America's Talking - Episode 71: Early Voting on the Rise Ahead of Midterm Elections

Episode Date: November 4, 2022

Join The Center Square's D.C. Bureau Chief Casey Harper & ATN's General Manager Cole McNeely as they discuss: Probe launched into Homeland Security’s 'taxpayer-funded censorship campaign'. Early voting on the rise ahead of midterm elections. ‘Trick on Taxpayers’ outlines questionable projects funded by COVID-19 relief. Survey: Growing number of small businesses can’t pay rent. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to American Focus powered by the Center Square and a production of America's Stalking Network. I'm Cole McNeely, General Manager of America's Talking Network. To support great podcasts like this one, please donate by clicking the link in the show description. We're recording this podcast on November 4th, 2022, and joining me today is the Center Square's BC Bureau Chief Casey Harper, Casey, sir. How are you? I'm good. How are you, Cole? I'm doing well.

We've got a big election coming up next week in your, backyard there in D.C. That's true. My backyard is full of political signs and angry parties. And just kidding, I can't afford a backyard in Washington. Well, inflation's taking a toll on us all, Casey.

It has. So the midterms, obviously next week, a lot at stake. Of course, all of the House of Representatives up for re-election if they're choosing to run again. The Senate is kind of up in the air right now who will control the Senate. Casey, do you have any thoughts of just

kind of generally what's going on next week or what you've been hearing in D.C. Oh, Cole. I always have thoughts, as you well know. So this is a very vague election, a midterm election in the first term of a presidential, you know, a presidential term is really big because it's often seen as a referendum on the incumbent president. We saw during Obama's first term, the Tea Party came alive, surged, and took pretty significant control of both chambers, especially having a dominant presence in the House.

So we saw the rise of the Tea Party in Obama's first term. In Trump's first term, we saw Democrats make a big surge and really take a lot of Trump's power to actually do anything in the second half of his term. And so, you know, conventional wisdom and modern political wisdom would tell you that we can expect the same thing this time around. Of course, nowadays, conventional wisdom is not as reliable maybe in years past. But the latest polling does show that things are trending for Republicans. We see that, you know, right now, Republicans have a real projected lead in the Senate as well in the House. You know, every poll that I, every group that I've seen has Republicans taking the House. How many seats is really the question.

And of course, you know, it's not Election Day yet. Anything can happen. You can have a big scandal come out a few days before an election. They can always swing things. But some of the Senate races that have been really closely watched, you know, Dr. Oz and John Federman in Pennsylvania, that used to be a race that Dr. Oz was losing, but that's pretty much come down to a dead tie now. Mark Kelly, the Democrat in Arizona, his lead has shrunk, although he still is expected to win that race. We've seen Republicans either narrow the gap or actually take leads.

So right now, you know, in the House, for example, Republicans are expected to take anywhere from 15 to 48. House seats, which is a lot, which would definitely, you know, 48, of course, would give them the majority that they need. That's an average of 31. On the generic ballot, overall, Republicans are up three. All these numbers are coming from real clear politics. So we can, we're not the belaboral, the small stats, but overall, at every level, Republicans are expected to do well. They're expected to take a House majority. I think these Senate races are going to be really close. There's only a few of them, and they're often, they have their own issues. You know, Pennsylvania has, is often seen as a swing state. Fetterman was winning, but then the debate, he really demonstrated some of his health

issues in a more striking way, and I think that hurt him. So it's going to be really interesting to watch. I think the last thing I'll say is that what will determine who the winners of these races are is how successful either party made the race about the issue they wanted it to be about. So if Democrats were able to make this race about things like abortion and keep that election and don't steal the election narrative that they've really been feeding into, then they'll do well. But if Republicans are able to make this about the economy, I think they're going to do really well. I think they've been really aggressive on some of the more extreme parts of the transgender movement. They've really been highlighting and even heckling rallies about transgender surgeries for kids.

And as I've written at the Soonersquare.com, the polling on that really shows that Americans don't support those surgeries for kids. on the whole. So Republicans are trying to make this race about their issues and Democrats are trying to do the same. I think one of the overlooked things is part of these midterms beyond obviously the House, the U.S. House, that is, and the balance of the Senate, a lot of state-based positions of as well for election, you know, governorships, House of Representatives and your state houses state senators as well. So a lot going on there across the board. But as we get into election week, there have been some different trends this time around, particularly on early voting, Casey, versus what we've seen on years before?

