FM Talk 1065 Podcasts
State Auditor Andrew Sorrell - Jeff Poor Show - Wednesday 8-28-24
Oh, my man. Can this really be the end of this day? I'm sad. I'm over here with the Memphis News again. Welcome back to the Chuff Forest Show. If you're talking about 065, they should be with us on this Thursday morning. I mean, it's Wednesday morning. Let's see here. Joining us now on the line is our state auditor. We pay him a visit about once a month. Always appreciative of his time, but state auditor. Andrew Sorrell joins us on the line. Andrew. Good morning. How are you? Good morning, Jeff. I'm doing well. Thanks for making time. I always appreciate it. Well, you just got to give us a you're right down to the presidential election. And I give you my take real quick. And I'll be kind of on this thing all morning. You look at what's going on and take Trump out of it for just a moment. I know the Harris campaign to me doesn't look like it's doing enough to win the White House. They're banking on a lot of things to fall their way. And I don't know. It doesn't look like a world-class made for longevity type of campaign. Yeah, I think they're writing their initial kind of surge in momentum, so to speak. And they had a very strong rollout for Kamala. She boosted up in the polls. But I've been saying on the radio for a month now, don't let that worry you. I mean, we had we had a month of coverage for Republicans. We had the terrible debate performance by Joe Biden. Trump was way, way better than Biden that debate. Then we had the Trump assassination attempt. Then we had the Republican Convention. And we had J.D. Vance picked his venture running mate. So there were so many like news stories for Republicans getting all the news coverage. Trump was ahead in the polls. And then everything changes for the next month, right? Then you have Joe Biden dropping out Kamala will come in a nominee who's Kamala going to pick for her vice presidential nominee. Then you've got the Democrat Convention. So there's been so many news stories. Now, the Democrats have probably gotten half a billion dollars in free coverage for media in the last month. And Kamala has predictably surged in the poll. I predicted this was going to happen. And I said, don't worry about it. Let's see where the polling settled out after Labor Day. We'll have some indication of which way this race might actually go. But I don't think that the Harris Wall campaign is built the last. They don't really have policy positions yet. And they're basically running on a we are not Donald Trump, orange man bad platform. They mentioned Trump hundreds of times at the convention. If the Republican you mentioned, they hardly mentioned the Biden or Kamala administration, really. They made it about America. They made it about unifying the country and everything. And so I think their whole, their entire platform, the strategy for the Democrats is the same as it was in 2020. We're not that great, but Trump's worst vote for us. And I just, I try to be objective here. I know right wing talk show host that does 18, 19 news in Breitbart. It's not really, it's very hard to do. But if Kamala is my candidate, she's my gal. I want her to be president. And I'm really rooting for her. I mean, I'm frustrated. I would have to be frustrated. I don't think Joy is going to get you there. Because I look at it. I'm like, well, they need to, I would feel better if they were doing a lot more. If they, they had her coached up, it's taken way too long to get her coached up and have her like memorize the game plan or whatever way too long. And, you know, to me, this is a, is it a very satisfactory circumstance? So I don't know. I mean, Democrats seem to get high on their own supply all too often. And they look just like leave Trump out of this and us as Republicans out of it. But there's a lot of problems. And they're like, it's trying to sell for a destination here, but they're stuck in the harbor, it feels like. Look at the, the main decision she's made since then she's become the presumptive nominee was to pick a vice presidential running day. Let's analyze how she did on that decision to your point about where is she going to be a good candidate. It was her pick was a total flop. She could have went with Shapiro from Pennsylvania. That would have actually made that at the time Trump was leading the poll poll by 4% in Pennsylvania. If they could have flipped Pennsylvania, they might have taken the White House, but she couldn't take Shapiro because he's Jewish. And there's so many people in Democrat party that are just anti-Jewish and pro-Palestinian right now. She couldn't get away with that pick. So who does she go with? She goes with Tim Walz. Well, what has Tim Walz done except be a complete and total radical as governor? Now, interestingly, when he was in the Congress, he was a liberal, but he was not what I would call an AOC radical. So look at some of his positions since he's been governor. How about the Take Pride Act, which became law in Minnesota that prevents discrimination based on sexual orientation? The law initially excluded pedophiles from being protected, but then it was rewritten. But then it was amendment HF number 165-5. It was introduced by some trans activists to modernize the definition of sexual orientation, to include attraction to children, and Tim Walz signs the thing. The same year he signs that trans-refuge bill in the law, which allowed the state to give the hormones, sterilization drugs, the gender mutilating surgeries to children without their parent's knowledge or consent. And it also, this is the bill that put those tampons in the boys' bathrooms in Minnesota. And then the most radical abortion bill in history contrasts out with Alabama. We have the best abortion law in the country. I was proud to vote for when I was in the legislature. But in 2023, Tim Walz signed the most radical abortion bill in the history of the state, and it allows for abortions for any reason through all nine months of pregnancy, including