FM Talk 1065 Podcasts
Andrew Sorrell for State Auditor - Jeff Poor Show - Tuesday 7-30-24
[Music] Look at back to the Jeff Pour show. What if I'm talking 106. 5 days you stay with us on this Tuesday morning. 2513430106 is the text line I see him coming in. We will get to those over the course of the program. Still to come on the program. I'm Scott Dulce. I remember him. He ran for governor in 2018. He'll be with us at the 10 o'clock hour. And then as we do every Tuesday, John Wall from the Alabama Republican party. Stay tuned for that. Jody gets now on the line. He is our state auditor. Always a pleasure to bring on Andrew Sorrell. I tell everybody we were trying to get you out about once a month I think, but I just kind of keep us plugged in about what's going on. Before we get into the what's going on in your office there, auditor. Let's talk about. I'm talking about the politics of the day. I mean, since the last time we talked, which was in June, I mean, it's been the world is changing significantly, hasn't it? It has in ways that in some ways we expected and in some ways we were still surprised. You can be expecting something and still be surprised when it happened. I think that's exactly what happened. I didn't think Joe Biden was going to let it go. I really didn't. And I thought that's the only way they were going to change the nominee is if he himself stepped aside. The delegates that were pledged to him were not going to abandon him at the convention. The only way they vote for somebody else is if he released them, which is what ended up happening. Yeah. Well, I mean, I was too surprised that he let go of it. I always saw that the Harris Planels Plan B, but he was never going to let it happen. I don't think this is a it's an upgrade, but I don't think it's a significant upgrade. I mean, I look at it to strategically. She has not been that impressive, at least now. I mean, maybe this changes, but she has not been that impressive out on the stump. She's got less of an excuse than Joe Biden for all her bumbling to mumble. Joe Biden, at least you can say, well, he's 80 years old. I mean, what's Kamala's excuse? She has some of the most obnoxious, ridiculous clothes and clips. She'll go to 20 events in a row and say the exact same thing and never vary it up a bit. I mean, she doesn't seem to be a very good order. It appears a lot of original thoughts. There's a lot of talk about how she climbed the ladder so quickly. There's a lot of good material there. And I think that the one question she should be asked over and over and over it, at what point did you know that Joe Biden was no longer capable of carrying out his job? He was capable of carrying out his duties as president. And what did you do about it? That's a question I think it's very fair to ask because she was out there in the media lying to everybody saying, "Oh, Joe Biden's in great health. Oh, his mind is sharp. I just left a meeting with him. Joe Biden is sharper than he's ever been." And that's obviously just a lie now, and everybody knows it. And I think she's trying to gaslight us and say something otherwise. I think she's had a good rollout as best as she could have. Now, she's gotten the biggest assist from the media. But man, they are, they have the talking points down. It is, while it is very disappointing and disheartening, they'll see it. It's impressive just how wedded to whatever they pump out as the conventional wisdom of the moment. The media are to help her try to get elected. Anytime you have a rollout and you raise $200 million in the first seven days, if you roll out, that's a pretty good rollout by any stretch. And that doesn't include the $96 million that she was able to roll over from Joe Biden. So she's sitting right now on $300 million, and she's only been the presumptive nominee for a little over a week. So, yeah, Republicans need to be scared. I mean, Trump is raising a lot of money, but I think Kamala could overtake him. I think a lot of the big Democrat donors were holding back to leverage Joe Biden to get out of the race. And then once he did, I think all the floodgates opened. But the amazing thing to see is it wasn't just the big donors. I mean, it was the small donors, millions of them. A lot of donors, I forget the numbers. Something like 75% of the donors were first-time donors that never donated to anyone before, and now they're donating to Kamala for president. That should be concerning. Also concerning, the Democrats just registered 100,000 new voters, and 84% of the 100,000 they registered are under age 34. Well, I got to tell you, those people under age 34, probably most of them are not voting Republican. Of course, if they were registered by the Democrats, you can almost be sure that they weren't voting Republican. And I don't know that the Republicans have any voter registration drives really to match that. So there's some unsettling things on the horizon as far as this election is concerned. I mean, I know we're polling in pretty good shape. The swing state looked pretty good for Trump. But overall, Trump's only up a point nationwide in most of the polls. So this is not by any stretch over. There's 100 days left, or maybe we're down to 99 now, days before the election. And that's an eternity, and anything can happen. I remember thinking in 2020, there was no way Trump could lose the election. And the economy was roaring. Everything was just wonderful. And then what happened, COVID hit, and completely changed the election. So you just never know what's going to happen in politics. So we don't need to just assume we're going to be okay. I do see the fundraising signs, the energy signs on the Democrats are somewhat concerning to me. Well, this sort of momentum and the momentum is shifted forward. But this level of intensity for the next 98 days, I don't think they can do it. I mean, and I say this, even for them, it would be ridiculous to keep this up with their convention next month. They got to back off a little to make the convention