What have we seen and how much of this, and I'm guessing at least in part, is a shift in how people want to vote from 2018 versus when COVID hit in 2020 and people kind of having the expectation of doing mail-in and early voting and all those sort of things? So what are the implications we're seeing on really the first non-COVID impact? election. Yeah, what we're seeing is that although, you know, we're not in that high pandemic season, that some of the behaviors that people picked up in the pandemic are here to stay. So Gallup released new polling, which found that Americans are far more likely to vote early these midterms than they were in midterms past. So four out of 10 registered U.S. voters say they plan to vote

before election day or have already voted, which is higher than recent, you know, previous midterm elections for, for example, 2010, it was only 26% of, you know, people who voted. So that's a, you know, last decade pre-COVID election. We say that it's, it's not doubled, but it's risen, you know, 15%, the percent, the number of people who vote early. And that does have, you know, big impacts. I've talked to a lot of guys in D.C. about, you know, the impact that early voting and mail-in voting has.

And a lot of them, you know, suggest that it actually helps Democrats. a little bit because people who are more likely to early vote or mail-in vote are Democrats. And so that's one of the reasons you see so many battles over the nuances of, can you count ballots late? What if a mail-in ballot arrives, but it's not dated? We just saw in Pennsylvania, a big Supreme Court case that the state Supreme Court in Pennsylvania ruled that if a mail-in ballot arrives, it has incorrect information or leaves parts blank, it can't be counted because the state law is really explicit that, you know, that mail-in ballots have to be filled out and dated correctly to be counted. So that's, that is one of many, um, election cases that have just totally sprung up

in a fresh way since all the, you know, contesting of the 2020 election. So election integrity, the nuances and details of election, um, rules, I have been very much in debate. Uh, of course, in the pandemic, the numbers were much higher. It was 64% of registered voters in the 2020 election plan to vote early. Um, so it's a much higher number, but that was in the middle the pandemic. So it'll be interesting to see in a couple of years when we're back in a presidential election year if, you know, the number of Americans who are voting early shoots back up or just continues to decline as we move further and further away from the pandemic. Yeah, and this is not not really relevant, I'd say, for our purposes, but, you know, food for thought. Oh, that's good.

It'll be really interesting to us. Yeah, I know, I know. Well, it's beyond the scope of what we generally talk about on this showcase. But if mail-in voting, early voting, all of this becomes the norm to a degree or more of a norm, certainly than it has before. Again, as you're talking about the next election cycle, that has to drastically change how you run a political campaign as well because they're, I mean, traditionally such a huge push in that last couple weeks of hitting people before they get to the polls, even with debates, right? I think they were talking about in Pennsylvania how many early voting and mail-in votes had

already come in before that U.S. Senate debate between Mehmet Oz and John Federman. And obviously, I don't think this is by any means biased to say that I think polls came out and people in general felt that Oz had a better debate performance. There are obviously reasons for that on Federman's side. I wonder how that will really shift how that kind of late aspect of the campaign will change over the next couple years. Yeah, it's a real thing, especially when you think about canvassers, which is illegal. And, you know, there are some states where it's legal for people to go around and collect votes, like Democrat or Republican representatives to go around and make sure

people voted and collect their votes and take them in. Some places that's illegal. But, you know, if a person like that has weeks of early voting, you know, to aggressively collect votes, then so much the vote can be determined by the, um, how well organized and, uh, staffed up some of these, you know, operations could, could change the game to a degree. Casey, I'm going to ask you to give an opinion here. Uh-oh. I know. Do you think that we will know who will hold the U.S. Senate come next Friday when we record America in focus? Or do you think it would be contested going into potentially legal challenges months on in? You know, this is kind of a, guess, more than an opinion. I think we will be almost sure, but not have the final stamp on it.

I think we'll say, oh, it's really looking like this is what's going to happen, but it's not finalized yet. I think that's where we'll be. All right. So we will, we will see how that ends up. You know, Casey, one of the things that I think a lot of voters are getting out to the polls to vote on. You mentioned the referendum on the sitting president. It's going to impact his party. The economy has obviously been shaky at best here for the last. last year or so, perhaps a little bit more, there's a new survey that came out that a growing number of small businesses are struggling to pay their rent. Casey, what is the backstory here? What kind of businesses are these? When we say small businesses, what does that mean?

