Captain Seth Ketchel is a battlefield-level analyst who brings a battlefield level analytical discipline to one of the most contentious issues in the country, election integrity. He is a former U.S. military intelligence captain, a veteran of Afghanistan, and an expert on trends in being able to predict where our politics are going. He has a new book, The American War on Election Corruption, which you should go out and get immediately.
00:01:31.500I haven't looked at you in those terms, but I will reevaluate you for next year's awards.
00:01:38.340You are someone who I have deep respect for in your analysts of the trends in voting and the anomalies in voting.
00:01:48.300So a couple of things I wanted to ask you about that I'm very curious.
00:01:51.740And that is, how is it possible that Donald Trump wins Wisconsin while the Republican Senate candidate in 2024 is going down narrowly?
00:02:03.040How is it that Trump carries Arizona by the margin he does, but the Senate candidate, our mutual friend, Carrie Lake, goes down to a dirtbag?
00:02:15.560How are those anomalies possible? Because that seems unlikely to me.
00:02:19.820I think the 2024 election was similar to the 2020 election,
00:02:23.520but when Trump made the catchphrase too big to rig, he meant that.
00:02:27.320And I think that in Pennsylvania, you probably would have had a different result
00:02:30.340had Trump not converted 100,000 or so voters that Harris probably expected to have camp.
00:02:36.260But down ballot, once Trump had been declared the victor and all eyes were off the election,
00:02:41.220that particular race you mentioned in Wisconsin flipped in the middle of the night.
00:02:45.260At the end of counting time on election night, I remember specifically
00:02:48.460seeing Trump ahead in which he comes by about four points,
00:07:48.120Welcome to Broward County, Florida, ladies and gentlemen, where dirty voter lists are the norm.0.99
00:07:55.400This claim by Governor Ron DeSantis that we run the gold standard of elections is just not true based on the myriad of problems.
00:08:05.240Even when the boards of elections mail out a mail-in ballot, it has to be returned, requested, in an event that is undeliverable.
00:08:13.640In the primaries two years ago, 4,000 returned to the Lake County Board of Elections, and somebody, somebody cast those votes.
00:08:22.100So it's a very corrupt system here, and you're right.
00:08:24.680I think it all goes back to the voter lists.
00:08:26.620And that's exactly why you don't see a lot of these states, almost all the states, including the red ones, cooperating with the DOJ and the orders to turn over voter rolls.
00:08:36.100So I love the – he puts Boss Tweed on the cover of his great new book, The American War on Election Corruption, The Crusade to Restore Trust in Voting.
00:08:48.480Newt Gingrich wrote the forward. It's a terrific work. I'm only about a third into it, but it is also a great cover.
00:08:56.620You say you have some concerns over the Texas Senate primary.
00:09:02.380I am concerned about it, and I think it presents a combination of issues.
00:09:06.240It presents a very serious political problem, number one, because it was a nasty primary.
00:09:11.640I'm not one of these people that panics over Texas every two years,
00:09:14.880but I think you've got one race that sticks out to people that is causing some concern,
00:09:19.080and that would be Ted Cruz in 2018 and his re-election bid against Robert Francis Beto O'Rourke,
00:09:25.520who came within three points of flipping that seat.
00:09:28.640Now, Ted was a very lazy campaigner, in my opinion.
00:09:31.560I think that he listened to some pretty bad advice,
00:09:34.340and he was going for a blowout when he was barely winning.
00:09:50.140who underperformed by at least 6.5 points, if not 10,
00:09:53.520putting the president in a very difficult position.
00:09:55.300Now, I think that there's leverage over the U.S. Senate and Cornyn and Senate President Thune, Senate Leader Thune, to get the SAVE Act across.
00:10:06.000But it doesn't sound like, based on the news today, that that's going to happen.
00:10:09.360So I almost wonder if we should just say the hell with it and endorse Paxton, because he's a far better Senate candidate and senator waiting to happen.
00:10:18.020It is. I must say that in the 50 years I've been in American politics, I have never seen a more selfless act of.