on minor children without knowledge or consent of the parent. It allows for the gruesome, late-term abortions, painful infants, all of that, provide zero protections for infants who survive an abortion. You know, we did the Born Alive bill. Representative Jenny Shaver had the Born Alive bill here in Alabama. She said she had heard from witnesses in Alabama that they had seen babies born alive that were later killed because we didn't have the Born Alive bill that says if an abortion is botched in the child was born alive, you have to try to save it. We got that bill through in Alabama. Complete opposite in Minnesota. They just let him die. So he's so radical on abortion that reportedly Nancy Pelosi has even asked him if he can tone down his pro-choice stances because they're too radical. They're going to drive away the moderate. Yeah, I think that's that's true. Going back to that pick, though, and that's an interesting point. Like, how did that come to be? How did he become the nominee? I don't think she put a lot of... I think she had other people kind of had her ear on this, and you know, the other thing about it, Andrew, it's this. It's just a... It's a straight up like play to people's perceptions, the judging the book by its cover. We're so superficial right now. I don't know, though. I don't think you could go 100% superficial and try to moderate and everything will just work out. I mean, to me, and I know I talked about this with Biden, but this remains true. Trump is a twice impeached, convicted of 34 counts, has all these things. If you just look at this on paper, Kamala Harris ought to be up 10 points. She's not. And then that's, to me, just to sign that this campaign's got some work to do. This is kind of like when... Let's say you have an incumbent state senator and you run a poll. Nobody has come out and out against them, and you run a poll, and the state senator is winning the poll 45 to 35. You're like, "Oh, he's winning." Yeah, no, that's terrible is what that means. If an incumbent is ever polling below 50%, that's already bad. And if somebody that nobody even knows who he really is is already a 35, you can predictably say that incumbent's going to lose the election. But I understand your point completely. Kamala should be ahead 10 points on Trump, and the fact that she's not is possibly evident that her campaign is going to continue eroding. And I think when we get into September and the honeymoon period wears off with her and Walt, and we get a first presidential debate next month, that should be interesting to see which way that goes. I know the debate has helped and hurt. You know, with Joe Biden, they really, really helped, right? I mean, they're so bad that their nominee ended up dropping out. I wish Trump had not debated them until after the Democratic Convention. We could have locked in a win for sure if that had been the case. But back in 2020, you may remember, I think it was the second debate where Trump was interrupting Joe Biden so much, and really people left with just kind of a bad taste in their mouth. Trump wouldn't let Joe Biden speak. And even though I think the content of what Trump was saying, beat Joe Biden, the way in which he did it, did not. And the polling reflected that and helped kind of propel Biden, if you believe Biden won without, you know, illegals voting for him, which I don't. But nonetheless, Biden ended up in the White House. So these debates can really move an election a lot. I mean, hundreds of millions of people either watch a live or watch a replay later. So that's going to be an interesting thing to see. How does the Trump-Harris debate go? Yeah, I know that they're like real, you know, everybody on our side, everybody, and there is this apprehension about Trump or whatever, but they're just not looking at what is the Harris campaign doing to make you think it's a winning campaign. I just, no one wants to, no one is really talking about that in the mainstream media, obviously. But, well, they're talking about their good fundraising, right, to have that good fundraising, but fundraising only goes so far. You've got to have a message to put out there for the fundraising to be useful. I mean, it's just going to be attack ads against Trump. And I'll tell one of our guests earlier, if everything's an October surprise and nothing's an October surprise, and they've been beating up Trump for 10 years, if Trump was so bad, I mean, they shouldn't, they wouldn't have needed to change horses. They could have stuck with Biden and Biden would have won. But I mean, obviously, that's, that's an acknowledgement that it does matter who the Democrats put up. And the other thing is, like, if Trump was so bad, they could be beating up on him for all these years. How come he's not at zero? I mean, he's right in the thick of it. So, to me, there's a lot of flaws with this, like, strategy there, their employees. So, I mean, I guess we'll see. But people that hit the panic button to say this is over, Kamala's going to have the media carry her to the presidency. It's just not going to be enough. There's not enough there to make person that you should make technological conclusion. The Democrats have overplayed their hand. And back in 2022, 2023, Donald Trump's popularity had started to dip in the polling. You saw Ron DePhantis come out, and even before he announced for president, four or five months before he announced for president, there was national polls out for Republican primary that had Trump at 35 and the standards at 30. And it looked like Trump might actually be vulnerable in a Republican primary. And then what happened? The Democrats indicted them and convicted them on 34 count. And the whole country woke up and said, this is political. This is a political prosecution. This is unfair. Trump surged in popularity. That's where I think the Democrats went wrong. They took it a step too far. If they had not done that, who knows what kind of race we've been looking at now. But everybody has sympathy