WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The WRFH Interview: State Sen. Joe Bellino, 05/07/26

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

Michigan State Sen. Joe Bellino joins WRFH's Malia Looke for a conversation. From 05/07/26.

Hello and welcome. This is Molia Look on WRFH Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. joined today by State Senator Joseph Bolino, who represents the 16th legislative district, including much of Hillsdale County out in Lansing. Thank you for joining, Senator. Doing fine. Hello, Hillsdale. So, Michigan Democrats are retaining the 20 to 18 majority that they have in the state Senate after this past weekend's special. election in the 35th district. What can you tell us about that race, the outcome, and the newly elected senator? Well, I'm not worried about that seat right now because we're going to take it back for the general. Here's the deal. Republicans look it out for special elections. We hate it.

We knew we did a lot of polling. We knew we'd have spent six or eight million dollars to get people out to have a chance here. We didn't want to spend all that money. So the Democrats spent almost two million and they did that because they want a 20 to 18 advantage for the for the governor's last budget i understand that but i i couldn't see us spending millions of millions more than that to get people to go out when we could take the seat back in the general i feel we have a great chance of the general we have a wonderful candidate uh he will he's still running he's not quitting now he's he's been he's it all the way through november he knew it would be a tough process in the special election and he knew he was going to have a tough road to hoe in the special election, but we'll be behind him 100%

with more walkers and millions of dollars more for the general election in November to take the seat back over. I've seen a lot of news outlets are talking about how this win is part of a kind of wider trend of Democrats performing a lot better than, you know, Kamala Harris did and getting, you know, better results. Do you think that, you know, even if this one, isn't perhaps the most influential because of the general elections coming up. Do you think this might be a bit of an indicator? No, I don't think, you know, between now and November is a world of time. I know people are upset the gas prices.

Some people are upset about what's going on Iran. President Scott is going to make the world a safer place by neutering the biggest sponsor of worldwide terrorist that we've known of in the last 100 years. And we have to remember, Iran has been in a... of war with America since they took all those hostages during Carter's Day. So they've wanted us dead. First they want the Israelis dead, then they want us dead. And anybody else that doesn't acquiesce to their Muslim ideas, they want gone. So I love what the president's doing. No, it's tough on us right now with gas, but oil came down again today because there's a rumor there's going to be

a deal. So as a deal happens, oil's going to drop like a bucket and gas prices go down to where they were a couple years ago. So I don't think this special shows us what the United States thinks. This is a special election in a Senate seat that the Dems outspend up by millions, and I don't take any credence in how much they won by or how much he outperformed Kamala. I look at what they did at their convention as a positive thing for Republicans, and it'll help us in November. Speaking of the Democrat elections and conventions, Attorney General Dana Nessel called for a recount following their meeting where, you know, delegates voted electronically using allegedly faulty apps.

I did want to ask your opinion as someone who is more familiar with this process. Are there behind the scenes logistics that kind of account for this call for recount? Or is this actually more Democrat specific? I was fortunate enough to work in this. city for a Catholic charity for six years in my younger day. Best job ever had. The problem is Catholic charities don't pay very well. So after six years, I came back to Monroe. I became friends with a lot of people that were raised and grew up in a city, older, younger. I talked to a lot of people back in the 80s and early 90s about elections. Everyone knew in Detroit, all the elections

were fixed. Everybody knew that. And I didn't understand it until my association, which is now called Midwest Independent Retailers, an association that I used. be chairman of the board of, we backed a young man by the name of Freeman Hendricks against Kwame Kilpatrick for his first, his first reelection. We backed this guy big time. We like Freeman. He was a free market guy. He was friends with small markets. A good man. So we backed him. The Friday before the Tuesday election, Kwame called our president and demanded the same amount of money we gave Freeman. We gave Freeman 30 grand. We didn't give Kwame 30 grand. He said, if you don't give me 30 grand, I'm going to start shutting stores down the day after

election. Our president said, in all due respect, Mr. Mayor, you're down by eight points now. He said, you watch. I'm going to win. Kwame killed him. Quami had to fix it already, and he beat Freeman Hendricks. And what happened to Wednesday after the election the next day? He went into stores. He sent cops at stores. If they found one piece of bread that was outdated, one formula, one candy bar, they padlocked stores. He was mad at us. It was retribution for not giving him money. That's what happens in Detroit. And the Democrats know that. So they go to their own convention. Days later, the next Tuesday, or three days later, whatever it was the next Tuesday, I see Sylvia Santana in the hallway at the Senate. Sylvia ran for the board of trustees

