Rick:

Welcome the intersection of faith and the culture. It’s WallBuilders Live. We’re taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective.

My name is Rick Green. I’m a former Texas legislator and America’s Constitution coach, here with David and Tim Barton. And WallBuilders Information, by the way, is available at our website, wallbuilders.com. But David and Tim, I got to tell you, man, it’s a privilege to work with these guys, they are on the front lines. If you can catch them, they are all over the country speaking, well, I don’t know how many cities they’ve been in this year.

But Tim’s a national speaker and pastor and president of our organization here at WallBuilders. And David, of course, America’s premier historian and just a blessing to the nation, to be honest with you. I mean, even when you take the issue like separation of church and state, 30 years ago, everybody thought that was in the Constitution, nobody taught the truth on that. The lie had permeated the entire culture. And here comes David Barton, he unveils the truth, writes a book called Myth of Separation of Church and State, that ultimately becomes original intent. This tool, man, I mean, it’s a big old thick book with a quarter of the book being all the footnotes. It’s so well documented. And I can tell you, it changed my life and certainly gave me what I did not learn in law school. And I have heard that from no kidding, thousands and thousands of people over the 20 years or so that I’ve had the chance to work with these guys.

So anyway, you’re blessed to be listening, I’m telling you, but I’m blessed to get to work with them. Check it out at wallbuilders.com. Get you some good material today. Share it with your friends and family. In fact, now is a good time to be doing some Christmas shopping, lots of good stuff there. In terms of videos, kids, books, I mean, you name it, it’s all there at wallbuilders.com. But thank you for listening.

As you know, we are an action-oriented program and we’re always challenging you to do things, to not just pray, but act to not just study, but actually go out there and be a force multiplier, teach other people. All of the actions that we’ve taken over the last few years, as more and more people have gotten involved, they’ve been really, really good. I mean, it’s been good to see so many people wake up and be a part of the solution. But a lot of people were disappointed in the election. And so it’s very important for us to take that in stride and have a big picture, be able to step back and look at that in the context of world history and context of the Bible.

And so we do this thing every year called the ProFamily Legislators Conference. And David kicks off the conference at the opening dinner with sort of a review of the last year and gives great perspective. And so David’s about to do that. We’re going to actually share that presentation with you, our listeners here on WallBuilders Live. So let’s just jump right in. This is David Barton at the ProFamily Legislators Conference.

PROFAMILY LEGISLATORS CONFERENCE

David:

Okay, guys. Thank you all for taking the time to be here and being with us tonight. I want to kind of go over something we’re all tired of going over, and that’s some election results, but maybe from a different perspective. So let me give you a look at some things, then we’re going to share some things at the end. And each of the night sessions tends to be a little more spiritual emphasis than throughout the day. You’re going to get your brain challenged throughout the day, a lot of great speakers nationally.

We moderated 157,000 pieces of state legislation this year. Out of that, we tried to pick 12, 13, 14 things we think will be growing issues in this next legislative session. So, we tried to pick things that we think you’ll be facing in most states. Certainly, with the republic we have with federalism, every state is different. But we’ve tried to pick things that appear to be growing, issues that we’ll deal with. So let me kind of go through some election stuff.

Since election night, Tim and I does election coverage on election night for a number of cable networks, and we’ve done that now for 12 years, live coverage. And this was a really confusing, perplexing night. There was a lot of stuff that didn’t go the way anybody predicted. And so in the weeks since that, I’ve been crunching numbers and looking at stuff and trying to get internal numbers to see what might be out there that might be helpful to us. Let me go through some of that.

It was a perplexing and a confusing and a disturbing night in some ways. But I’m reminded of 1 Corinthians 8:2 that says if anyone thinks he knows anything, he doesn’t know anything like he should. And that’s pretty much where this went. All the experts got it wrong, and what they thought was going to happen did not happen. So when something is that confusing and that unpredicted and that just swerves, might be something really providential going on, might be something that’s a whole lot bigger than what we think because none of this makes sense. It is not traditional politics.

