it’s it’s making it harder for the government to interfere with the religious freedom. There was one in Tennessee that was interesting, it goes all the way back to the Founding Fathers. Founding Fathers back in the 1770s put in their state constitution, many of them that if you’re a minister, you can’t serve an office because they’re used to the British, and they don’t like the government telling Christians what they can do so they put that in.

And then John Witherspoon, who was a minister, who’s a signer of the Declaration, he said, wait a minute, timeout guys, did not do as much patriot work as any of you, are you going to keep me out of office because I’m a minister? Are you really discriminating? And so he made such a good argument that nearly all the states took that out.

But a state that did not take that out was back in 1796, Tennessee, had that provision in their original state constitution, have never taken it out. Well, they took it out on Tuesday night, they said, hey, it’s okay for preacher to get elected in Tennessee, we think that’s fine.

Marijuana had a lot of good news from the stand standpoint of initiatives on it. There’s 19 states that have moved toward legalising marijuana. And the only state really that has stood against it to this point is Michigan. In Michigan, they rejected the first step toward marijuana which was medical marijuana. On Tuesday night, Missouri said yes to marijuana, Maryland said yes to marijuana, but Arkansas said no to marijuana, North Dakota said no to marijuana.

By the way, Colorado who already had marijuana said hey, we want to go further. We want to do hallucinogens. We want to do the big drugs. And they said yes to that in Colorado, South Dakota said no to marijuana. So there were a number of states that stepped out. We haven’t seen an election like that where people started saying no, so that’s really good.

And then in Arizona, they added another election integrity provision related to voter ID requirements. So you got to have voter ID to vote. And Nebraska did the same thing. In Ohio, they said hey, we’re not going to let non-citizens vote. And by the way, the Federal law says non-citizens cannot vote in a federal election. But it’s up to the states and cities whether they let non citizens vote in their elections.

So as San Francisco wants to say, we want everybody to vote including non- citizens, which are saying they can do that in the city elections. And the states can do that in the state elections. So in Ohio, they said no, we’re not going to do that for the state, we’re going to require you be a citizen of the state, Massachusetts is still debating that one, that hadn’t been decided yet.

So I think four of that were disappointing to me were on emergency sessions. Remember back when we got into COVID, and the governor started declaring statewide emergencies and they took over and started running things, that didn’t matter whether it was Pritzker up in Illinois who just ran everything and the legislature could never get involved and never limit what he did.

Michigan

And the same with Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan. Well, Greg Abbott did the same thing in Texas, he didn’t convene the legislature. He left them totally out and he’s telling the state what to do. There were several legislators said wait a minute, we’re the ones supposed to be in charge of policy, not the governor. We want to get in on this.

And so you had Arkansas, Utah, you had Idaho and Kentucky that all said it should go to the legislature, not to the governor, whether there’s a state emergency or not, because legislators are more responsive to the people than the governor is. Most people can’t get a hold of the governor.

You can get a hold of your state legislator. But in those four states, it appears that people did not understand that giving constitutional emergency powers to the legislature was limiting the government. And most people thought, oh, I don’t want to give any emergency powers to the legislature was bad enough having the governor, not the legislature too, so all four of those measures lost.

Rick:

I think you’re right, man, that had to be what caused that because you know people did not want more emergency powers, but they read it as we’re creating new power instead of we’re limiting the governor and we’re making sure that the elected representatives so the people can come in and have a voice in this. Isn’t that amazing? I mean, those should have all gone the right way, had to be voter confusion.

David:

If they had worded it to say this is to limit the power of the governor to be able to take over the state and be a dictator and it goes to the hands of the legislature where the legislators are answerable to the people, every one of those would have passed if they have worded something like that. I’m just absolutely convinced. But they were worded in such a way that it appeared that the state was given power to the legislature to also declare emergencies and nobody wants that, you know, that’s not what you want. Well, people didn’t understand.

And by the way, I think a little bit of education in this would have gone a long way. If you look at the abortion initiatives we mentioned earlier, the Democrats put $415 million into abortion stuff in this campaign. As we watched all the polling leading up to it, abortion was not a top issue in anybody’s list and the Democrats made it that.