Is this related to the economy? A lot of questions there. Take it any direction you'd like to. This new report from Alainable found it. And for the month of October, 37%. Now, I know you're not a math was cool. That's more than one in three. I know you went to a liberal art school. So that's one. That checks out. That checks out. Okay. Uh-huh. Right. Just carry the one. You know, carry the one. So 37% of small business owners were unable to pay rent either in full, like they can like they have or they were laid on it last month, which is up from 30%. We said the same thing the month before. Now that varies by industry. You know, restaurants are facing, you know, even more difficulties.

Some, some different industries or retail is having a hard time paying its rent. But we're seeing this across industries, across the economy. In fact, 59% of small business owners reported that consumers are spending less this month than last, which is really interesting because they actually have more disposable income according to federal-related, but they've actually spent less consumer habits are obviously having a big impact here. So, you know, they surveyed thousands of small businesses. for this. Small businesses, the definition can vary. You're thinking like a couple dozen employees

or less. You start getting more of that. You start thinking about medium size or a larger businesses. So you're thinking this is coffee shops. This is retail. Kind of the mom and pop shops that people see in small town, main streets all around the country. And they're having trouble paying rent. I mean, and you got to think that rent is one of the first things you pay. I mean, you pay your employees first probably. You got to pay your supplies and then you pay rent. So, and of course, business owners are the last ones to get paid, actually. So if you can't pay rent, that means you're not really making enough to pay yourself as a business owner.

Maybe you pay your salary, but often they don't take a salary when they're struggling. So I don't know. I mean, we talk a lot about inflation on this podcast. We talked about the Federal Reserve interests, rate hikes. There's a lot going on right now. Unemployment's not too bad. It's, you know, unemployment rate is doing okay, but it's getting more and more difficult to buy a house.

Far fewer Americans are trying to buy a house. So it's interesting economic times. I don't think it's going away anytime soon. We were told a year ago that inflation was transitory and to not worry about some of these things. It was all because of the pandemic. But here we are. You know, pandemic's over. Things are still not great.

And we're seeing from the data, and I talked about this in a couple weeks before on the podcast, but most of the inflation that we're seeing now is not related to the pandemic at all. So it'll be interesting to watch. Yeah. And you feel for those small. businesses too that especially mentioned places like coffee shops if they existed pre-pandemic just getting through those couple years were difficult and how on the tail end you're seeing the impacts of inflation to get down inflation obviously the Fed hiking up interest rates that's

going to raise the cost of well frankly housing as you mentioned to be in a place depending upon how, you know, it's going to make all of that a little tighter across the board. And it's going to impact the consumer's desire to spend money to a degree. I don't think we've seen that to full extent quite yet, but it's going to impact the consumers, you know, really desire to go out there and spend money. Pair that with rising rent rates. And it'd be tough to be in that kind of small coffee shop position. Yes, right.

All right, Casey, well, let's move on. You wrote another story at thecentersquare.com this week, talking about a probe that is being launched into the Homeland Security's, quote, taxpayer-funded censorship campaign. Casey, what's going on there? This is a pretty interesting story. The Intercept broke a big story on Monday, and they're reporting, you know, this is not a brand new story.

The Intercept broke. There's other people that have done work on this. But what they showed was the elaborate nature of the federal government and federal law enforcement in particular, the way that they have been pressuring social media companies like Facebook to delete content. And so this all kicked off when people, you know, when the 2020 election results were being challenged. Department of Homeland Security got really involved working with tech companies to try to quench some of that resistance. You can call it whatever misinformation is what they called it. And it started there, and I think the tech companies were pretty willing to work on that. But what we've seen from The Intercepts reporting on Monday is that what started out is, you know, trying to, you know, quiet down people who were questioning the election has now spread to all kinds of issues from criticizing the withdrawal from Afghanistan, from talking about COVID, COVID policies, the vaccine, question of vaccine.

So this is really grown really quickly. and DHS has just tried to, is in pressuring these social media companies to delete and censor content. And so this has all come to light. Now it's been very explosive reporting, great work. And now, you know, I worked with some sources at the House Oversight Committee

and they gave us an advanced copy of this investigation that they're doing, which we wrote about the cindersquare.com. And they're looking for information, emails, documents related to how it is that DHS, which of course is taxpayer funded, is so aggressively censoring Americans, one, which they are used violating the First Amendment. And then there's kind of the political angle, which is, of course, it's a Democrat administration

right now. And the issues that they are choosing to censor tend to be more associated with right-leaning Americans. I mean, I think the one that's most egregious here is questioning the withdrawal from Afghanistan. I mean, you can't criticize the withdrawal from Afghanistan without getting, you know, censored or, you know, flagged his misinformation. And I think, you know, people used to be more sympathetic to this idea that misinformation is being spread online. That really started in the 2016 election when, you know, there was a lot of like kind of fake news going around of the 2016 election.