at a major university in the state, and she lost by 18 votes at the convention. Sylvia pulled me aside and said, Joe, I got screwed by my own people. The fix was in. This is Sylvia's words, a Democrat. I don't trust what the Democrats do in the convention, or what they say, because they lie and cheat and steal, or they'll tell me, oh, it was only one person from China that voted, or it was only one clerk that was bad. Well, one is too much. If you can't tell me that one false vote in an election is too much than to fix us in, then you're part of that. So the Democrats showed the world, they like to run elections, how they want elections to happen. And I'm happy that they nominated the most left-wing people

at their elections, whether there was fault people voting miles away, 200 miles away or whatever was. I think I read a report over 200 people voted while not being there, while the rules you had to be there. So obviously Democrats don't like to follow rules when it comes to elections, and they want me to listen to them about when they tell me elections are safe. I read a report yesterday that SOS is finally going to take off dead people off the rules, thousands and thousands that we have been begging for for years. My biggest township of Monroe County, Trudy sent the SOS, the Secretary of State a list three years ago of people take off the rolls. The next day they got to e-mail.

That's too many people to take off. We're not doing it. That's too many people. Half of them were dead. Rest hadn't voted over 20 years. They moved or something happened. And they wouldn't take them off the rolls. That tells me they don't really care about safety and integrity in elections.

They only want them to go their way. And that's just my thought, though. I know you mentioned the person who you had talked to specifically, but I wanted to ask, like, who else do you think that recounts would impact? And do you think that a recount would actually go anywhere? Well, I'm not sure how the other, how close the other races were. I know they're upset that, you know, I think I mentioned this before. They had the, Karen McDonald was a nominee to be the attorney general candidate,

a person that we would have a real, Republicans would have a real, real tough time be defeating her, a tough time. But they decided they don't want somebody that wants to win the election. They decided to do what Republicans did years ago. Let's nominate the person, purest Democrat heart, the farthest left-wing Democrat heart, and we'll put them out there. And we could get our person nominated, elected a general election. And this is what's going to happen to Democrats in the fall.

Mr. Eli from Washingtonal County, Mr. No Cash bail, man, we're going to defeat him. Well, we would have had a real tough time defeating Karen McDonald. So I'm not sure how close the other elections were, but I know that Sylvia told me she lost by 18 votes, and that's real close. They had, I think, 6,000 voters there, so that's close. You're listening to WRFH Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Malia Look, interviewing Michigan State Senator Joseph Bolino. Continuing on voting accountability, Michigan Democrats are continuing to push back against

the Justice Department's demands for Wayne County to turn over election ballots from the November 2024 election. What are some of the possible consequences of the Democrats not complying? And how would this, like, in reality, practically, I guess, affect the Michigan taxpayer? I think it's ironic that our Secretary of State who wants to be governor doesn't want to turn over the information to the feds about how many voted, who voted, where, about when she gave our voting rolls away to a nonprofit before the last presidential election. She gave it away. It's a nonprofit out of the West Coast somewhere funded by left-wing extremists. They cultivate people to go to elections and vote. But she gave it away because that group only

does all the work in Democratic areas to get out to vote, not Republican. So she was okay with giving that group the same information that the federal government wants right now. Now, what would it be safer? A nonprofit that's going to use that information to get out to vote or the federal government who wants to look for fraud and abuse for election integrity? I think. think the federal government's a safer spot saying things like, well, we don't want to turn over this information that it might get leaked out. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Ms. SOS. You gave that information to a nonprofit years ago, and they subsequently later on gave your nonprofit that was working on elections a lot of money to help you. And this is where the Zuckerberg came in. People like Mr.

