Family Talk

Dr. James Dobson: You’re listening to Family Talk, the radio broadcasting division of the James Dobson Family Institute. I am James Dobson, and I’m so pleased that you’ve joined us today.

Roger Marsh: Welcome once again to Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk. I’m Roger Marsh. Family Talk, of course, is the broadcast division of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. Today on the program, we feature part two of my conversation with Gary Bauer, our Senior Vice President of Public Policy here at the Dr. James Dobson Policy and Culture Center. He’s the host of the Defending Family, Faith, and Freedom podcast, which you can subscribe to at JDFI.org, or also at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We’re talking about Christians and voting, and why the 2026 midterm election could shape up to be one of the most, if not the most, defining moment in American history. I know Gary doesn't want to sound like a broken record. For those of you who may not be familiar, records are those vinyl recordings that you put on the turntable and they spin around, and sometimes when they break, it would just sit there and stop at the same place over and over again. But this really is not a false alarm that we’re sounding here.

Gary Bauer: No, it really isn’t, Roger. There are caucuses inside the Congress. There’s a black caucus, and there’s a really conservative caucus that’s even more conservative than the typical Republican. I think there’s a Hispanic caucus, and so forth. I believe we will have a socialist caucus in the House of Representatives this November.

Roger Marsh: There will be that many socialists in the House?

Gary Bauer: Yes. Of course, I want to remind people again, because there’s a lot of confusion about what a socialist is. Marx himself said socialism is the first step to Marxism, and Marxism is always godless. Most of the socialists that are running are radical secularists. They not only don’t believe in God or are agnostics, but they mock those of us that do believe in God. They call those of us that love God and love America Christian nationalists, which is a scary-sounding term.

I grew up in a time where everybody I knew were people that loved America. That was the World War II generation, my father’s generation. They loved America and they loved God. This is a really incredible moment in America. I don’t know if all of our listeners are paying enough attention to know some of the things these candidates are promoting. They’re talking about adding five or more additional justices to the Supreme Court.

Think about that for a second, because that means those appointees are not going to be believers. They’re going to be secularists. They’re going to be pro-abortion. They’re going to be in favor of the LGBTQ agenda. People might say, "Well, Donald Trump is still president; he’ll be able to stop that." Well, Donald Trump will be stopped from putting the kind of justices he wants on the Supreme Court if these people get control of the United States Senate and the House of Representatives.

They have proposed making the District of Columbia, which voted 98% for Kamala Harris, a state. That can be done by just a simple majority vote in the United States Congress. It doesn’t need a supermajority or any of that. They are intending to do things that will make it impossible for people like us ever to win another election again.

Roger Marsh: Whoever coined the phrase "Democratic socialist" probably got a big raise from the DNC or whoever was behind this. They have done a spectacular job from a marketing standpoint of how they couch and phrase the way that they are seeking to destroy and ruin our nation.

Remember a couple of years ago, we had Allie Beth Stuckey here on the program. She was talking about a book that she’d written called Toxic Empathy, which is such a great way to describe what they do. They take Christian values and turn them against Christians for not supporting Democratic socialist policies like transgenderism and abortion even after the labor and delivery takes place.

A lot of Christians fall victim to it because they don't want to be seen as a mean person, a person who hates America, or doesn't love their neighbor. Therefore, they think they have to go along with this. Gary, I appreciate the fact that you’re telling us and encouraging us not to let the word "Democratic" in socialist lull us into a false sense of security that this is just another extension of the Democratic Party. This is an overtaking of the Democratic Party. It really is what would have happened a lot sooner on a more national level if the Harris ticket had actually been successful in 2024. This is a chance for us to keep a stick in the door and keep that door open from getting it slammed shut on what’s happening. That will happen at the polls. Here we are in the first week in October; it’s already happening because of early voting.

Gary Bauer: It is happening, and the early voting is so important, Roger. In many places, you can go in person and early vote, or you can mail in your vote. Most of us have had real misgivings about mail-in voting. There was a commission set up under Jimmy Carter that looked at mail-in voting, and they concluded it was the form of voting that was most likely to be undermined by fraud and cheating for obvious reasons, because the vote is sometimes out of your possession and it goes into the post office.

Nonetheless, we haven’t been able to change that. If the left votes early, we have to be sure that we get our vote out early, too. I remember just a couple of years ago, there was an election in Pennsylvania and our people, most of them, waited until Election Day. What happened? There was a hailstorm on Election Day in that part of Pennsylvania. Our side had to spend millions of dollars driving four-wheel vehicles to people's homes to try to get them in to vote in time.

