Guests - Chad Connelly, Rick Shafton, Tara Oster, Stephen Moore
Remembering Senator Lindsey Graham: The Man Behind the Scenes
The show opened under the shadow of news that broke over the weekend: Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina had passed away suddenly. Kathleen Winn reached immediately for Chad Connelly, former South Carolina Republican Party chairman and founder of a national pastor network, who had known Graham personally and had just finished a round of national media hits on his passing.
Connelly's portrait of Graham was precise in one thing above all: the gap between his public reputation and his private reality. "People kind of love to hate on" him, Connelly said, describing keyboard warriors who had told him, sometimes in the same breath, that Graham needed to go — right up until they actually sat across from him. He organized small pastor meetings rather than rallies because he understood the value of the room: "They've got influence." He remembered one gathering with 45 pastors from more than 10 denominations in Anderson, South Carolina, at the church Brandon Armstrong had served before coming to Tucson. Several pastors arrived hostile. Every one of them left won over. "They listened to his reasoning. They found out what he was doing behind the scenes."
The backstory Connelly wanted the public to hear: Graham grew up above a pool hall and liquor store his father owned in a small rural South Carolina town. His parents died while he was still young. He was already in the Air Force when his sister Darlene was left without parents, and he adopted her and raised her anyway. "Anybody hears Darlene talk about Lindsey, they would be like, wow." From that beginning — to sitting with sheikhs, kings, and prime ministers, to 33 years of military service — Graham represented, in Connelly's telling, a kind of American story that doesn't get told often enough.
His role in the Abraham Accords, Connelly said, was real and underreported: relationship-building behind the scenes that helped reshape the Middle East's diplomatic architecture without anyone being able to see his fingerprints. A moment from Connelly's own trip to Israel with 20 pastors crystallized it. He was in the Israeli president's residence — their equivalent of the White House — meeting privately with President Isaac Herzog alongside author Joel Rosenberg. Herzog leaned over, confirmed Connelly was from South Carolina, asked if he knew Lindsey Graham, and said: "When you get back, I want you to make a point of telling my friend Lindsey how much we appreciate him. There have been some times we in Israel didn't have a lot of friends." Connelly came back and made a video personally for Graham. "People don't know that stuff. They don't hear the stories."
On the policy record, Connelly made a specific argument: without Graham's performance in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, Roe v. Wade might never have been overturned. Graham had previously voted to confirm Sotomayor and Kagan on the grounds that the Constitution's advice and consent role obligated him to be consistent. When Republicans questioned that judgment, he told Connelly directly that it positioned him as perhaps the only senator in America whose sudden defense of Kavanaugh carried moral weight — because no one could accuse him of partisanship. "What if he had backed down and Kavanaugh had caved and Trump would have backed off? We got a bunch of vetted conservative judges that got appointed in Trump's first term. It wouldn't have happened had Lindsey not done that."
Graham had called President Trump after returning from his final meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and expressed confidence that a workable path forward on the war had been identified. "He worked until God took him home," Connelly said. His hope for the Senate vacancy: that Graham's sister Darlene be appointed as a placeholder — someone without personal political ambition who would simply fulfill her brother's remaining term faithfully, without handing anyone else an unearned electoral advantage.
Rick Shafton: The Senate Vacancy, the Maine Fallout, and Why Every Democrat Is the Same Now
Rick Shafton, East Coast political consultant, joined the show to provide strategic context on both the South Carolina Senate succession and the broader national political picture coming into focus.
On the Senate vacancy mechanics, Shafton was precise: whoever Governor Henry McMaster appoints will serve only through January 3rd, 2027, and separately a full-term primary is already scheduled for August 11th with a runoff two weeks later — the fastest runoff calendar in the South. That compressed timeline eliminates any meaningful head start for an appointee who wants to run for the full term. Sitting House members were immediately ruled out by the party's preference to avoid surrendering a congressional seat. Trey Gowdy was floated, though Shafton questioned whether he'd trade his Fox News career for four months in the Senate. Nancy Mace publicly suggested the governor should appoint himself, a suggestion Shafton dismissed as publicity-seeking. His own read tracked with President Trump's apparent preference for Darlene Graham — someone who would simply be a faithful steward without creating a political complication. Tim Scott, he noted, has held his seat since Nikki Haley appointed him as a history-making gesture when Jim DeMint resigned — and has never fully grown into it. "He's just not like a fighter. He's not Mike Lee. He's not an Andy Biggs. He's just, you know, there."
Mitch McConnell's situation got brief attention as well. Should McConnell step down, the complications compound: Kentucky has a Democratic governor who is claiming he may not be bound by the state legislature's law requiring him to select from a list of three names submitted by the departing senator's party. That legal fight remains unresolved, and Shafton's position was simple: hope McConnell stays healthy for another six months and avoids the question entirely.
On Graham Plattner's exit from the Maine Senate race, Shafton's assessment was strategic rather than moral: whatever the personal dimensions, Democrats had the worst possible outcome — a primary winner supported by 70% of their voters who left the race by publicly bashing the party apparatus that pushed him out. His supporters were explicitly told the party betrayed him. That doesn't convert into enthusiasm for whoever the party machine produces as a replacement by July 27th. "He did us a huge favor," Winn said, noting that Plattner's exit with a grenade rather than a graceful bow creates a ready-made narrative problem for every Democrat trying to distance themselves from the party's handling of the situation.