What we've seen in a very short period of time is that whatever power was given to the feds and to big tech to regulate that misinformation has already been well abused. I mean, probably the gross, most, you know, the most gross example was in the 2020 election when the New York Post was tweeting out this Hunter Biden story, Hunter Biden's laptop, all these things, how it may have compromised the Biden family with foreign interests. And it was first written off as a conspiracy theory and Twitter actually locked down the New York Post account. And now it's come out that pretty much all of that is true or been verified. There is a Hunter Biden laptop. The New York Times later came out and explicitly said that he acknowledged 100-biden laptop.

And so I think these big tech companies and the censorship apparatus has lost the trust of a lot of Americans really quickly. I mean, not that it had a ton of trust to begin with. But what we've seen is when you make a big mistake on an issue like this, it can really impact elections. It can impact the way people think about things. And maybe you're doing more harm than good. I don't know. I mean, I don't think anybody wants just total free-for-all on social media companies. but right now maybe the pendulum swung too far a different way.

And that's what the House Oversight Committee is investigating. It'll be interesting to see if, as the polls are suggesting, if Republicans can take power in the House, then these investigations get a lot more teeth to them when they are the majority. Now, Casey, what is the DHS and the White House saying about this? I mean, are they giving a justification as to why they're doing these things? Well, so the White House is kind of denying it, which is funny. you know, White House Presbyter Creek Jean Pierre, she said that they're not flagging things with Facebook anymore.

But it's on the record that Jin Sacky said in 2021 that they were flagging things with Facebook. And it's funny, when she said it, she said it in the present tense. Like, we're not doing that. So I suspect that they stopped doing it on, you know, a week ago or on Monday. And so now they can say truthfully they're not doing it anymore. But I think they have been doing it, you know, regularly for a couple of years now. The DHS has been more quiet. It's kind of this faceless entity.

It's a lot easier to hide when you're one of these big agencies. The White House doesn't have that same kind of luxury. They are taking hard questions on it. Right now they're just trying to kind of hoping it goes away. And I think people are distracted by the election. But I don't think the story will go away. And if Republic, like I said, if Republicans take the house, they're going to use that power, I think to trot out a lot of this censorship, misinformation stuff. I think it plays well with them better than some of their other issues to show that, you know,

big tech has been colluding against, you know, the average American or whatever. That's kind of the messaging. And as you think that plays well for them. So I don't think it's going anywhere. The story is not not done from evolving. All right. Well, we'll keep an eye on that as it continues to evolve to use your terminology. Casey, we've got a couple more minutes here and we've got we've got two more stories.

I think we want to cover, both focused on explicitly tax. payer dollars will start on the $1.2 million, nearly $1.2 million study to see if poor sleep is related to racism. Yeah. I read the headline. I'm going to be honest. It's an interesting, catchy headline, but is there a legitimate theory behind why they're doing this of what they're trying to say here?

The legitimacy will probably depend on who you ask, but they have a, I guess, logically consistent reason, you say. So the headline is one of those you think. Can this really be true? You've got to clip on it. But the National Institute of Health, which, you know, gives out billions of dollars for medical research grants. They gave grants to Dr. Alexander Sy, who is an associate professor at Harvard. He is a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital. So, you know, he's got the credentials. But I've looked at all his other research is much different in nature. I mean, he's doing research on a lot of, like, hypermedical things. This one is kind of maybe gone into a different realm.

But the basic theory on our time crunch is that black Americans' knowledge of police shootings is keeping them up at night. And that is why black Americans don't sleep as well as, like, some other ethnic groups. So I want to make sure I understand this correctly. And I'm sure we have some listeners. think of the same thing. Effectively, the thought is that black Americans seeing police force used against other black Americans, that that could have a mental health impact effectively that would impact their sleep. Is that fair? Yeah. That's fair. And it's probably the way that makes more sense is to work at it backwards, which is how I think they did it, which is they said,

hey, there's a sleep disparity here. Black people aren't sleeping as well. What could be causing this? I bet it's It's racism. And then they looked into it. And that's what they're, that's the hypothesis. I bet it's because of the mental health impact of violent, you know, police violence. So they're researching that, you know, three grants, nearly $1.2 million. Of course, the criticism is, hey, there's a lot of lifestyle issues that go into sleep. There's actually probably dozens of factors that affect your sleep.