special, right? But there's no way this is sustainable. I don't know what kind of twisted terms this is going to take, but this honeymoon will come to an end at some point. Well, it absolutely will. But let's look at how we got here, how Donald Trump was up by one point. What events led to Trump being ahead by one point in the polls? Well, you go back to the debate at the end of June, which I thought was a strategic error on the part of the Trump campaign to debate Joe Biden that early. If they had waited until after the convention and Joe Biden was the nominee and then debated Joe Biden in September, Trump would have been an absolute lock for president. But because Trump debated early, the Democrats had time to basically do a trial run, Joe Biden performed poorly, and now they're swapping them out. We've got to deal with a completely other candidate. We don't necessarily have all the opposition research done, which is not organized to run a campaign against Kamala as much as we were against Joe Biden. So that happened, the debate. Then what's the next thing that happened? Well, there's an assassination attempt. And anytime you have an assassination attempt, I mean, rightfully so, there's going to be a lot of sympathy out there from the public, the voting public for that person, especially the way Trump responded with his fists in the air saying fight, fight, fight, that fired people up. Then we rolled into the Republican convention. And then what was the news story there? Who is Trump going to pick for vice president? Well, then it was JD Vance. Then we had the whole convention. So we've had the post convention polling bump. So everything for a solid month was in the media. It was the tension on Trump, how bad Joe Biden is. Who's Trump's going to pick? And here's the convention, a free, free week of media, basically, all in free. I mean, the convention costs a lot of money, but you're not buying ads. The media is putting your stuff on TV for you for free. Now what's about to happen? It's all of that reverses. Now the story is Joe Biden dropped out. Who's it going to be? Okay, well, now we know it's going to be Kamala. What's the next story? Who's Kamala going to pick his VP? That's what everyone's talking about right now. And then it's going to be, oh, the Democrat convention. So where is the polling going to stand at the end of August? That's what I need to see. Then things have kind of stuttled out. And then we get into the real meat of the campaign season. So the fact that Trump is up one point before the Democrat convention, before she announces, probably like a Shapiro from Pennsylvania or somebody like that as a running mate, that could change. Trump's up four in Pennsylvania right now. What if that state flips with those strategic pick on Kamala's part? There's so much we don't know. So I think we're sitting in a good position, but we are definitely not a lot. There's been a lot of things that have boosted our polling the last 30 days, and I think that's going to flip on us for the next 30. Well, this is what it sounds like to me. I mean, like, if you're advising Republicans out there, there's some Republicans who are watching what's going on here. They're a little panicked. I'm not one of them. I'm just in awe of how this week has been going, but I think you're right. I think like, let's watch how this settles out. Not saying that you just kind of sit and lay low, but before we get emotionally exercised about what's going on out there in the presidential election, see where this is headed. And probably a good time to reassess would be about a month from now. I agree with everything you just said. And I think if you're Republicans right now, you're doing a deep dive on Kamala in a way you've never done it before. I mean, when somebody runs for vice president, yeah, you do some background on them and stuff, but it's not like they are not the candidate for president. It's not the same level of intense scrutiny. Republicans need to see what they can find on Kamala because the Democrats have sure investigated Donald Trump and JD Vance, which brings me to my next point. We need to be investigating all of the potential vice president picks, just like Kamala's campaign is vetting him right now. We need to be vetting him so that when she picks one of them, we're ready to go with messaging on day one about what a liberal person this is. And here's all the terrible things they've done. That kind of, you know, takes some of the shine off the announcement of who the VP is. So those are the things I'd be working on right now, get past this convention, and then Trump's got to prepare for debate with Kamala, which is going to be very different. You're debating a woman, which thankfully Trump has done before, right? And we saw it in 2016, and I thought he performed well on the debates against Hillary Clinton. But debating a woman is different than debating a man, and you cannot beat up on him. Beating up on a woman in debate gives sympathy to the female. And you've got to be very, very careful about that. Those are some of the things, go ahead. I'm sorry. You know, vetting the vice presidential candidate right now, they're having to run like a hurry up offense. Usually it takes a little while. I think they're, I mean, I think there's a potential risk here for Democrats in rushing this process with the VP the way they are. I don't know what they, you know, what they would miss or what would happen, but there's certainly that potential, right? No doubt. I mean, yeah, it's a short time period. They've got, you know, three weeks to analyze somebody before the convention, and the voters have 99 more days, and the opposition researchers are Republicans have 99 more days. And once their pick is locked in, I mean, they're stuck with them. So I do think that there's some additional risk there on the side of the Democrats. Anytime you move quickly in politics, there's always risk that you messed up enough. The other thing, I think Democrats are betting big