Live from Virginia Wednesday morning on The John Fredericks Show – weekdays on WNTW AM 820/ FM 92.7 – Richmond, WJFN FM 100.5 – Central Virginia, WMPH AM 1010 / FM 100.1 / FM 96.9 (7-9 PM) Hampton Roads, WBRG AM 1050 / FM 105.1 – Lynchburg/Roanoke and Weekdays 6-10 am and 24/7 Stream –  host Fredericks welcomed political strategist Steve Bannon to the show to talk about his recommendation for the Trump campaigns new ground game.
Fredericks: Joining us now without further ado is Stephen K. Bannon the host of War Room Pandemic. The number one radio show in America. Except for today. Today Donald Trump is going to be the number one rated show as he hosts Rush Limbaugh. Steve, great to have you.
Bannon: Let’s call that a rally. He’s having a three-hour rally. I don’t want to seem like he’s auditioning for his next gig. It’s just it’s a three-hour rally. So I know I think President Trump is taking to the airways. Saturday night’s very important. You know we got tremendous feedback from all the ones we’ve done with the Young Republicans across the country.
They’re at the vanguard of really this whole volunteer effort to not just poll watchers but election officials. People are going to be in the room. If everybody does their job according to plan right now President Trump will have a massive lead late in the evening on the third of November. And that bold red predicate has to be held. And so that’s got to be held by people. They’re going to be into counting rooms. Absolutely essential that we have young, vigorous, tough people understanding that traditionally many of the people have done that.
Our senior population is rightfully concerned about the CCP virus so we need young people. Because this is going to be a knife fight in each one of these rooms to appropriately certify and make sure that the ballots that came in are certified and certifiable. It absolutely should count and that’s a vote. But if it’s not certifiable it should not count. And that’s where the fights are going to be. And so Saturday night we’re going to have a partner’s discussion. You’ll get super inside baseball.
And John, I got so much positive feedback from the event in New York and particularly your radio interview afterward. So the John Fredericks radio network continues to resonate throughout the country in the world. One of the things you need to understand that we have a massive Chinese audience because the show is broadcast both live and later subtitled in mandarin but also broadcast live in mandarin now. And it’s interesting. As tough and as gnarly as our democracy is, we’re actually teaching a working lesson for people that don’t have freedom like the Chinese about Reagan. When I first heard Reagan’s statement that freedom is only one generation away from losing.
You kind of dismissed it at the time because back in the 70s and 80s obviously it didn’t look like anything like that could happen. But you see that our entire republic is on the line here on November third. It’s no longer a theoretical debate. It’s not a philosophical debate. There’s no commercial or 30-second spot that’s going to change this. This is all about mobilization. This is all about the ground game. This is all about the nitty-gritty of just physically getting people out to exercise their right to vote. And that’s what this is all going to come down to.
Fredericks: Steve we had a lot of momentum a couple of weeks ago. Then there was the debate. Which as you know I was not happy and I made that clear. I didn’t think it was a good idea to not let Biden talk and to interrupt him. And I thought for a lot of people it was just annoying. So I wouldn’t have done that. But now you look at some of these national polls and I know we went through this in 2016. But you look at these national polls and one after the other coming out showing Biden up by 15, 18 20, 23. I mean these are absurd numbers. What is the deal with this?
Bannon: Well look it’s about it’s about momentum. And I think the president’s got a very compelling case. We’re not called War Room Pandemic for nothing. We always assumed that this pandemic because it’s driving the financial it’s driving an economic crisis it’s driving a financial crisis of which he’s handling. We had Betsy McCoy on who was former I think lieutenant governor of New York. She’s a right fire breather and New York Post columnist and she makes the most compelling argument which I’ve been saying.
Trump’s handling of the pandemic is so much more powerful than the to-do list that Harris and Biden put up. I would be diving into that and pivoting into that hard. I think you’ve got to get out. You’ve got to make the case. I am not a fan of going and doing these rallies right now. Right now I think you got to look at operating leverage. You’ve got amazing people that can go out there. You’ve got Lara Trump and you’ve got Donald Trump Jr., Kimberly Guilford, Corey Lewandowski, and Rudy Giuliani. You’ve got 10 to 15 great surrogates.
Fredericks: You!
Bannon: We could spread the country and the battleground states with key people doing mini rallies. And then beam the president in for 10 minutes. 15 minutes of hard breaking. And each one has a news item so you force the mainstream media to cover you. All they’re gonna be covering in a rally is they’re gonna be covered how many people don’t have masks on. how many people are sick. And it’s just so much time to fly down and to get there. And I don’t want people waiting five hours. The Trump people are fabulous. The Trump base is great. But to take all the time what I want to do, knock on doors.
Fredericks: Knocking on doors. Yeah. Bingo!
Bannon: Knocking on doors. I love rallies. I could go to rallies every day. But that’s not where we are. so we need those people knocking on doors or the ones that can knock on doors working phone banks. we’re now into grinded out time. And I think that there’s some disconnect. Particularly I would be taking down what we did in ’16. Take down the spots he commands the media every time he does something. Take down the spots. You’re getting outspent eight to one anyway. And there are no spots here they’re gonna make a difference and stop chasing suburban women and suburban housewives. It’s just not there.
I’ve said this in the beginning. you’ve got Hispanics. You’ve got African-Americans. You’ve got African-American males. You’ve got Hispanic males. You’ve got people that resonate with the economic nationalist message resonates with them. Go where the votes are, and I would pound that. And I would do pay chase. It’s the time you’ve got to shift your resources to have people. You’ve got an advantage. You see Pelosi these people are panicked.
They’re trying to get out the vote for the third. They realize they don’t want to be outvoted on the game day. They’re trying to shift the resources. It’s very difficult for them. Number one they’ve traumatized not just their low information voters they traumatized their elites too. None of them want to go out they all got fear. So we got to leverage off that and get our people out going door to door.
You’ve got to get paid chase. This is all going to come down. That’s what the story in The Hill John will look at today but the early vote in a b vote is going to come down to local density voters. You got to get low propensity voters out. And low propensity voters love President Trump but their local penalty for a reason. They don’t vote okay. You got to go curate that.
Fredericks: So you got to go to that you got to go to them to get the low propensity voters out. You got to go to them.
Bannon: You’ve got the data and you know where they are. You got to go knock on a door. You got to physically knock on a door you got to leave something behind. You got to go back. It’s not one time. You got to go right. So forget it. We’re past the nice philosophical talk. This is about physically getting people to go vote. And I think that that’s got to be a thing. And I’m adamantly just against these rallies because you can do 10 digital or streaming. You’ve got 15 fabulous people. Fabulous. Biden’s got nobody. He literally has nobody that can go out there. He doesn’t even have a vice president that can go out there. I’m actually pretty high on her. I thought her staff did a terrible job of getting Senator Harris ready.
Fredericks: Yeah. It was horrible.
Listen to the full show here:
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