And to just isolate racism, it seems just kind of politically motive. It seems kind of weird to critics. it seems like in line with this kind of, I think, left-leaning ideological meaning, which is everything is caused by racism. If there is a disparity, it cannot be explained by natural causes. It has to be explained by some, as one of the critics called it, the ghost of structural racism. So I think that, you know, we cover the taxpayer angle here. And I think the story is actually really fair. I quoted the study author at length, let him lay out his entire argument. Of course, I quoted critics too. But, you know, we're spending millions of dollars, because this isn't the only

grant like this. There's many others that kind of absorb some of the structural racism, critical race theory, doctrine, and just take it at face value and base medical research on the precepts of critical race theory and some of the structural racism doctrine. And so I've just been writing a steady stream of story showing people that, hey, your tax dollars are funding a lot of research based on an ideology that you may disagree with or you may We're going to move on from that one for the sake of time. Another one, Casey, questionable projects funded by COVID-19 relief. Obviously, a whole bunch of money came in through COVID-19 relief.

And hey, people have certainly spent it, haven't they? Oh, the government is best at one thing, and that is spending money. They love it. They love to spend money. So, as you pointed out, there's been trillions of dollars were spent through several congressional bills to respond to COVID. it's all this COVID relief money. But now that we're getting a couple years out from all that spending, the receipts are starting to come in and they're not all pretty.

Besides the fact that likely hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe some estimates would say $400 billion were lost just to fraud and the mishandling of COVID unemployment payments. And that's half a trillion dollars that was just lost, not even spent on questionable projects, just totally lost. Setting that aside. citizens against government waste, you know, released this report. And they laid out some really good examples.

I also included other examples that I've reported on. But I'll just, you know, rapid fire some of these as we near the end here. You know, $300,000 for an engineering assessment of the now condemned Aloha Stadium in Hawaii, federal taxpayers for that. How about a million dollars for a sea urchin hatchery in Hawaii? I don't know if you're a big sea urchin hatchery guy, but a million. dollars of your taxpayer funds went to that. It was 12.5 million went to build a baseball stadium on the famous field of dream site to encourage

tourism. That's be fair. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. That one. Okay. Hey, you know, I don't take it aside. I'm not saying I support.

I'm sure it could have done in a more fiscally responsible way, but I do think that it was a that was a cool. That's a neat. Let's put this way. If we're spending $12.5 million, might as well get a cool stadium out of his own. Well, it's of ways to participate. potentially waste taxpayer dollars. I think that's a neat way to do it.

It ranks above, well, I bet you it ranks above this next one, which is $4 million in Texas for a urban bird sanctuary. So feel the dream is probably better than urban bird sanctuary, would you say? I'm biased. Don't necessarily live in an urban community,

nor do I have a fondness for birds. Dan McKaylor usually hosts the show. I think he has a little bird friend that, that sits by him in his office and you can hear it sometimes on the podcast. So Dan might like that one. But I'm a sucker for baseball, though. So that might be why. It's got a soft spot in my heart.

Well, I'm glad to hear that you support a $12.5 million soft spot my heart. It's a baseball field. It's what do you do with some white paint on the ground and a couple of bleachers. But anyway, these are just a few of many examples. Billions, hundreds of billions of dollars wasted and just fraud and sending the money incorrectly. And then just laying out a few examples to kind of give you an idea of how we just poured trillions of dollars on this pandemic problem. And we're seeing that, as was probably expected, it wasn't all handled well. Casey, we've run out of time this week on America and Focus.

I want to thank you for dealing with me. And Dan McAulb should be back next week. That's at least the expectation. I know for everybody, the listener, you, me, for everybody involved. We're going to be happy that Dan McAilb should be back next week. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And if you didn't enjoy this podcast, just be patient, delete this one out of your library, wait for Dan to come back and enjoy that one.

I want to thank you for listening to American Focus this week. Again, American Focus is a production of America's Stalky Network and powered by the Center Square. The likes of Dan McKalib and Casey Harper will be back next week. Thanks for listening. enjoy the election week