I’ve been involved in local, state and national politics for a long time, was in this cycle as well, running the circles in D.C., running the circles with state chairmen. In the last several weeks, we were on 132 cities, 24 states working in the 76 congressional races we thought were flippable. So I was in every state you can think of that’s a battleground state and every district we can think of, and nothing went the way that we thought all the numbers were. So let me go through some of this. What I’m sharing is generalities, and there’s always exceptions to all of this. And while overall the election night was not what was expected, there were certainly some states that did really, really well. There were certainly some states that had really bad. But let me just talk in generalities and kind of go from that background.

So I want to start with something that happened to me a few years ago. Glenn Beck was a good friend. Glenn asked me to be part of some arena events that he was doing a number of years ago that were called the American Revival. And in the American Revival, the theme he had was 1 Corinthians 13:13, that all of these of this abiding faith, hope and charity. And so faith, hope and charity, that was the American Revival, let’s get back to those three. But it was really kind of a different look at that verse.

On the faith side, he had me speak, and so I talked about faith and the history of faith in the nation, what it did, what it built for our institutions. And then when we got to the charity side, it was Judge Andrew Napolitano, if you remember Andrew Napolitano, and he talked about charity from the standpoint not of the word love, but of the word of charity, who is supposed to be responsible for this? And this is really a federalism issue. The governments aren’t responsible for charity, it’s supposed to be private individuals and families and churches. It’s not the government’s role. So he used the word charity to talk about the line of distinction between what’s God’s and what’s government and how it’s supposed to break.

And then we had Professor David Buckner from Columbia University, who’s a noted national economist, do the hope side. And when he was talking about hope, it was depressing. He just went through all the bad stuff in the economy, the deficit, the debt, what it means to the future, what it’s going to do for debt load for perpetual debt, what it’s done for all the various types of debt, what it does to interest. And it was not very encouraging. And this supposed to be the hope side.

And Glenn said, no, look, I understand this is not encouraging, but here’s the way it works. If you have stage four cancer and don’t know it and you go to a doctor and he finds out you have stage four cancer and you say, what’s up, Doc, I understand what’s going on? He said, oh, you’re great, everything’s fine. He said, that’s not a good deal. But if he says, you know what, you have stage four cancer and it’s really bad, but here’s what we’re going to do to fight that. And he goes then lays out a plan. He says, it’s not good news, but you have hope because you’ve heard the truth. And he said, telling the truth is one of the things that’s really responsible for generating hope. Ignoring the truth does not give you hope, you’ll get disaster and didn’t see it coming.

And so tonight I’m going to give some true thanks and there’s going to be some call outs in this because I think there’s some areas where we really had good things on the table and did not perform in those areas. So let me throw it out and I think we’ll probably all agree at end with what it is we may disagree on some points along the way. But all you folks are legislators, but you’re also activists. And so you care about policy, but you also care about issues. And that was the one thing that really kind of stood out in this election more than most elections I’ve been involved with. This one had less to do with values than any I recall. I’ll take you through some of that in a minute what the polling shows.

So we were caught by surprise in so many things. I do think that actually, even though we know the Democrats had polled this, Republican polled it, Independents polled had it, they polled the issues, I think the Democrats had some internal polls that were much better than what anything else was. And I say that because when we were on the East Coast doing a lot of the races there, we kept seeing the Democrats stop spending money in several races. And that was a really thing because the DCCC, which is a congressional arm that spends money, they stop spending money in races and they were very competitive races, that’s why we were there was, we had a chance of flipping those things.

And our belief was going in this thing that anybody that’s within five points probably has a good chance of winning on election night because of what was going to be the red way, what tsunami, all the stuff that’s polling, and yet the Dems start spending in those races. Well, it turns out they were right. The races they’ve spending in, they won handily and we thought they were battleground races. All the national polls showed they were battleground races. But they stopped spending because they had better polling that said, no, we’re going to win that race and there’s no use wasting money here, let’s move it somewhere else.