on the right. And I think the independence in this country, I think they all had sympathy for what happened to Donald Trump because they thought, what if that was me? Well, and we'll just look at Donald Trump for a moment. I mean, I don't know what different he could do that would satisfy a lot of people who, hey, yeah, I want him to win, buddy. I mean, everything that man does is going to be criticized by the media. The media are going to make it out to be a scandal. You got to stop at this point, just accept that the media are going to be working against you. And play your game like you need to be playing it. Otherwise, like always trying to go back and correct things. The media say we're wrong. You're getting excited about that. That's not, that's just not how you win. Well, another big question, Mark, that remains to be seen. How does the polling look with RFK dropping out endorsing Trump and taking the fame off the ballot and the swing state? How does that play into the race? And these third party candidates do play a big role in who wins the presidency. You saw that with Ross Caro back in the 90s. Who wasn't in 2000? Was it Ralph Nader? They used to talk about the Nader effect and how Ralph Nader running in the green party was going to affect Al Gore. And, you know, possibly it did. I mean, arguably could Al Gore have gotten another 73 votes in Florida if Ralph Nader hadn't been on the ballot there quite possibly. So the third party candidates do what I mean. I mean, I even got a situation where the third party candidate has dropped out and endorsed one. Which I thought was very interesting. Jeff, I don't know if you had time. I actually took the 45 minutes to listen to RFK's entire speech where he dropped out and said why he was doing what he was doing. I mean, a lot of the points the guy made, I agreed with them. Most of his policies, the guy's been a Democrat this whole life. All right, I don't line up with him. But his points on the Ukraine war on many different issues with child nutrition, what's in our food, the chemicals in our food, all those points. Man, that was pretty eye opening to me. I actually appreciated what he said. And I hope he actually is successful on getting some of those things through if Trump is fortunate enough to win reelection here. Well, I think there's just doing the right thing as far as the circumstances lend themselves. And what Trump doesn't need is his allies saying, "Hey, why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that?" Back to the RFK thing, and I caught most of that. The problem with that campaign, I think, right now, and it's kind of interesting time to be a Republican, is the Republicans own that space as the outsider. Had it been Mitt Romney versus Obama or whoever, maybe the third party has a lane. But post 2016, Andrew, I think it's this, that Republicans occupy the quote-unquote outsider lane. Yeah, that's a good point. But I kind of respect RFK in the sense that he cares more about the issues he's running on than he does being president himself. And he came out and said it as much. He said, "I'm not doing this in a vanity campaign. If I can drop out of the race and work with one of the two candidates," and by the way, he reached out to Kamala. She said, "No, she wouldn't even drop the Trump actually taking the call and meeting with the guy. But if I can drop out and work with Donald Trump, for instance, and he wins, and we can try to implement some ideas in the public policy, these are ideas that Republicans would agree with. He got a huge round of applause when Trump introduced him at the event the next day out there in Arizona when this happened. And he said, "I care more about getting my ideas in the public policy and I care about being elected president myself, and I can respect the guy who does that." Real quick, Andrew, before I let you go, we had this story, but I wanted to get you to kind of talk about your new post there at the State Financial Officers Foundation and getting elected as a leadership role. Yes, as soon as I won my primary for state auditor back in 2022, I had a member of the State Financial Officers Foundation reach out to me and say, "Hey, you need to join this group at the group of conservative comptroller, treasurer, auditors, chief financial officers from around the country." We band together, we fight the Biden administration, rule changes on mortgages, for instance, subsidizing people with worse credit with the people who have better credit. You know, they help cover some of their fees, all those type of things we speak out against and we do it at the group, and there's 38 of us from 27 different states, so we get a lot of national news articles out of it. And after I learned what the group was about, what it stood for, I said, "Yes, I'll join." And fast forward, two years later, I ran for a position as auditor at large in that organization. It was fortunate to be elected a couple of weeks ago, and my promise to them was, "I'm going to work to expand this organization. There's only seven state auditors in the group right now, including myself." I said, "I'm going to, in a minimum, I'm going to try to get us to double digits." I've got the Republican nominee for auditor in North Carolina, and in Montana, lined up to join SFLF. Should they be fortunate enough to win those races? Montana is very likely Trump's of 18 points there. North Carolina's a toss-up, don't know which way that'll go. But if those two win and join, that'll get us to nine, and I've just done that in the last three weeks. So I've got a whole list of people to call. I'm going to try to help build this organization. I really believe in it. All right, Andrew, we've got to get out of here a little long, but we always appreciate your insight, and we'll get you on. We'll talk more about what's going on in auditor's office next time. Thanks. I'll see you up. See you later. Thank you. Andrew Serrell, our state auditor. We'll be right back. This is FIT Talk, 1.0. 6.5. [MUSIC PLAYING]