00:10:24.300Ken Paxton, who could very well still win this Senate seat, in fact, I would argue might be
00:10:28.860well positioned to do so, to say, look, I'll give up my personal ambitions and my candidacy
00:10:33.820if the Senate will simply end the filibuster and allow J.D. Vance to break the tie to pass the
00:10:40.980SAVE Act, which the president correctly calls the Save America Act. It's really not that
00:10:44.680controversial. It simply says that one has to be a qualified U.S. citizen to vote in a federal
00:10:49.600election and one needs to have a certain form of idea these are perfectly reasonable concepts we
00:10:55.160have 50 votes but because of an antiquated rule among gentlemen we don't have the filibuster now
00:11:02.900the instant republicans lose control of the senate if they would if they do they will end
00:11:07.320the filibuster and they will ram through some of those left-wing extremist legislations you've
00:11:12.040ever seen we have a unique opportunity right now to save the country by passing this vote and john
00:11:18.020thune i bet donald trump wishes if he had to guess again he had supported rick scott to be the
00:11:24.980majority greater than john thune who thune who will not even uh leave the senate in session
00:11:31.060so that trump may have recess appointments i mean there are many jobs in the trump administration
00:11:35.960that are yet vacant or even worse still filled by biden quizlings that have not been filled because
00:11:42.480there's no process for confirmation. If the Senate was kept technically in session, Trump would have
00:11:51.280the ability to make at least temporary appointments so we could actually run the machinery of
00:11:57.960government. But of course, they won't allow that. On top of this idea that both senators
00:12:06.320must agree on the choice of a U.S. attorney, a U.S. attorney who might be in a position to
00:12:12.180investigate the corruption of, well, those two U.S. senators, the so-called blue slip system,
00:12:18.580where a U.S. attorney has to have at least the acquiescence of a Democrat senator in his state.
00:12:26.360All of Biden's appointments were duly approved by Republican senators. He had the right to appoint
00:12:31.600his U.S. attorneys, as horrible as some of them were, but they have not given Donald Trump the
00:12:35.940same courtesy. In fact, they continue to refuse to confirm his appointments. And I think that is
00:12:42.700hurting his administration. And you can't sue because it's not a law. It's an antiquated
00:12:49.280custom. We got to break the filibuster first. I think that's next. You know, I think all roads
00:12:55.340lead back to the corruption of our elections, because you have the problem with not enough
00:12:59.940senators willing to get this across. But you have the last three federal election cycles,0.69
00:13:04.520Where if you restore these Republican losses that we've already mentioned, my count is that since 2020, if you take those three elections, we should have 62 Republican senators in office, not 53.
00:13:15.660Well, once Saskatchewan and Alberta secede from Canada, which constitutionally they have the right to do, and maybe in the process of doing, and then become independent, then applying for statehood, I get you at least four more conservative members of the Senate and a bunch of conservative members of the House.
00:13:37.060I'm thinking maybe Cuba and Venezuela, too, give us four more.
00:13:39.800uh that's an interesting idea i wonder if the president would also then appoint marco rubio
00:13:45.400uh in addition to being the archivist of the united states the national security advisor
00:13:50.980the secretary of state uh but would also appoint him governor of uh of uh of cuba that would be
00:13:59.020you know one more thing for him to put in his resume he's handled everything really well so far
00:14:03.300no i'm very very uh pleased and happy with my home state senator his politics were not always
00:14:09.260mind i did support him over charlie christ in the tea party circle and i'm glad i did he has been a
00:14:14.320valiant warrior against marxism and marxist narco trafficking in this hemisphere where he and trump
00:14:20.460are obviously based on what they did in dorau this weekend with all those central and south
00:14:25.100american leaders in this new coalition to fight uh the the narco uh drug trafficking that's
00:14:33.000mostly done by these leftist Marxist states in this hemisphere.
00:17:36.320And we're back with Captain Seth Ketchel.
00:17:38.820He has a very lively feed over there at Substack.
00:17:42.720He is an author, election integrity analyst, former U.S. Army intelligence captain.
00:17:48.180And he is also, I think, a very shrewd reader of political trends.
00:17:54.100I do have to ask you, in your new book, which is The American War on Election Corruption, The Crusade to Restore Trust in Voting, which I highly recommend to you, you say that elections are not stolen but rigged.
00:18:08.520You know, it was actually Newt Gingrich's comment about the elections not being stolen but rigged.
00:18:13.700And I wanted to pick the speaker right before because, you know, we all, you and I, Roger, we've toured a lot of events and we tend to talk in circles.