So I would say just by reading after the fact, they had better polling than really what we were aware of. And so we were kind of unprepared for some of the results. Let me add some of the moral issues. Let’s take the abortion issue as an example. Take the abortion issue, what happened. Going into the election, all the polling we had for the three months leading up to the election, the number one issue, continued to be the economy, number two issue continued to be crime. Way down in 5-7 usually was abortion. It wasn’t the huge issue. So everything is focusing around crime and around the economy. That was the big stuff to campaign on.

Democrats were able to single handedly turn that. They put 415 million into abortion ads. They nationalized the whole issue over abortion. They did it so much and they were so sweeping in their claims that even CNN called out the Dems for mis-characterizing the abortion issue. They put a bunch of ads on TV where they were flat getting it wrong, but didn’t matter. That was their national focus. That was their national emphasis. And so they put 415 million of that. We only pro-life money, we put 1/35th of that, they outspent us 35-1 on the abortion issue. How did it turn out?

Well, when you start looking at exit polls like in Pennsylvania, where we expected to make some serious gains, we lost the House in Pennsylvania, lost a lot of seats in Pennsylvania. We thought we’re going to be making gains in Pennsylvania. It’s interesting, the exit polling coming out of the polls, the number one issue for voters in Pennsylvania was abortion, 36%. Number two was the economy at 11%. And number three was crime at 10%, 2.5 times more than what we thought were national issues, they had driven abortion to the top of the rank.

And then if you break the demographics down all the state, you find that generally the traditional stuff happened, that generally gender stuff we know where that’s going to happen, we know the generations are going to do. Millennials actually were a little closer to being conservative this time than they have been. They were 51% Democrat this time, they’re usually much higher than that. They actually came closer. Married folks still vote Republican more than single folks do. And so we had all the traditional splits that you normally have in conservative Republican stuff. None of that was a surprise.

What was surprised with the youth vote, the Gen Z vote. For 20 years I know of it’s always been an emphasis to get the young people out. So Rock the vote was Obama’s thing. And generally young people don’t show up at any significant degree for elections. That’s always a big emphasis, it’s always the big hope, and it doesn’t materialize. It did this time. Gen Z turned out in massive numbers and they voted plus 28 for Democrats. That’s where the election rested; was virtually every state, it was the Gen Z vote that changed it.

So that youth vote, that’s really strange because that 28 plus D was 28 plus pro-abortion, which is kind of weird because the Gen Z generation is the most pro-life generation in our polling history. Been doing polling for 120 years in America, abortion-wise, since back in the 70s, but nonetheless, it had always been that the older you were, the more prolife you were. So the 65 up generations are more pro-life, than the 55-65. Well, about 12 years ago, switched and young people and the millennials, they became more pro-life than the over 65, and then now the Gen Zs are more pro-life than the millennials were who were more pro-life than the over 65.

So you have a very pro-life generation, about 70% pro-life in most polls, a very pro-life generation who ends up voting very pro-abortion and very pro-D, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Well, it doesn’t make sense because they are products of education for one. So they’re pretty open to progressive stuff and pretty open to that message. But what the Democrats did very effectively was they nationalize the election on abortion, and they didn’t make it about abortion, they made it about freedom. They said, hey, Republicans are trying to take away your freedom. You got to save the democracy. What you saw on January the 6th, that’s what Republicans are going to do. They want to destroy the whole nation. It’s up to you guys to save. And they did very effective ads and very effective reaching out to that generation on not an abortion message because they can’t win on that, but they did win on a freedom message. And that is a really hard thing.

And by the way, I think we mentioned the conference a couple of years that some national polling that we had done on one of the cases, we’re going to Supreme Court and we found that if you use the word religious freedom as opposed to religious liberty, among all five generations of voters, you actually gain 24 points of support just for using the word freedom over liberty. So Americans don’t respond nearly as well to the word liberty as they do freedom and Democrats took advantage of that. And so they pushed this freedom agenda. And it’s interesting to see how they were able to move that in.

So in pushing the abortion agenda, there were also a lot of states that that this became a big deal. And by the way, we could have done a lot of messaging on the other side. It was really easy to make. And if you saw the standard ads that came out of the DCCC or the Democrat Central Committee, it was all about all abortion all the time for any reason that it cause, there was no limits on abortion. So easy to nationalize that and make it about infanticide.

