Lending the credibility of the national party she represents to convicted criminal Steve Bannon’s insurrectionist podcast in recent weeks, Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has repeatedly urged the ex-Trump strategist’s audience to sign up as poll watchers.
McDaniel’s call to action among Bannon’s far-right viewership comes as complaints of voter intimidation from armed “vigilantes” at Arizona drop boxes continue to pour in—all while Bannon promotes the QAnon-linked organization menacing voters.
With the midterms just 13 days away, McDaniel has appeared on Bannon’s War Room Pandemic program three times in just the past two weeks, making her most recent appearance on Wednesday morning. In fact, her latest stop on the MAGA podcaster’s show came mere days after Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison for contempt of Congress.
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Bannon, who has publicly boasted about his clandestine efforts to steal the 2020 election from President Joe Biden, has turned his attention to “watching the polls” in this year’s pivotal midterm elections.
The former Breitbart chief, for instance, has encouraged his audience to join attorney Cleta Mitchell’s “Army of Patriots” to be trained as poll watchers, portraying it as a “call to arms.” Mitchell, of course, was one of former President Donald Trump’s lawyers involved in his attempt to overturn Biden’s electoral victory.
Additionally, Bannon has twice hosted conspiracy theorist Melody Jennings on his program to promote her group Clean Elections, which has called for “true Patriots to take a stand and watch the drop boxes.” Jennings, who shouted out QAnon shows and groups during her appearances, claimed her organization has “people ready to go in 18 states to go out in shifts and guard these boxes” so they could find the “mules”—a reference to right-wing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza’s debunked election-denying film 2000 Mules.
Clean Elections and Jennings have been named in multiple lawsuits by voting rights groups regarding the group’s alleged interference at Arizona drop boxes since early voting began in the state. Bannon, meanwhile, has defended people carrying guns while watching drop boxes in the state.
Throughout her appearances on Bannon’s podcast, McDaniel has called for his followers to sign up to monitor voting locations as the ex-Trump adviser describes the coming election in apocalyptic terms.
“Where do people go? Because we get the most motivated group of activists out there! Where do we need everybody? You have to have a piece of this,” Bannon addressed McDaniel on Wednesday. “This is like the Second World War; everybody has to be part of this, not just passively watching the show or watching Fox.”
The GOP leader, for her part, told viewers to sign up at the RNC’s Protect the Vote website, adding that if the Election Day slots were all taken or they couldn’t volunteer that day, they could still sign up for post-election shifts “we have to be ready to deploy people to all of these different precincts” in case there are close races.
In another interview with Bannon last week, the RNC chair encouraged viewers to “go vote early in person” and then “go sign up for a poll-watching shift,” telling his audience that “we need you to do both right now.”
She added: “We will plug you into your state. So there’s a couple of things you can do. One, you can knock doors in your state or be a poll watcher.”
Besides relentlessly encouraging Bannon’s viewers to volunteer to watch polling locations, McDaniel also appeared to play footsie with election conspiracy theories, such as the false claim that voters can vote after election day via mail-in ballot.
“So state law in Pennsylvania, this is the law, that if you return a ballot, it has to be dated, right?” McDaniel exclaimed last week. “Simple. We need to know when you voted so we can know if you voted before election day. Really simple law. That is their statute. It is passed by the legislature. And Pennsylvania has been, the secretary of state said we’re going to count undated ballots.”
She continued: “So the RNC is suing, we’re taking it to the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court. We’re suing the Secretary of State in every county in Pennsylvania, that they absolutely should not count undated ballots, and follow the law. That is their law. If they want to change the law fine, but that is their state law.”
