How are you feeling about that effort?

Well, they certainly seem to think so.

You know, there's been an awful lot of conversation about the turnout of these low propensity Trump voters in 2018 and 2022.

And how's it going to work in 2026? And if you talk to Blair, you talk to LaCivita, they think they have that magic sauce to get them out.

And a lot of it goes to the president and, you know, all the things the president has delivered and what they've learned by talking to these people.

consistently over the years and never stopping their their communications with them to understand what it is that's motivating them to turn out and vote.

And, you know, listen, Kurt, this is it's one of the most important aspects of this upcoming midterm election, making sure that they they they turn out.

I'm thinking that maybe we're missing a lot of Trump voters because every pinko commie and leftist weirdo out there is just aching to tell the pollster how politically correct they are.

How could you turn that campaign around?

Well, first of all, I'm not sure we would – There's political consultants and then there are mercenaries, as you say, and I'm not sure we would have we would have taken that job for El-Sayed.

And I'm not really sure what he can do to dig out from the hole that he's created for himself.

All of the associations with Hassan Pike are all of the controversial things.

He has said about 9-11 for crying out loud.

And here he stands against Mike Rogers, a professional from the American security business and a guy who's dedicated his career to keeping our country safe.

On the 25th anniversary of 9-11, this race for Senate in Michigan really is high noon in a way that a lot of the other Senate races aren't.

Does Paxton just go negative every day or does he try and repair his image?

Overall, how do you feel about the Republicans' chances for holding the Senate in the midterms?

Well, Republicans aren't without opportunity, um, in these Senate races.

You look at the, the seats that are most hotly contested, places like Ohio, Iowa, Alaska this year, Texas, those are states where Republicans should be able to win.

The question is, can we win? And I've worked on Republican Senate races for almost 20 years now.

And, um, we do have a lot going for us, but I think it's pretty easy to say, uh, we got a lot going against us too.

Um, one of the big concerns the Republicans have in midterms during the Trump era is will the Trump voters turn out for, uh, elections when he's, his name is not on the ballot? Now, if you look through recent history, the 2018 midterm, the 2022 midterm, each of those successive midterms, they, the Trump voters have turned out at a little bit of a higher rate.

And there's reason to believe they can do, uh, even more now in 2026.

How about, uh, El-Sayed versus Rogers? We, uh, I thought, uh, the, I thought the, uh, Democrats' appearance on Jesse Watters was a, just an absolute disaster for him.

Are we going to get destroyed in the midterms? What's up with that?

Well, uh, you know, honestly, Kurt, um, when president Trump won in 2024, that was the first day I thought to myself that pretty good chance that these midterms don't go Republicans way just because of history.

That's kind of how it works.

And there are a lot of reasons for that, but Republicans are in the natural environment that you would be in when you control, uh, the house, the Senate and the white house at the same time.

And, So if you look at the House races, there are plenty of competitive opportunities for Republicans who actually may pick up a few seats.

I think people probably will remember the redistricting fights from earlier this year.

Those will help Republicans sort of limit the losses.

Can you say again?

Are they going to give us this guy as a gift so Mike Rogers can win?

You know, I think this guy is going to win.

If you look at any of the polls right now, it looks like he is running away with it in their primary against Haley Stevens.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing for Republicans.

But Michigan has been a difficult state for us to win a federal race in over the last 20 years or so.

You might remember a guy named Spence Abraham was a senator back in the day, last Republican.

to be a senator that represents that state.

Is it possible to overplay that hand or is just a steady diet of insanity from the Francesca Hong's, the Abdul Al-Sayed's and the Zoran Mamdami's? Is that just as good a content as any we can come up with? Doesn't hurt.

We played the sound bites yesterday.

Okay.

Yeah, so, so she is studious about maintaining this image as a potential bridge builder for her party, recognizing the fact that her party is as divided as hell.

You've got the radical communists on one side, and then you have the old school Democrats who are trying to get elected on the other side, and she is presenting herself as a potential bridge to pull those two sides together.

You can see her working to try to make this happen.

There's only one way of filling it, and it actually does take the toiling work of building a family, being faithful, making your meals together, going to church on Sundays, all the stuff that your average American does in order to find happiness.

Yeah, Whitlock is, his observations are always astute, and he, he has a way of conveying stuff in a very simple manner that I think everybody sort of digests and appreciates.