Rick:

Alright, folks, got to interrupt, David, for just a second here, we’re going to take a quick break. We’ll be right back. You’re listening to WallBuilders.

THE AMERICAN STORY

Hey, guys, we want to let you know about a new resource we have at WallBuilders called The American Story. For so many years, people have asked us to do a history book to help tell more of the story that’s just not known or not told today.

And we would say very providentially in the midst of all of the new attacks coming out against America, whether it be from things like the 1619 project that say America is evil, and everything in America was built off slavery, which is certainly not true or things, like even the Black Lives Matter movement, the organization itself, not out the statement Black Lives Matter, but the organization that says we’re against everything that America was built on, and this is part of the Marxist ideology. There’s so many things attacking America.

Well, is America worth defending? What is the true story of America? We actually have written and told that story starting with Christopher Columbus, going roughly through Abraham Lincoln, we tell the story of America not as the story of a perfect nation of a perfect people. But the story of how God used these imperfect people and did great things through this nation. It’s a story you want to check out, wallbuilders.com, The American Story.

Rick:

We’re back here on WallBuilders, and we are actually going to jump right back in with David Barton. He’s out at the ProFamily Legislators Conference speaking on the results of the last year, the things that we can do to respond to this and the action steps we can take to restore biblical values in our culture. Here’s David Barton at the ProFamily Legislators Conference.

PROFAMILY LEGISLATORS CONFERENCE

David:

It’d been so easy to say, look what Democrats did in Virginia. Look what they did in Maryland. Look what they’re doing in California. They’re saying that after a child is born, you can go ahead and kill the child after it’s born, law passed in Virginia. The one proposed in Maryland said we’re going to allow abortions up to 28 days after birth and still call them abortion. And then in California, it’s up to 30 days after birth and they’ve already passed that through the House, it’d been so easy to nationalize this as just murdering kids. Democrats want to murder kids. And instead of them characterizing everything as January 6th, we could have said, look, the Dems are burning down the cities, look what’s happened to the crime. We didn’t. We left all that national messaging off the table.

And the guys I was with in D.C., the consultants, kept saying, oh, you don’t want to talk about moral issues. Don’t don’t talk about abortion. So we left stuff on the table. But interestingly, the people who did talk about it did really well. Rubio is one, [inaudible 15:55] is another, J.D. Vance, they outperformed what they were supposed to do in polls on Election Day, and so they overcame that because they were willing to talk about infanticide. These guys on the other side are radicals, they want to kill kids after they’re born. We just left that message on the floor. So that was something that came out from a lot of these.

And what we also saw in that, faith voters; faith voters was the other interesting thing. That’s the single biggest constituency the Republicans have. For the last five presidential elections, a single best indicator of whether someone will vote Republican or Democrat is that often they go to church. That’s the single greatest indicator. It’s been that way for five straight presidential elections. That is a vast majority in the Republican constituency. It was untouched this time. I did not see anything at the national level or anything at any state party level that ran any ads that were pro-religious liberty or pro-religion or anything.

You remember Trump specifically reached out to the Christian community. He said, hey, I’m going to bring back Christmas. And you guys are treated like third class citizens, that’s not going to happen anymore, and I’m going to get rid of this IRS stuff on your church. He specifically appealed to that community. He got 81% of the evangelical vote. That’s the biggest ever recorded. He acknowledges that’s a single reason he became president. We left the faith vote on the table.

Now, we were certainly working with pastors and trying to get them out and we did really well in certain areas. In Colorado, for example, a very blue state, it did not do what the other blue states did. Blue states like Michigan, like Pennsylvania, like Minnesota, they became more blue with this election. We actually lost four Republican trifecta, US Democrat picked up two Democrat trifecta. This is the only election in the last 30 years where that the President’s party has gained state legislative seats. So this one went against every thing that we’ve had for decades. And a lot of it was the faith voters didn’t get out.