The broader argument Shafton pressed: the category of "moderate Democrat" no longer functions as a meaningful political identity. Every Democrat who runs claiming to be a veteran, a centrist, or an Arizona original is still going to vote with the party line when it counts — because they have to run in a Democratic primary to get there, and that primary is now owned by people further left than George McGovern ever was. "The days of personality politics are over. People are voting straight party now." He cited a race in which a client with almost no money ran nearly even with Glenn Youngkin purely on party identification. The implication for Republican strategy: stop letting Democrats self-describe as moderates without consequence. Force them to either embrace or repudiate the party's socialist wing publicly. Both options are losing moves for them.
On CD6: Shafton reinforced the framing around the Joanne Mendoza-Juan Ciscomani race. Mendoza's publicly stated position — that transgender individuals should be able to access prostitution as a livelihood — is the kind of position that, if Republicans make voters aware of it, is self-disqualifying without any further argument needed. "They just make it even easier for us." His tactical advice: don't run personality campaigns, don't run constituent service campaigns. Run on the binary. Pick a side. Make them pick one too.
The three amigos observation he left the show with: John McCain died in 2018. Joe Lieberman died in 2024. Lindsey Graham on Saturday. They were the last visible embodiment of cross-aisle legislative relationships. No functional equivalent exists in today's Senate because no functional equivalent exists on the Democratic side to negotiate with. "There's no Joe Lieberman type Democrats anymore."
Stephen Moore: What the Media Isn't Telling You About Ukraine
Stephen Moore — former chief of staff for the U.S. House of Representatives, founder of the Ukraine Freedom Project, and a resident of Kyiv who has been on the ground since day five of the war — joined the show to provide the ground-level intelligence briefing that mainstream media has consistently failed to deliver.
His headline: Ukraine is winning this war by every metric except one. The exception is civilian casualties — Putin is targeting civilian infrastructure deliberately, and that is where Russia retains an advantage. On every battlefield metric, the trajectory runs in Ukraine's favor.
In June alone, Ukraine struck 176 targets inside Russia — refineries, munitions factories, logistics nodes. The cumulative effect on Russian refining capacity: roughly half of what it was at the war's start has been destroyed or disabled. Russia, Moore noted, is a gas station with an army. Cut the gas station's revenue and the army's sustainability degrades with it. Ukraine's drone production has scaled from 2.2 million in 2024 to 4 million in 2025 to a projected 7 million in 2026. Battlefield casualty ratios run five to eight Russian losses for every Ukrainian loss, according to estimates Moore described as conservative. The average life expectancy of a new Russian recruit inside Ukraine, according to Russian military bloggers, is 35 minutes. Moscow and St. Petersburg now see billowing black smoke on their skylines regularly. Crimea — annexed by Russia in 2014 and previously presented as a prize of permanent strategic value — has been effectively cut off on all three access routes: the sea route is now dangerous after Ukraine destroyed 40% of Russia's Black Sea fleet; the land route through occupied Ukraine has become what troops call the "highway of death" due to Ukrainian drone interdiction; and the third route is increasingly compromised by the same campaign.
Putin's manpower economics are visibly failing. Russia is losing approximately 35,000 casualties per month while only able to recruit roughly 26,000 per month. To fill the gap, it is offering $80,000 signing bonuses — the equivalent of $400,000 in American purchasing power given the wage differential — and still failing to meet recruitment targets. Conscripts who are drafted legally stay within Russia. Everyone currently being sent into Ukraine is a volunteer. They are still having trouble finding them.
Moore's strategic analysis of why the Biden administration failed in Ukraine was blunt: National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan operated on a "fear forward" foreign policy, throttling Ukrainian military operations whenever Ukraine gained a decisive advantage to avoid "provoking Putin." The result was that enormous amounts of money and weapons were spent in a managed stalemate. The Trump administration's approach — letting Ukraine develop and export its own defense technology, pursuing Patriot missile licensing so Ukrainians can build their own, and withdrawing the throttle — has produced measurably better battlefield outcomes even without significant new U.S. direct weapons shipments, the last of which came early in 2025.
On weapons economics, Moore laid out a mismatch that illustrates the war's character: a Shahed drone — the Iranian-designed, Russian-produced weapon that has been used 57,000 times against Ukrainian civilian targets — costs $35,000 to $50,000. A Patriot missile used to shoot it down costs $4 million and U.S. doctrine requires firing two per incoming threat. Ukraine's solution: a $15,000 drone interceptor that can take down the Shahed cost-effectively. That asymmetric technology is now being shared with the United States. Conversely, Trump is working to license Patriot missile production to Ukraine — critical because Patriot is the only system capable of intercepting the faster ballistic missiles Russia is increasingly deploying, and the U.S. defense industrial complex currently produces only 600 Patriots per year against a demonstrated need of 800 in the recent Iran engagement alone.
