We’ve got a big problem in Wisconsin

Let me tell you about a little birdie of mine I spoke with recently, because what he told me is canary-in-the-coal-mine kind of stuff for the November presidential election.

He’s a hard-core right-winger, and there’s none of that “Donald Trump tiptoes between the raindrops” worship from him. He supported Ron DeSantis in the primary. So this guy’s not going to Mike Lindell symposiums, OK? And he is currently looking at the political landscape in several key battleground states.

We need to do something different, we need to do it fast, and it needs to work.

I want to focus on what he said about Wisconsin in particular after he and I began discussing a poll put out by Donald Trump’s personal pollster, John McLaughlin, in which Trump was losing independents by four in a head-to-head against Joe Biden — and actually finishing third among independents if you factor in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

First, let me just say that in none of the nine realms within the Marvel Cinematic Universe will you find a multiverse reality where Trump loses independents by four points and wins the presidential election. Republicans have not won independents since the 2016 election. What’s the last election Republicans won? 2016. Probably just a coincidence, says Nefarious.

But is it possible that Joe Biden could depress his own base turnout because he is an 80-year-old mumbling corpse and thus open the door to Trump winning if he only loses independents by, say, one or two points? I think that’s possible. Independents are the largest voting bloc in the country right now, so we are talking about tens of millions of people. And in the last two presidential elections, we had one guy win the decisive states by fewer than 40,000 votes in one case and fewer than 80,000 votes in the other.

Which is why my little birdie is on the ground trying to figure out how the electoral needle can be threaded this time around. He’s not busy looking for voter fraud underneath every rock, though. That isn’t who he is. I mention it because it pertains to the voting landscape in Wisconsin and how the rest of our futures hang in the balance.

Based on his professional surveying and canvassing of that battleground state — of which, along with Michigan and Pennsylvania, Trump must win at least one of if not two — my little birdie thinks it is possible we might have the lowest under-40 voter turnout in history.

Now, I’ve taken election fraud pretty seriously since 2020. With this new information at my disposal, I pointed out that introducing this unprecedented level of uncertainty into the electoral equation would help the Democrats with their margin of cheating … er, I mean turnout operation advantage, right?

Bingo, he said.

The fraud concerns in Wisconsin are very real, according to my little birdie, because the state has some of the worst voter files in the country. The surest way to find out who will vote in the next election is to know who voted in the last one. Because if you just poll people on issues or candidates but these people aren’t going to show up to vote, then your poll is worthless. This is why a healthy voter file is vital, because it is how you find the people who typically vote and figure out how to get a message to them so that they vote for you.

Wisconsin is a historically purple state that currently has a Republican legislature and a Democrat governor. You would think, then, this would be a state where the voter file is on lockdown. It’s a pivotal swing state in a hyper-competitive election environment following year after year of accusations of election fraud from both sides of the aisle.

Nope. Not even close.

My little birdie told me he had a woman in one of his focus groups complain about receiving a mail-in ballot for people who didn’t even live with her. When she complained to the city, she learned that five other people were registered to vote at her address. My little birdie verified it. Everything she said was true.

Now consider just how much money and fame have been chased by people moaning and complaining about voting irregularities these last few years without doing anything about it. How many shows, how many documentaries, have highlighted the problem?

Or consider that when I pointed out the sketchy banana republic drop boxes in Wisconsin on Glenn Beck’s show the morning after the 2020 election, the entire Blaze channel got demonetized by Facebook. Is that where we are heading again after zero accountability — or, at the very least, the sort of self-censoring that other high-profile networks on the right have embraced as a means of avoiding being crushed financially by the online algorithms that rule us all?

I’m sharing this with you just after Memorial Day weekend, with the maybe, sort of, not really “most important election of our lifetime” less than 24 weeks in the future. And I can’t even begin to tell you how much I don’t want to do the same election shows I did after the 2020 and 2022 elections. They were two of the worst nights of my professional career because I knew how much pain they meant for our country in the first case and how little we all seemed to care about it after the red wave never happened in the second case.

Are we going to just shrug now and triple down on that when our entire birthright is at stake?

I can’t. I won’t. We need to do something different, we need to do it fast, and it needs to work. Because like Captain America said in “Avengers: Endgame,” I don’t know what I’m going to do if it doesn’t.