I’ll show you a slide here. I was in Georgia just last week. We’re working on Herschel’s race, trying to get over the finish line on that and so we’ve got another 17 meetings scheduled in Georgia. But you see the darker green and the darker the green is the lower the turnout. The top part of Georgia is where Christians and conservatives were the strongest: had good turnout in Atlanta all over, but the Christian and conservative areas did not turn out. And this is in Georgia and camp won by a large margin, but there might not have even been a runoff had the conservative Christians had a reason to get out. And so no one was messaging on them, no one was reaching out to them. And that’s the biggest constituency Republicans had, and there was no national effort to do that. So that’s one of the things that stands out.

The other thing that stands out is voters tended to reward leadership or perceived leadership. Look at DeSantis, you know, he runs away with this thing, people really loved what he was doing. Kemp was perceived to be a leader. He was very close, thought might be 1-2 point race. He wins by 8 or 9. And it’s interesting that in those states you had Democrat elected officials endorsed DeSantis. So this is a guy that’s changing the state in the right direction. They did the same thing for Kemp. They did the same thing for Bill Lee in Virginia. They did the same thing for Greg Abbott in Texas. Even the Democrats were endorsing leadership.

And so what you find is if you take the five governors who were considered the front runners in fighting COVID, fighting the mandates, the top five that did that, it’s interesting four years ago, those five won by an average margin of 3.7 points. This election, those five won by 18.2 point average. They just ran away with it. And so people that were considered to be leaders and considered to have backbone and considered to be standing up for the people did really well. Even Jared Polis in Colorado, you know, he was the first Democrat to get rid of that stuff. People said, reward you for that. We appreciate you doing that.

So leadership and backbone is something that appears to have been rewarded. There’s a lot more races, but those are just two good examples of it. Let me take you through some of the ballot initiatives that happened. In the election, there were 132 ballot initiatives on under the boards. Let me take you through what happened. On the abortion side, there were five ballot initiatives, all five of them went pro-abortion, including in two pro-life states. And this is kind of what Kansas did a year and a half ago, they pro-life state passed a pro-abortion measure. But it’s interesting to the Democrats in passing that didn’t talk about abortion, it was against freedom and stuff like that. So they’re staying away from the word abortion because that’s not favorable. But they have re message and they have made it all about freedom and that’s where they won.

So we saw and there are even in Montana and a state that the particular measure of pro-abortion measure that was on the ballot, it’s opposed by 72% of the people and yet it won in Montana, even though opposed by 72%. So they got their people out. They got their pro-abortion people out at very high level, very effective doing that. There was a religious freedom amendment that failed in Arkansas, but there was one that passed in Tennessee. And the one in Tennessee is kind of historically fun.

Back when the Founding Fathers did the 13 states, often the measure in the 13 state amendment said, if you’re a preacher, you can’t run for office. Well, it goes back to Great Britain days. We don’t want the preachers telling the state what to do. Well, John Witherspoon, who was a preacher who signed the Declaration, wrote an op-ed on that and said, wait a minute, am I not a patriot like the rest of you guys? Matter of fact, I lost my son in the war and I fought the British. And so he went through and they said, yeah, you’re right. Why are we keep them preachers out because they’re the ones who helped us win the war? So that one out of most amendments except the Tennessee Constitution still had that from 1796.

Back in 1796, when they became a state, William Blount, who was assigned of the Constitution, was their first governor in their Tennessee, said, we don’t want preachers running for office. Well, they got that out of the Constitution in Tennessee now. So even though there’s been preachers running for office, it’s no longer in the Constitution. So Tennessee made that change.

Also, marijuana, there’s 19 states in D.C. who are pro-marijuana. There’s only one state who had voted against it up to now in the last ten years. Michigan voted against medical marijuana. But what happened in this election, in Missouri, Maryland, it passed, but it failed in Arkansas and North Dakota and South Dakota. So that’s the first real pushback we’ve had on marijuana, which is good. But Colorado passed not only just they already had marijuana, they went to hallucinogens now, so they’ve approved hallucinogens there, that’s going to help safety in the state. I want to drive on their highways, that’s going to be a lot of fun.