I mean, I, I won't pretend to know what's going through Brady's mind, but I do know that if I went home every night and just scrolled TikTok and then woke up the next morning, I'd be like, "Well, where the hell did my night go?" Because that wasn't-

My first question is, would you rather be the owner of 42nd Street between 2nd and 3rd, the former Pfizer high-rise that's collapsing, or be the campaign manager for Graham Platner?

Oh, man.

Hugh, that's a really tough call, I've got to be honest with you.

But I thought, you know, on the main Senate race situation, I thought that you had one of the greatest takes on that race and the media coverage of it this morning when you described that New York Times story from a few weeks ago, not as a catch and kill, but a trap and tame, Hugh.

Oh, thank you.

That is a very astute way of describing what The New York Times appeared to be trying to achieve with that story that everybody was talking about ahead of time behind the scenes.

And then it comes out and all of a sudden this girl, Lindsay, who was put through the ringer by Democrats, nobody believed her.

Are they allowed to pay him off? Can they just go to him and say, we'll give you a million dollars to get out of the race? Because he doesn't have a job, he doesn't have money.

Well, John Adams got it right

and we all get it wrong.

And I'm John Ashbrook and I've got the final word on the Fox News Rundown.

John Ashbrook.

What's on your mind? A lot has changed in the last 250 years.

The earliest days of our great nation were difficult for every man, woman, and child brave enough to settle in a new land.

Everyday life was often violent on the frontier.

Disease was rampant and families faced long odds simply maintaining shelter or putting food on the table.

What do you make of Communist Fest 2026 here in New York City?

I mean, it is so wild.

And the thing is, if you look around the country, it's not just in New York.

I mean, obviously, New York is top of the news right now.

But what's happening there is happening in Washington, D.C. There's a DSA candidate who won the Democrat nomination for mayor in D.C. It's, of course, happening in L.A., where Spencer Pratt came in third place in that election.

primary or that mayor's runoff.

There's a DSA candidate there.

My hypothesis is that while substantively they're different, inform the insurgency in the Democrat Party, which is bringing in hard leftist socialists, is akin to the Tea Party and then the Trump populist insurgency in the Republican Party? What do you think?

Explain this part

...

he said he was a har- harbormaster, and then they, they called the guys working at the harbor, and they're like, "Uh, nah, not exactly.

He's...

We really don't have anybody like, uh, that des- fits the description of that job, uh, that he claims to hold." But this guy is, is an absolute lunatic.

Of course, the Nazi tattoo isn't just a Nazi tattoo, it's a Totenkopf.

This is the, this is the insignia worn by the guards at the concentration camps.

Unbelievable

Explain this one

... yeah, he said he was a har- harbormaster, and then they, they called the guys working at the harbor, and they're like, "Uh, nah, not exactly.

He's, uh, uh...

We really don't have anybody like, uh, that des- fits the description of that job, uh, that he claims to hold." But this guy's, is an absolute lunatic.

Of course, the Nazi tattoo isn't just a Nazi tattoo, it's a Totenkopf.

This is, this is the insignia worn by the guards at the concentration camps.

It's the worst of the worst you could possibly imagine.

Unbelievable.

Guys, weigh in.

Yeah, he's won statewideYeah, Brian, he's won statewide there many times.

This is a guy who can win, especially the more people learn about James Talarico.

You know, there's a lot of, uh, speculation about how much this race is going to cost.

It is going to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

You can be sure the Democrats are gonna invest almost everything they have in that state.

But at the end of the day, it's a red state, it's voted for the president many, many times, and I think it's gonna go red this fall.

Anybody else belong on that list, and how do you feel about the tightness between Rubio and Vance?

Mm.

Because it wasn't just all flash.

It wasn't just all ads.

This is a guy who spent an enormous amount of time, obviously to anybody who watched that, studying what went wrong and what these people do, and he's tapped into this underlying anxiety that Americans have right now.

Which is, you don't...

This is the kind of thing, what you're talking about with your story and the insurance companies and all that, that's the kind of thing that you have a government for in the first place.

Yep.

Right? It is not to make performative statements about gender identity or, or, you know, what you stand for or what...

[laughs]

-Ben Rhodes to Metternich.

But here's the, here's the thing, Hugh.

This guy and his ilk spent their entire careers in Washington appeasing the Iranian regime that has instigated so much terrorism across the world and has tried to destroy our country for forty-seven years.

And, you know, they used our own tax dollars.

Everybody f- remembers the famous air dropping of American cash that was put into that airplane by American taxpayers.

We've got April fifteenth coming up.

He was the Iran guy in Trump One.