Now when we looked at exit polls coming out of Pennsylvania, for example, the number one issue in the Pennsylvania elections was abortion at 36%. Number two was the economy at 11%. Number three was crime at 3%. Everybody thought crime and the economy will be the top issues. Well, Democrats with 415 million managed to make in Pennsylvania at least abortion the top issue.

Nevada

And so I think if Republicans spent any money on shots showing that, hey, we’re trying to get the government back in the hands of the people, that would have been good. By the way, Nevada decided they want to go to rank choice voting, which give me a break, how bad is that in Alaska, now they’ve gone to it.

And also in Nevada, they’ve added a trans clause to their Constitution so that trans now gets specific protections like males or females or races. Now you have that that category, which is whatever your mind says. So there’s a lot of initiatives that went through on Monday night, and those are some of the bigger ones.

Tim:

Well, and let’s point out too, I mean, one of the issues is we talked about protecting certain specific individual’s right, it goes back to the fundamental problem. The Bill of Rights doesn’t specifically apply to groups on different levels. The problem with these even ballot measures where somebody says, oh, yeah, we we should make sure they’re protected. Well, you should make sure they’re protected because they’re human beings, they have the same rights as everyone else. But there shouldn’t be classes of rights. There shouldn’t be groups of rights.

And so even with a lot of these ballot measures, dad, I mean, you kind of pointed this out, one of the challenges with where a lot of this stuff ended up is really revealing that there was a terrible campaign strategy, terrible marketing behind whoever was promoting these or not promoting them as the case were. Because for so many of these, these are contrary to what people would ultimately think or want or feel.

But sometimes the way things get worded and there really are at times even legal challenges to who is in charge of the wording for different ballot measures and amendments and some of these initiatives. Because the way you word things can make a big difference, but it also indicates a lot of times the ignorance for the people of the state to maybe not fully understand what it is, or sometimes if things are worded so poorly, that even though you might support something in general, I can’t support it the way that’s worded, that looks terrible, that seems like it could be opening up for other negative things.

All that to say there’s a lot of work still to be done and the ballot measures can show us some of where the cultural battles lay and where some of the educational issues are. Obviously, the elections are very revealing to the fact that we did not do a good job as conservatives with communicating those principles, those values, and certainly not with a ground game.

And this is factoring in all of the work, guys, that we were doing all over the nation with how bad some of these results were in some areas. Imagine how bad it could have been if Christians had not gotten involved faster and churches hadn’t gotten involved to the level they did, that is maybe one encouraging thing is in some of these places, it ended up being a lot better than it could have been because people did get involved.

The Day After The Day After – Election 2022

And with that being said, I think we mentioned it yesterday, although we’ve done a lot of media today and I could have said it many other places as well, one of the realities that we also know is that sometimes you can lose battles in a long term campaign, you can still win the war. And so we don’t have to win all of these battles right now. In the American Revolution, it lasted for years.

Lose Battles, Win the War

I mean, according to John Adams, it started in 1770 and the Peace Treaty of Paris ending the revolution was 1783. I mean, at the very least, you’re talking 6, 8, 10, could be 13 years of this conflict with Great Britain and the Americans lost the vast majority of battles. But they ended up winning the war because they stayed engaged long enough to actually be able to position themselves to win.

And so we can’t look at what’s going on and be discouraged, and be so frustrated that we’re going to disengage, this needs to be something that helps us recognise, we now have even more of a cause more of a reason to stay engaged long term. So if we keep fighting these battles, eventually we can win this war.

Rick:

Tim, that’s a great way to close out today, because it’s putting it in the context of history in the context of what we’re up against here. I mean, this is going to take time to do the cultural left has complete control of most of the institutions in America: press, media, the public employee unions, the federal agencies, the state agencies, all the major corporations, the military, you can go on and on and on, academia. And so with all of that, we still had great victories on Tuesday night and so I think it has to be put in context we got to realize because we’re now in the fight, it’s going to take time, but we can win these areas back. And so everybody stay in the fight, duty is ours, results are God’s. Thanks for listening today. You’ve been listening to WallBuilders.