Zuckerberg gave millions of dollars in the Michigan so they could get the vote out in Democratic areas only. How fair was that? How was that? How would legit is that. You can't even spell the word equity when you say it only went to Democratic areas only. That's the BS where the Dems come from. They love it when they give them money to get the vote out, but they hate it when Republicans ask for it. The DOJ is asking for the information to see if there's any false people voting or dead people voting or the same signatures as I've heard about on 10,000 different ballots. These are the kind of things they need to check out to make sure they're fair and safe elections and she doesn't want to do it. And, and you know,

to her credit, the left wing of her party doesn't want to give anything to the DOJ. But people in Michigan, they want that stuff given away. They want to see, you know, I want the DOJ to get Wayne County stuff so we can see exactly what happens in Wayne County. What would happen to Wayne County, do you think, if the accusations of election fraud are proven true? Well, I'm not sure. I don't want to come up with ideas what the feds might do, but we might put oversight people

in all precincts or in major areas. I mean, when our people stormed Kobo Hall years ago during the election process, when Biden won, and they put paper over the windows, that broke laws. When they told people who were watching the election counters get away because of COVID and they couldn't see what was going on, that broke laws. But they said that they had to do it for coal because they were killing people. And that was BS. We found out later all that COVID stuff was BS. So I don't trust Wayne County. I think they're all thieves and they came care of themselves.

And years ago, Wayne County, they slapped the treasure. on the wrist because him and his family formed a corporation. They were buying houses that he foreclosed on and took away from people of color. And they fixed them up and sold them so his family could make money. When we found out about it, article paper, they slapped the guy in the wrist because he's a Democrat and a good giver to the governor and that Governor Whitmer and other people, Democrats in the whole area. He was part of the whole McNamara clan back in the old days where Kwame came from and where

Governor Hanholm came from. They slapped him on the wrist instead of getting rid of him. He was chisking houses from people of color and making money on it. And the Dems did do a damn thing. So I don't trust them at all. They like to yell about people that look like me, but they won't take care of people look like me when it's their own party. That's the problem with the Democrats.

You were recently involved in a group of bipartisan legislators who introduced the bill that would update the laws surrounding manufactured housing. I wanted to ask, could you go more into detail about what those bills would do? The Democrats had a trifect that came up with a bunch of bills from manufacturing housing communities, and we didn't like any of them because it was rent control and all this stuff in there. But now we have a bipartisan set of bills that are mainly going to go after park owners that run real bad trailer parks or real bad manufacturing home communities. I have a couple of them. We all, every county's got a couple of them in their

community. They're absent landlords, just taking the money. They live in New York or Frisco or somewhere else. And they're not. updating the roads or the water system or the sewer system. They don't have codes on how things should look or how fast people should drive on the streets and all kinds of different things. So this package of bills, which is okay by the community, manufactured community, home communities, and the Democrats will kind of put the reins on some of these bad actors and make their community safer, better looking, and more representative of the people around them. And so I have no problem. I had no problem getting on this package of bills because there's been a work group out there for

two years hammering out different details. And it doesn't go too far as I was way against the rent control stuff they had in last time. It took all that out of there. But it mainly goes after bad actors and the manufacturing home communities. And that's what we need to go after. If I live in the street and I live on a street Monroe, but if my sewer wasn't running right or my water or my roads real bad, I'd be able to the city to fix it. And I have recourse. There's no recourse. And these manufacturing, home communities. So we need to hold up higher standards. They need to step forward and do good things for the manufacturer home community and not just take, take, take like the bad ones are right now. You're listening to WRFH Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Malia Look, interviewing Michigan State

Senator Joseph Bolino. Democratic Senator Sam Singh recently proposed a $25 million park in Lansing Republicans criticize this on the basis of it accruing more debt. I wanted to ask, like, why is Singh making this distinction? And what does it say about how Democrats view undertaking long-term projects and the, like, I don't know why Sam Singh or Sarah Anthony want this park, but I'll tell you right now. It's right in front of the building where the Supreme Court is. There's a swath of land, eight, ten acres. in a parking lot and land around it.

And the city of Lansing is not taking care of the parks that are near there, the parks that they own. So it saves them a lot of money. If the state puts $25 million into a park so they can say, hey, we have a park near you. That's a nice park. Well, I'm sorry. We've already given the city of Lansing hundreds of millions of dollars since COVID, hundreds of millions of dollars to help them with their infrastructure because they don't know how to balance

a checkbook. This is a city that got rid of their defined benefit pensions. years ago, and then in an uproar from the unions, they brought it back. So now they're, I think I read last $88 million underfunded and their health care pension for the retirees. So they can't put money into their parks. Their streets around the capital stink. They're like, they're like, I'm in a third world country. There's so many potholes. They can't fix that. They rely on the state to be a lifeline. And part of the problem is, the governor hasn't called anybody back to work since COVID. The restaurants and businesses