here. This, this may be the, the Waterloo moment for Democrat, the current Democrat establishment, because Andrew and I don't know, I mean, maybe they pull it off, but if they don't, well, what do you, what do you like your average Democrat watching this? Well, you know, they were told that we need to go with Joe Biden in 2020, and then you go through this primary process. It's all they just toss it to the side. And no, we're going to go this direction now. And, you know, it sort of reminds me of this. And we went through Bob Dole, Bush twice McCain and Romney, and went two and three, right? And then we got, and then finally in 2016, Republicans just said they're going to do it all the way and they all went with Trump, that this is the last gas for Democrats to the current Democrats establishment, Schumer, Pelosi, etc. He declined, even though Obama's a sub-degree before there's sort of an internal party revolt. I think if they lose to Trump, again, I do think that there will be a big reassessing on the part of the Democrats. I think that was due in 2020, and then we all know what happened at the 2020 election, Joe Biden squeaked it out by, you know, 0.2 and 0.3% and a couple of the key states and all that. When you did all the election integrity problems, everything. But, Jeff, one thing you got to remember about Democrats, and it's like, they don't necessarily get whiplash. Like Republicans, we would say, "Hey, wait, we just picked this nominee, and now, like, no one's voting for him at the convention. We're just picked. Oh, he just picked the nominee for us. The guy who dropped out is picking our next nominee. I mean, we would have whiplash from that as Republicans. Democrats are very good at just getting in line and doing what they're told. And to illustrate my point, look what happened during the COVID pandemic. They were happy to stay home and wear their masks and all the things they were being told to do. They were happy to just get in line and do them and get a vaccine, all about all those mandates. They didn't have a problem with it. Well, but there will be a time for reassessment for them. I don't know when that comes. They may be loyal when the going gets tough, but when you lose another election, I think this is a big, big, big gamble by the Democrat establishment. This is a Hail Mary pass because this has never happened before. Well, look, it's a big gamble, but it's not as much of a gamble as even Joe Biden on the ballot. I mean, we all agree about that. There was no way. Let's talk to him about why Joe Biden dropped out. Joe Biden didn't drop out because he had a bad debate performance because he couldn't keep his thoughts together or whatever. That's been going on for years, and we all know it. We've seen him stumbling up the stairs. We've seen him referring to people by the wrong name. None of this stuff is new. Democrats did not care. The only thing they cared about was when his poll numbers dropped to the point where they thought there's no way we win this election. Then they threw him overboard. That's what happened. Democrats would have been happy to leave Joe Biden on the ballot even after we all saw him expose himself that he couldn't keep his train of thought. Back on June 26, I think it was in the debate. They didn't have to leave him there if he had still been pulling ahead of Donald Trump, but he wasn't, so they had to get rid of him. Joe Biden, State Auditor, Andrew Sorrell. Andrew, just a few more minutes here. How are things going in your office these days? We haven't talked about that in a while. Yeah, so things are going to be relatively slow until legislature session kicks off as far as trying to get any duties in my office expanded. I've got the bill drafted. It's sitting on my desk. I made some slight revisions. I think I talked about that when I was on with you a month ago. The revisions we made, the suggestion of the rules, Chairman, and the House, I think are going to help the bill be more likely to pass. It really didn't take anything out of the bill. I didn't have to weaken the bill. I just changed what I called. It changed from the Investigations Division to the Property Investigations Division. That's going to get rid of some of the hardware that was in the caucus over the bill. But what I'm focusing on doing right now is the duties that are already assigned under law. We had Board of Adjustments the last two weeks. Those meetings that I've been attending had some very large claims. We had a million dollar claim that we're going to be deciding here next month at our voting session. And then the auditing, the actual property audits that we're doing, we met with me and some of my senior staff. I met with one of the largest departments in state government that last time we audited them. They were missing two million dollars of inventory. By the way, we finally found 1.3 million of that, but 700,000 the state just in essence had to write off. And of course, there were excuses where we just came out of COVID. We lost track of stuff and whatever. We've been working with them very hard the last year and a half that I've been in office to try to prep them for the next audit. We had a pre-audit meeting with them for about an hour. There were probably 15 or 20 of us in the room. And I'm optimistic this audit is going to go much, much better. So we'll find out here in a couple of months that that agency alone will take us five weeks to audit. Our entire staff will take five weeks just to do that one audit. We'll best of luck on that audit. Hey, we got you out of here. Thanks for making time for us. Let's talk again soon. Thanks, Jeff. See you later. All right, state auditor Andrew Sorrell. We're going to get a break here. We'll be right back. This is the Jeff Moore show with us in talk 1065. ♪ Harking harder needs a mountain moonlight ♪ ♪ Older up tight ♪ ♪ Make a little love in ♪ ♪ A little turn of love in on a mason dixon light ♪ ♪ Fits my life ♪ ♪ And holds so right ♪ ♪ My big sea landing light ♪ (upbeat music)