00:18:20.520And one of the more difficult audiences, and we deal with them all the time in Arizona, regular rank-and-file Republicans that may not like the president's style who don't want to talk about election corruption.
00:18:29.760And I always knew that Speaker Gingrich felt the same way about elections that I did.
00:18:33.780And by not stolen but rigged, I mean that the 2024 election made it very obvious to me what the capabilities and capacities of the various states to produce which ballot counts are.
00:18:43.460And it's all based on what types of laws they have on the books.
00:18:46.140So, while Governor DeSantis may say that he's got the gold standard of elections, I wouldn't call it that.
00:18:51.380I would say maybe states like Iowa have the gold standard of elections.
00:18:55.000But for a large state, clamping down on how much cheating is possible with the more than 3 million mail-in ballots that Florida has every cycle has really turned that state into a blowout.
00:19:04.920I mean, nobody's going to win Florida for the Democrats for our lifetime, my lifetime, and I'm 41 years old.
00:19:09.440So, forcing voters to request a mail-in ballot, verify addresses, that really tamps down on how much cheating is possible.
00:19:16.140So rigging is done by what types of laws? The big three laws are automatic voter registration, universal mail-in voting, and ballot harvesting. You have those, you have a Democrat superpower.
00:19:25.660Yeah, it's very interesting. The trend in Florida now for the first time Republicans have over one million dollar one million voter voters voter registration edge over Florida Democrats. This was a state that until not that long ago is a purple state rather than a red state become a solidly red state. A lot of this has to do with with Hispanic Americans beyond Cubans, Venezuelans, even Puerto Ricans who more traditionally Democratic gravitating to the new Republican Party of Donald
00:19:55.640trump and therefore i think it's i think it is easy to say at this point is whoever wins the
00:20:00.420republican nomination to be governor of florida most likely congressman byron donalds who's been
00:20:05.280endorsed by the president uh based on uh that endorsement alone but but whoever wins the
00:20:11.300republican nomination there are several other candidates um the democrats have no bench here
00:20:16.780and their party has atrophied very badly uh so i think roger there's a few things in florida
00:20:21.860I like to watch. There are three things in Florida I really like to watch.
00:20:26.380Number one, Miami-Dade County is a pretty interesting opportunity for the Republicans everywhere.
00:20:32.000I get frustrated watching the party in Pennsylvania.
00:20:34.520They don't seem to realize that if they could just go into Philadelphia County and be anti-crime, anti-corruption, and be 10% better,
00:20:40.700they could never lose the state again based on the trend in the rest of the state.
00:20:43.880So Miami-Dade County offers an urban roadmap for Republicans if they can figure out how to replicate that.
00:20:48.440Number two, the overall trend of Florida.
00:20:51.040So Florida was R-plus 7.8% by registration, 1.1 million more Republicans than Democrats when Trump won by 13 points.
00:20:59.020Now it's R-plus 11.2, almost 1.5 million advantage.
00:21:02.860What that means is Florida is on pace to be redder than Texas in the next presidential election, whether that's J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio as the party nominee.
00:21:09.760And Florida has a 1952 to present, brand present, in which Pennsylvania and Michigan move in the same direction as Florida.
00:21:17.400So Florida's current lean suggests very strongly that the next Republican nominee will carry both Pennsylvania and Michigan.
00:21:22.620And then the third thing I like to watch is Duval County, Jacksonville.
00:21:25.400It has shifted in the same direction as Georgia in every presidential election since 2004.
00:21:29.740So I can't get party registration figures in Georgia because they don't register by party.
00:21:34.480But I can read them in Duval County, and Duval County is almost flipped to a Republican registration advantage.
00:21:39.420I know some of these demographic trends are very, very interesting.
00:21:42.880Of course, they also, the negative side, look at New York City and the white flight, the flight of Catholics, the flight of working class white voters changing that Democrat primary to produce a memdami.0.74
00:21:58.940I'm going to have Captain Seth Ketchum back because I want to get his thoughts on 2026 and 2028.
00:22:04.520I think we beat up the last election pretty good tonight.
00:22:08.220Seth, good luck with your book again, The American War on Election Corruption, The Crusade to Restore Trust in Voting by Captain Seth Ketchel.
00:22:17.080You can go to Amazon. Grab your copy right now.
00:22:20.000Yeah, thank you very much, Roger, for having me on.