Half

of your staff needs to be Republican and not just like the kind of Republican who didn't like Trump.

Half of your staff needs to be among the 77 million people who actually voted for President Trump.

And until you have a legacy media outlet that reflects what Americans are interested in consuming and what Americans are thinking, you're not gonna be able to adequately serve that audience of huge diversity in our country.

And Josh mentioned, at the very beginning of our careers, when these legacy outlets were humming, they were left wing, but center left.

And the management in those organizations probably voted for Democrats, but the top people would always stop the most lunatic story ideas from their young people and say, no, you can't do this.

Well, a lot of those people retired or took buyouts or the company wasn't succeeding enough to continue to satisfy them.

Let's help you lose $40 million this

... you know, the gr- blue light or something. It's like, mm, they're all kind of swarming around him. But it's the same with Gretchen Whitmer. I mean, I've, I've heard people say, you know, in meetings that she's just very charming. The problem is they do these videos and they look like complete fools, and I do wonder if that has hurt their brand so significantly, that you saw... I mean, the week that you had Kamala Harris out there not going to the Al Smith dinner, and then at the same time you've got Gretchen Whitmer giving the Dorito communion. That was a moment where everybody said, "What in the world is happening? These are not serious people." And we are now at a time that is a very serious time. We need very serious people. You saw collapse around the world. We saw what was happening with Israel. We saw what was happening with Ukraine. But their argument on these things is also bizarre to me, because you've got Donald Trump going in and saying, "Okay, we're gonna stop the war in Ukraine." People are after him about the fact that, like, "What do you mean? You're just gonna give this to Putin?" Well, what did, what did the American people want on the progressive side? Do they wanna send troops there and say, "We're gonna get every inch of your border back to you," or do they want the, the killing to stop? And that was what Zelenskyy said he wanted, and then when it came down to, "Okay, we're gonna stop the killing, we'll end the war," it's like suddenly, oh, uh, you love Putin. But what is the answer if the answer is not to stop the war?

Yeah. I mean, th- this is, this is case in point why the Democrats' brand is in shambles. They take positions on issues that make no sense to normal people, and you look at the issues that they've taken positions on, like, like men and women sports. Y- you know, that's an 80/20 issue in our country, and they're going to the mat so LeBron James can play in the WNBA. It makes no sense. It has nothing to do with the two issues that you pointed out that people are most concerned about, their personal finances and whether the government is corrupt and spending their money inefficiently or in a wrong way. And Democrats, time and time again... I mean, look at, look at what some of these l- left-wing judges are doing to try to stop the President from making common sense decisions in our government, that he, he wants to cut spending. The judges are like, "Oh, no, I'm sorry. Our Constitution says you do have to fund trans surgeries in Sub-Saharan Africa." (laughs) That's right there in Article II. You know? It... Like, it makes no sense, and yet, yet Democrats are taking these positions over and over again simply because Trump is doing it and they think that's good politics. And man, are they so wrong.

(laughs)

But it actually doesn't produce things. You know, we... In, in this country, we used to make things and we can do it again, and people, people, uh, regular Americans... We're, I'm from the Midwest, I'm from Ohio, Michael's from Indiana, also from Michigan.People like to make things. They like to start their own companies. They like to have, you know, s- the, the, the feeling of accomplishment that comes with building something. And you just can't do that with a, an English degree the way you can with an engineering degree or something in metallurgical studies. And so, and, and so many of these left-wingers look... Who go to these Ivy League schools, they look down on people who go to trade schools. But I... Like, more and more and more, I am of the mind that a trade school degree is more valuable than an Ivy League diploma. It just is. And i- and if we build this, rebuild this country in the way that it used to be, those people, those people are gonna thrive. I mean, I thi- I think about the guys I know who, who are electricians, right? I- if you know an electrical contractor, they are flourishing, and maybe they went to a trade school when, when... I, like I- I have one buddy, went to a trade school, and now he's an electrical contractor. And I went to a four-year school and got a four-year degree. He is killing it-

And I think he was doing that all night long.

Yeah, I mean, it really seems like it feeds his energy.

You know, it's almost like he was baiting them.

And there were so many moments where he looked directly at them, just waiting for them to interact with him so he could just punch right back because he's so much better than they are.

And he also knows they don't actually have a response to him.

What he is doing is common sense.

And we haven't had much of that in America lately because the entire conversation of everything going on in our country is controlled, has been controlled.

When do Democrats get the message? Do you think that they're going to get the message while Donald Trump is still president?