H2: Ryan Wrecker and Rich Rubino analyze candidate shifts, name recognition, and the 2026 midterms.

What this episode covers

Transcripts Hour 1, Segment 1 Ryan Wrecker: Oh boy! Happy to be with you, and can't believe we're here already on this Labor Day. It's been forever, it feels like, since we've been together. Well, I guess I was just on a month ago in August, but if you want to reach the show, we do have the Common Sense Retirement Planning text line up: 800-905-0989. I do keep an eye on that. We are live on this Labor Day at 6:06 in the morning, so if you're wondering, "Okay, is this pre-recorded?" It is not. Here I am with you. And I was listening to the Fox News report there, and I got to say, I'm very disappointed—a little bit here in Fox News in some ways. Maybe they wouldn't know, but since I live here in Michigan, it is, I mean, pretty big election going on here, and they just played a clip from Jocelyn Benson, who is Michigan's Secretary of State. She is running for governor as the Democratic candidate. She's running against John James, the Republican. She has a big lead—all the polls show that she has a big lead over it right now. And I hear these things, and she's talking about affordability, and I think, Michigan is not affordable! We have one of the highest gas taxes, we pay one of the highest when it comes to insurance here for what you get—it's ridiculous—one of the highest when it comes to energy prices. All these things that Democrat-run cities in the state... it has not been fixed through them. I don't know why they make it sound like, "Oh, she's being tough. She's going to make things affordable for Michigan." But one of the biggest problems when I hear Fox News bring that up is they don't mention her association with the Southern Poverty Law Center. She was one of the key board members that would have known where all the finances were going when the Southern Poverty Law Center was sending money to the Ku Klux Klan and other groups that they said they were against in order to try to drum up problems in order to use it as a fundraising tool. So here she is, she's now Secretary of State. Then, when they were funneling this money to the KKK, she was with the Southern Poverty Law Center, and without a doubt, I truly believe she absolutely would have known the money was going and being funneled this way. And she's just mum about it. And for whatever reason, here in Michigan, they just don't bring that up. They don't want to burden her with that baggage that she was sending money to the KKK. Now, I know that there are certain... there's political ads and things that bring it up, but the news don't bring it up here. I don't hear any commentators bring it up. Nowhere! No one brings up her association with the KKK funding. It's like, okay. And then I hear the top of the hour news here with Fox News, and this is what I don't understand: You can't bring her up as if she is flawless and she's fighting for the American people here in Michigan. No! She's also refusing to comply with subpoenas as the House here in Michigan wants to know, "Okay, what is on your voter rolls? And why haven't you purged them when you have all these people that are like 110, 120 years old still on the voter rolls? Why won't you purge those people? And why won't you open it up into the sense that the government's requesting to make sure people that are illegally in this country aren't getting ballots and aren't sending them back in?" "Oh, just trust me. You have to trust the process, but we're not allowed to send that stuff even when the government asks for it." Now that's baloney! She was under investigation for that, too. So, got me all worked up. We're just starting the show. Here I am, I hear a Fox News report, gets me all worked up. What I wanted to bring up on this Labor Day... and maybe, I'm not going to talk much about that. I know you don't care about everything that's going on here in Michigan, really. You don't care, I get it. But you got me at the right spot. I'm here getting ready for the show, and I'm all worked up already. First hour, 6: ...

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