downtown lancie are closing down their tax base is dwindling and the state does own a lot of property in the city of lansing they get no money from no with no tax dollars from that is one of the big problems but they can't balance their own checkbook so what do they do they come to us what's 25 million dollars when you have a $83 billion proposed budget that's a drop in a bucket give us 25 million we'll take over the front lawn of the Supreme court building and we'll make a part for the people live there. I think it's BS. No Republicans are going to vote for that. And I hope it fails, but we'll see what happens in the negotiations with the governor and the Senate and the Speaker Hall. And then lastly, I wanted to kind of talk more generally about things that aren't really

controllable. These past two months have shown a lot of tornadoes and a lot of floods, just a lot of disturbances and weather. And I wanted to ask, what are some of the the ways that Michigan legislature is assisting affected areas? Well, when we have a huge storm, and we've had a few since this governor was likely, we had them during Snyder's Day. If it's like the ice storm last year or the flood nine years ago in the UP, you've got to ask the feds for help. And you've got to do it in a certain way and fill paper out and send it in and have the feds

come in and help. And so people can get low-infront loans and some guarantees to fix stuff up. And that's been happening in America for years. But I don't think, I don't know if we're getting more violent storms than we got 50 years ago. See, weather's weird. We know, as Americans, we know where our resentments are from fifth grade, people we don't like. But we forget what the weather was like last year or two years ago. We've had violent stories since I was a kid.

I lived through the blizzard of 77. My dad says the coldest winter he ever remember was this junior in high school, which was 1956. So we've had cold weather before, and our weather tracking our weather records only go back 130 years, maybe 140 years. And you're telling me, the world's falling apart because we know what's happened to the last 140 years. We've had weather changing. I mean, where I'm standing right, we're sitting right now doing this interview, it was 40 feet of water 15,000 years ago. So the weather has changed. So when bad things happen, like ice storms and tornadoes like the 1967 one that killed a lot of people and damaged a lot of property in Michigan,

you have to ask for help. And the feds have a way of FEMA's got a way of letting low-cost loans and guarantees come out. And then we help people fix things up. We've been doing it for years. And we need to keep the same situation intact. A little side note story. The first town, there was a disaster in the governor's term. There was a huge flooding in a UP.

They got like seven inches of rain in an hour. hour in an area and it washed out roads and culverts and all kinds of stuff. Now, first of all, it's in UP, so Democrats don't care about it. It's too far away. They don't understand it. It's over the bridge. There's not that many people of color living up there, so they don't really care about it. Second of all, when it happened, the governor said she's calling the feds and going to get some action from FEMA. She didn't correctly. Snyder called her three days in a row. She will answer his phone call. Finally, you got a whole of her friends who told her, this is what you got to do to get FEMA to answer and do these things. She wasn't doing it the correct way,

but she didn't want to answer a phone from Snyder because why the hell would you ask somebody who knew how to do it? That's how Democrats act sometimes. Why would I ask a Republican, even though they know how to do it? They don't do that stuff. So that disaster in the UP went two weeks longer before help came because the governor wouldn't listen to people and do the right thing and listen to Snyder and pull the right levers with FEMA and get things done. So we have a federal way of helping people out in these disasters. We need to keep it that way because they do happen every now. And I mean, let's get honest, we've built all this infrastructure in an area of Michigan, parts of areas of Michigan, that we have no idea how the water

flowed 500 years ago. I mean, I live near the river raisin. There are parts of the river raisin where starts downsloping to the river raisin half mile away. That tells me that river was a lot wider at one time. Who's to tell us it won't be that wide again sometime? Thank you again for your time. And we always remember the weather for the last couple of years. But as a kid, 1967 tornado that swept through Michigan killed more people per capita than any tornado we've had. And that was a long time ago. And my father lived near the water in the 50s. And we had the water up from Lake Erie way higher than it is right now in the 50s.

So we only go back 140 years maybe of looking at this data. So don't tell me you know how the world's going to act with 140 years of data. That wouldn't be the scientist's way of doing it, especially since this earth's been here millions and millions of years. So thank you very much. Thank you. This has been Malia Look with Michigan State Senator Joseph Bolino, who represents the 16th legislative district, including much of Hillsdale County on WRFH, Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.