Then voter ID kind of stuff, in Arizona, stricter voter ID measure failed; in Nebraska, it passed. In Ohio, they have a measure that prohibits non-citizens from voting. Let’s see. And there were four states that were dealing with separation of powers, all the COVID stuff. When the governors had the right to call everybody in and weren’t talking to the legislature, by and large, and I know here in Texas, that was an issue: our legislators never got a choice on whether there was emergency sessions or how long they would go or continue. So four states had measures. They say, hey, let that power be in the legislators, not just the governor, come to us with it. And three of the four states got rejected on it. That was a bad messaging thing. Most people said I didn’t like the governor doing it, and I sure don’t want that legislature added to it. They didn’t understand that. No. No. We’re the ones trying to stop the governor from doing what he did for you. And that never got message. So three out of four said no on the separation of powers.

Electronic surveillance, they banned that. In Montana, there’s a measure in federal Congress called the Fourth Amendment’s Not For Sale. Right now, the police are able to take all sorts of geo tracking information on anybody and buy it from private vendors. And it’s stuff they would not be able to do unless they had a warrant otherwise. But because they’re buying it from private vendors, they can get all your phone information, all your phone records, all your locations, stuff that’s supposed to be covered by the Fourth Amendment. They say, well, we’re just buying what’s on the open market.

Well, this provision says, no, even if it’s on the open market, if you’re law enforcement and government, you can’t get into private records unless you have a warrant, Fourth Amendment. And so that’s a measure to say free market is one thing; government is not the same as free market and you don’t have access. Even if you have access to information, you can’t use it unless you’ve got a warrant. So that was Montana. That’s a measure in the federal Congress that they’re trying to get passed.

Oregon gave constitutional right to health care, so everybody in Oregon now has a right to health care. However, Oregon also passed a Second Amendment measure that said you have to limit your magazine capacity. Well, the sheriffs came out today and said you may have passed it, but we surely aren’t’ enforcing it. So in Oregon, the sheriffs stood up there. Nevada passed ranked choice voting. That’s disastrous. Ask Alaska how that’s working out. It’s not too good. And then Nevada also put its pro-trans amendment on the Constitution, that if you’re a trans person, you’re not protected by the Constitution. That’s a real problem because if we’re going to start picking and choosing people, I’ll go to one that Bob McEwen often used. Are you going to put left handed, red haired women in there for protection as well? I mean, how many groups can you come up with?

So if you’re going to start doing groups instead of individuals, you’ve got a real problem. Constitution protects individuals. If you’re going to break it into groups, now, if Christians don’t get in there, they won’t have the constitutional protection because trans do, but Christians. So it gets really bad.

So looking at the ballot initiatives, it was kind of a mixed thing with the ballot initiatives going back to the rest of the night. So the people did reward clear leadership.

Final thoughts, let me just run through some things. We’re doing well locally. We didn’t do well nationally. We didn’t do well to state. And again, I think there might be a providential reason to that. Let me show what’s happening locally. I was in Virginia Beach yesterday and I talked to Congressman Randy Forbes, former congressman, retired now, Randy had just helped in Virginia Beach and they won 11 out of 12 seats in Virginia Beach on the local level. In Minnesota, where they got back on election night, I got a call the next day from a pastor up there said, hey, guess what, I just got elected to school board. So we’re winning local elections. And let me just take you to some headlines real quick.

This is Minnesota. Even in Minnesota, we won a bunch of school board races there. And churches are getting organized and churches are starting to understand local stuff and local community. Here is in Denver, both Denver and Colorado Springs, 1,500 churches got engaged, took 78 school boards. So Christians now have the school board in Denver and all four in Colorado Springs, which is pretty amazing stuff. That’s a big victory, even though the state, and the state, I think this church actually stopped Colorado from going to split as it did. Pollish ran away with it. But the Dems only picked up one state in Colorado, which is a fairly blue state, and it’s because there were one million voters contacted with Voters Guides on Christian stuff, get out and vote. And so we saved the legislature there.

Rick:

Alright, folks, we’re out of time for today. We’re going to do two more programs sharing this presentation from David at the ProFamily Legislators Conference. So do not miss tomorrow or the next day. And of course, when it’s all over, all three programs will be available at our website. So check that out as well. Thanks so much for listening to WallBuilders Live. 

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