The connection to Senator Graham's death was one Moore was willing to discuss carefully. Graham's cause of death is not common but not unknown. It also fits, Moore noted, a decades-long documented pattern of Putin-linked deaths — specifically, a Soviet and Russian program of apparently natural deaths that internal declassified documents later revealed to be assassinations. The Havana syndrome, he explained, is a directed energy weapon that has been used against hundreds of U.S. clandestine intelligence operators — causing sudden severe headaches, vertigo, blurred vision, and long-term neurological damage with no available defense. It is believed to originate with a Russian military intelligence unit. It has been used against National Security Council members exiting the White House. "This is the reach Russia has in the United States," Moore said. The question of whether Graham was killed or died naturally, he acknowledged, may never be publicly resolved. But the pattern is real and documented.
His perfect outcome for the war: a defeat significant enough that Russia is forced to reckon — as Germany did after World War II — with whether imperial ambition serves its people better than economic development. A quarter of Russia's population currently lives without indoor plumbing. The money being spent on $80,000 signing bonuses, death benefits, and the war machine itself represents a massive diversion of resources from those citizens. If Ukraine's military and economic pressure can sustain long enough to make the Russian elite calculate that the cost-benefit no longer works, an off-ramp becomes politically possible. If it doesn't — if we allow a ceasefire that lets Russia rebuild economically — the next confrontation arrives in three to seven years, either with Putin or his successor, because the problem isn't a person, it's a system. "The problem is not with Putin necessarily. It's with the Russian system."
Moore's Substack — Tales from World War Three — is where he publishes his firsthand reporting from the Ukrainian front for those who want information outside the mainstream media's coverage. "The media is not telling you everything you need to know about Ukraine."
Tara Oster: Eleven Days Left and 100,000 Ballots Still on Tucson Countertops
Tara Oster, ground game coordinator for Pima County Republican operations, joined the show's final segment to deliver a state-of-play update with eleven days remaining before the July 21st primary.
The top-line number: of 179,326 registered Republicans in Pima County, only 16.6% had returned their ballots as of the morning of July 13th. Winn's working estimate was that close to 100,000 Republican ballots were sitting unreturned on kitchen counters, dining room tables, and desks across the county. She called them "rotten bananas" — if you'd let a piece of fruit sit on the counter since June 24th when ballots went out, it would be compost by now. The ballot is similarly past its optimal window, but the solution isn't to throw it away. Vote and mail it in.
Oster's most urgent tactical point: Tuesday, July 15th is the last day to mail a ballot and reasonably expect it to arrive at the elections department before the 7 p.m. July 21st cutoff. Anyone who hasn't voted by Tuesday needs to pivot to in-person voting — either at an early voting center, which remains open, or on election day itself. The key distinction for election day: if you bring your mail ballot to a polling place and check in to ID-verify it, your signature is verified on the spot and it moves directly to tabulation rather than sitting in a queue. That saves processing time and virtually guarantees your ballot counts promptly. Ballots simply dropped in a box on election day, by contrast, must go through signature verification and won't tabulate on election night.
Oster flagged a significant ongoing problem: voters who believe they're on the Active Early Voting List but aren't — a confusion she traced to five consecutive mail-in elections conducted in Pima City of Tucson elections over the past year, which trained voters to expect automatic ballots without requiring them to be on the formal AEVL. People who received mail ballots for those city elections without being on the county's AEVL didn't know the distinction. They waited for a ballot that was never coming for the July primary. The fix is pima.vote — a resource Oster described as giving voters complete access to their registration status, AEVL enrollment, ballot history, and a map of all voting locations. "It's a little bit difficult to navigate, but it gives you everything you need."
By legislative district, the return rate picture was uneven in a useful way. LD19 — Green Valley — led by percentage at roughly 21%, consistent with its historical pattern of politically engaged, high-turnout voters. LD17 led in raw numbers at nearly 11,000 returned ballots despite only a 16-17% return rate — a function of its larger registered voter base. Green Valley's strong percentage return was happening, Oster noted, despite the county eliminating 10 of its 13 polling places and skipping it entirely on the mobile voting center schedule — making its voters' performance all the more remarkable and their remaining unreturned ballots all the more urgent to chase.
The write-in reminder for Supervisor District 5: Jeff Rhodes — J-E-F-F R-H-O-D-E-S — at the bottom of the ballot, in the supervisor section, fill in the bubble and write the name. Oster clarified that Rhodes's district overlaps primarily with portions of LD18, LD20, and LD21. "If you see write-in supervisor district five on your ballot, you are an extra special voter because you're paying attention." The threshold to qualify for the November general election ballot is now closer to 200 write-in votes rather than the 150 previously cited — a detail worth noting for anyone coordinating turnout.
Winn closed with the math that frames the entire primary: to match the statewide Republican turnout rate in the November general election, Pima County Republicans need to hit 73%. The primary is the on-ramp. Voters who engage in July become invested in November. Voters who skip July often skip November too. "Don't you dare complain about who we put forward in the primaries if it isn't someone that you wanted — you have a say." PimaGOP.org, and Winn extended her personal cell number to anyone needing guidance on any ballot question through election day.