TRANSCRIPT OF JOHNNY KINCAID PODCAST CONCERNING LOCAL GOP SCORCHED EARTH PHILOSOPHY

JUNE 7, 2024

There they go, using that flamethrower for their scorched earth philosophy in the Vanderburgh County GOP. We’re going to discuss that and a whole lot more here in this episode of This Week in Evansville. We’re going to get right into the meat of things here because this past week has been quite interesting for the Republican Party.

They threw out three members: Ken Colbert, Michael Doherty, and Cheryl Batagar Smith. And they were booted out for five and a half years. I mean, we expected that they would probably decide to drop them from their positions in the party. but we didn’t expect them to be labeled “bad standing” with the party for five and a half years. I mean, it’s going to be 2030 before any one of these three people can have anything to do with the Republican Party in the state of Indiana. 2030. That is just mind-blowing. Nobody, by the way, can remember there ever being this severe of a sanction put out against anybody in the party. I mean, this is just unheard of. And I’ve talked to a lot of people about it.

Let’s compare, and this is, for part of this, comparing apples to apples, because Steve Hammer, in the mayoral contest was backing Cheryl Musgrave. When Cheryl lost in the primary, Steve Hammer decided that he was going to back Stephanie Terry for mayor. And that’s 2023, a year ago. And so they threw a big bash called Republicans for Terry. And that caught the attention of the Republican Party. And guess what? They removed him as a PC. but they didn’t apply this long-term sanction to that. Cheryl Smith, her offense was that she ran as an independent against Wendy McNamara. Ken Colbert is because of critical comments that he’s made. And Michael Doherty is because he ran as a Libertarian.

So this is most closely aligned with Ken’s situation here. All right. But, but Hammer, they, when they dropped the Hammer on Hammer, it was the outcome, right? He bounced back and in 2024, he ran for PC and was elected once again. And the party didn’t do anything to stop him. They didn’t try to stop him in the filing process and they didn’t try to stop him at any point along the way. A year at the most from when the party took him off from his PC position.

So now we’ve got the three troublemakers here that recently got five and a half years of removal. There will be two different cycles of party chairpeople in that time.

This ruling came from the 8th Congressional District Committee. So this committee of people from the 8th District… That’s the next rung up. You have the county level and then you have the congressional district level. So from the district level, they all came to Evansville and held these hearings, three 45-minute sessions. There were maybe 50 protesters out front. I mean, it was kind of a zoo. But these were people, 50 people who wanted their voices heard on this matter and that they’re fed up with Michael Duckworth. One of those people from the Eighth District made the comment, and it was documented in the Evansville Courier and Press, that she said, those were just friends and family. That’s just friends and family. That’s all they are. Friends and family, give me a break. These are people in the party who wanted to be heard. There was a state senator and his wife there. There were people who I have seen at GOP functions and there were new faces there as well. But the simple fact is this just wasn’t a bunch of buddies and pals that came out because their friend was in trouble with the party. These were people who wanted to be heard. People in Vandenberg County didn’t like the fact that their vote was being nullified in this process.

It’s not friends and family. To trivialize this group of 50 people down to friends and family, that’s an insult. I just think that we need to be more mindful of these folks that came out there. Because they came out to make a statement. And their statement was trivialized. And their vote had been nullified. That’s the other part of it. See, some of those people were the people who had voted for Ken Colbert, Michael Dougherty, and Cheryl Smith and their votes were nullified, stolen, and taken away. 1260 people voted for Michael Dougherty to become a delegate at the state convention. 1260 votes were nullified and taken away by the 8th District Committee. Right around, I think it was 900 people voted for Ken Colbert to be a delegate at the convention. Their votes were nullified by the 8th District GOP. And Cheryl Smith, well, she didn’t cut for being a delegate at the convention, but she had people in her precinct that voted for her to be their precinct committee person. And guess what? Those people’s votes were nullified and taken away.

And in the eyes of the law, we’re trying to figure out legally, does the party have precedence in this situation? I mean, do party rules override state law? Do party rules override the person’s votes?

