Texas election red alert as Trump collapses to 29%

David Pakman (0:00)

Coming up today, Donald Trump's approval rating has fallen all the way into the 20s in a new poll and now Republicans are distancing from the president because they're desperate not to get destroyed in the midterms. But we have a potentially massive problem in Texas where I am right now, where tens of thousands of voter registration applications were caught in a backlog weeks before the election. Is this what they will use to put down James Talarico? Meanwhile, Donald Trump finally gets something he's wanted for years, which is that major news organizations are being kept far away from him and he's surrounded by friendly MAGA media going, do you have an update about the ballroom, sir? We're also going to look at the literal red carpet treatment for Chinese authoritarian president Xi Jinping, the Trump administration turning on Fox and a very weird new interview with Melania Trump. We have all of that and more today and I should tell you, my book has 36 hours left to try to make the New York Times bestseller list. Jessica Tarlov's book out last week didn't make it.

We've got to do this, folks. They are trying to suppress the book. They want it off Amazon. Hardcover copies are what matter. If you haven't gotten it yet, David pakman.com/attentionsignedhardcovers not signed hard covers. Let's see if we can do this thing and show the power of independent media. We'll see.

We have to start today talking about a potentially huge election problem in Texas. I'm in Texas for a signing tomorrow at Texas Tribune Festival. Hope to see you there. I'll sign my book for you. I want to tell you what we know about what's going on here with voter registration. And then there's also some aspects of this that that we don't know. Now I don't have evidence today that Republicans are intentionally trying to manipulate this election, but they usually do. And what we know that's happening is that tens of thousands of voter registration applications have been sitting unprocessed because of what's being called an error, an error by the Texas Department of Public Safety. Some of these go back a year. And what happened is that when eligible Texans use the DPS website to renew their driver's license or to replace an ID or change their address, they can also submit a voter registration app, except some of those applications were never actually sent to the underlying counties where those voters were trying to register.

State officials say, well, the records were incomplete, so they weren't transmitted, but nobody has said what information was missing. What, what's the problem? Why would you collect a missing application? And initially they said, we don't even know how many people are affected by this. Now the Texas Association of County Election Officials says it is tens of thousands of applications and updates to applications. There are counties getting tens of thousands individually in some cases, and it is happening days before the midterms in an election where Democrats could for the first time in decades take a Senate seat. If James Talarico defeats Ken Paxton. Now the voter registration deadline in Texas is October 5th. Early voting starts October 19th and of course election days November 3rd. So county officials are suddenly being handed massive numbers of old registrations and being told, hey, go ahead and process this. And this is already one of the busiest periods of the entire cycle. Now there's another complication. Some of these people may have subsequently updated their registration info. So officials need to make sure that an old record that suddenly appears in the system doesn't overwrite the newer correct information. Now there is some good news. The Texas Secretary of State says, listen, if you submitted your registration before the deadline and you're not on the voter rolls, you can still cast a provisional ballot and then officials can check the transaction. And if you were registered on time, the ballot should be counted. But if you're going, David, give me it. Come on, give me a break. I know because the whole, as soon as the word provisional ballot is mentioned, you are right to be concerned. Now why do we even have this hurdle?

The voter did what they were supposed to do. The state screwed up. And now the voter may show up believing they're registered, having done everything they were supposed to do, not understanding the provisional ballot process maybe. And they just have to trust everything is resolved. And this is after we have been covering issue after issue of election access controversy in Texas. We've got Tarrant or Tarant County, which is the third largest county. They approved 92 fewer election day polling locations than they had four years ago. They said, oh, it's expensive. And obviously voting rights groups are very worried. So I am not here to tell you definitively this is Republicans trying to steal Texas. I don't have all the evidence to say that. And I think it's important not to become the people we criticize who go, you know, every single problem is immediately fraud. But what I will say is there's one party that focuses more on manipulating or controlling how people vote rather than simply convincing them that they have the best candidates and the best ideas. And that's Republicans and Republicans run Texas. And registering voters correctly is about as fundamental as this gets. Election systems have to work. And when you have what is being called an error, potentially affecting high tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people right before a major election, a major election where the results may be humiliating for Republicans. Don't worry, you can fill out a provisional ballot and you know, we'll look at it and count it if everything's good. It's not good enough. It's not good enough. So we need to know how many people were affected. We need to know how this happened. We need to know why applications from the DPS were being either collected or transmitted without all of the required fields filled out. I mean, come on guys. And there are applications dating back 11 months to October of 2025, which weren't even caught earlier. They're figuring this out. Now every single registration needs to be processed. And the way you prevent legitimate election administration failures from turning into allegations of a stolen election is transparency. So we've got to figure out what is the problem, explain the problem, fix the problem, and make certain every eligible Texan who followed the rules gets to vote. Because otherwise it's certainly going to look like, I mean, listen, if you zoom out and you just go, okay, forget about the technicality of what's happening with these.