Some legal minds say the primary is a party activity paid for by the taxpayers. We need to close that loophole somewhere here. That doesn’t seem right, especially since we’re in an open primary state. What that means is that when you go to vote in a primary here in the state of Indiana, you choose. You could always be a Democrat and you could go in and you can choose a Republican ballot this year for whatever reason you choose.

You don’t register as a Democrat, Republican, Independent, or whatever, at the elections office. See, in a lot of states you do. But in an open primary state, it means that anybody can kind of jump into that mix and Democrats can vote in the Republican primary and maybe they have some reasons that aren’t pure for doing that. They can do it. But then to argue that even these Democrats coming over and voting Republican in the primary, that that’s still a party activity, that’s kind of hard to swallow.

Now, I want to take just a minute here to share what Ken Colbert had to say about the proceedings when he came out of his hearing on Monday night in Evansville.

(KEN COLBERT) “Vanetta Becker was there. She had commented that I had disparaged her on social media. I stated a fact and again, I reaffirmed that as a private citizen, I can have a grievance with my government. Okay, I did end up saying I can identify a sham when I see it. My personality was coming out, okay? I was very calm, honestly, during the presentation, but at the very end, I did stand up and looked at Brenda Goff and said, ‘This is a sham, and Mr. Duckworth will be shortly inundated with a lot of complaints because he is Republican in bad standing.'”

Alright, so Ken Colbert can be seen as a pain in the rear by the party leadership.

Michael Dougherty is being pointed out as the reason that the Republicans lost the mayor’s race last year. He’s not the reason. Come on. Give me a break. Michael Dougherty is not why the Republicans lost. Do you know who beat the Republicans? The Republicans. That’s who. There was nothing to excite people. No message resonated with the public. The simple fact is that they spent a million dollars to try to get Natalie Rascher into the mayor’s office and nobody was buying it. That’s the bottom line. With a million dollars, you should have got some people to the polls. But they didn’t come out because they weren’t excited about anything that they were hearing. Give them a vision. Give them something that makes them go, I want to vote for that person.

The marketing wasn’t good. It was expensive. And it was all this top talent from Washington, D .C. involved in creating it, but it wasn’t good. Natalie got some bad advice through that campaign, and they spent a million dollars, and they didn’t excite anybody. That’s why they lost, not because of Michael Dougherty.

The party wants to see these problems and the actions that they took as getting rid of the problems. So, instead of trying to work with people, let’s just get rid of people. We’re going to shrink the tents. Instead of expanding the tent for the party, we’re going to just get rid of them. And what winds up happening in the process is that the Civil War broke out. And now, the party is just flying off in all directions. And one of the things that I said to Michael Duckworth, to his face, was that getting rid of Michael Doherty is not getting rid of his problems. If he thinks that his problems are gonna go away because Doherty is gone, he’s mistaken. Because the truth is, there are probably, I don’t know, maybe nine people who are thinking right now about running for the chairmanship of the Republican Party. I mean, I could sit here and name names from people, but the fact is that there’s a good number that are thinking that they should be the ones, the next county chair. And they’re in line waiting for Michael Duckworth’s job. It’s That simple. But if the members of the party, if the PCs make the wrong decision, they make a rash decision, that could be disastrous too. Because we could wind up stuck with somebody as the party chair who is ineffective.

And what we’ve got to do, this is here’s the bottom line and I’m going to shut up. The bottom line is that this party needs to stop fighting with one another. Stop trying to weaponize the rules of the party and instead find ways that we get people working together. All of us believe in those conservative values and it’s simple. We want less government in our lives. We want lower taxes. We want more freedom. It’s simple.

And we need to work on those principles driving our decisions. We’ve gotten away from that. We’ve gotten away from the planks of the platform. We need to get back to supporting the Republican platform and move forward to get back into the business of improving our community by giving them lower taxes, less government, and more freedom. And that is going to put us back in the business of winning elections. And until the Republicans learn that lesson, we’re going to have a bumpy road ahead. So let’s try to fix it.

FOOTNOTE: THE CITY-COUNTY OBSERVER POSTED THIS ARTICLE WITH an OPINION. without bias or editing.