We don’t want to wait until the last minute. You could get sick, there could be an emergency in your home, or you could simply be busy. You just have to vote and do it the most convenient way you can. If you don’t like the mail-in, then go to the polling places early. Most states now have a couple-week period where there are polls where you can go into the booth, do your voting, and then you can rest and watch the election returns on election night and hopefully celebrate with the rest of us when the votes are counted.

Roger Marsh: Another thing that has been happening more and more is there are certain states that have been banning a process called ballot harvesting, where people can collect ballots from other people and take them in. It’s a type of thing where, if you have an elderly parent, for example, and they can’t physically get out—like my mom is 93 and she hasn’t been in a car in years—my sister helps her vote. They vote by mail; she fills out the form, puts a stamp on, and puts it in the post office box or she'll drop it off at the polling place. That’s legal in a state like California.

In some places, it’s not. But Gary, you can imagine, we’ve heard the stories. There was a story just recently about a guy who was in Skid Row in Los Angeles who was going around to homeless people and getting them to sign certain things so they looked like they were registered voters and then stuffing ballot boxes. The idea that the elections need to be fair, level, and balanced has never been more critical than now.

Quite frankly, when you see who is accusing whom of actually doing the cheating, the reality is 60% of Americans in the 2024 election voted either early in person or they voted by mail. When that happens, the idea is that gives everybody enough time to get the ballot, count it, and look at it. But some states will sit on them toward the end.

Don't you find it a little odd—Pennsylvania was another one of those Commonwealths as well—that during the 2020 election had a groundswell of ballots that showed up after the election, three days after the election, four days after the election? There’s a big battle right now going on in the courts as to when you can actually mail in your ballot and when it actually counts. I think it’s just interesting to see how many people are finally taking the blinders off and saying, "If I wait until the first Tuesday in November and there might be a hailstorm or an earthquake or a flood that keeps us from actually voting, we have to be as Christians more proactive to get our vote in and make sure it actually counts."

Gary Bauer: Absolutely. I noticed all the way back in the Reagan years this unusual phenomenon. There would be elections and sometimes they were close, and you would think that our side had won. Then the news would break that one of the people that worked at the polls was at home and he opened his trunk a couple of days later and found a box of ballots that he forgot to drop off.

The really interesting thing about it, which made me a little suspicious, is every time they would find one of those boxes of ballots in somebody's trunk, all the ballots in there were people that voted Democrat. Wouldn't you think that over time there would be as many Republican lost boxes of ballots as Democrat?

We know there’s cheating, but you can’t let the cheating discourage you and lead you to stay home or to turn off from the system. You still have to vote. We’re making a much better effort here in Washington to make sure that every legal vote is counted and no other votes are counted. A lot of money will be spent for poll watchers and lawyers. If you don’t vote because of the cheating, the cheaters have won twice: they’ve cast an illegal vote and they’ve stopped you from casting your legal vote.

Roger Marsh: Speaking of legal voting, as Christians we look at the words of Jesus. We were talking in our last get-together about James Talarico, who is running for the Senate as a Democrat in the state of Texas. He is a seminarian at Austin Seminary, which is a part of the Presbyterian Church USA, which is about as far left as you can get in terms of Christian seminaries.

In an interview he gave recently to Jimmy Kimmel, he said, "If Jesus were to go to the Senate floor, I believe He would say," and he pulls out Matthew 25 and says, "I was sick and you cut off my Obamacare." He was going on and on about things that he believes Jesus would say. We know that when it came to government, Jesus said, "Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and give to God the things that are God's."

To me, that means be a good citizen, pay your taxes, obey the law, and if you have the opportunity to vote, vote. We have an eBook in our Dr. James Dobson Family Resource Center called "Voting and the Church: Why Christians Engage the Public Square." I encourage you to click on DrJamesDobson.org and search for that title. That eBook was very popular during the last election cycle, and I know it’s going to help a lot of people too who might be sitting on the fence and saying, "I don’t know. It just seems like I haven’t voted recently or I don’t always vote, and does my vote really count?" A lot of Christians think, "I’m just going to hold my nose and not vote for anybody because I don’t think God wants me participating in this." Gary, give us a little bit of exhortation as to why it’s so important for Christians to vote.

Gary Bauer: Dr. Dobson and I did a couple tours around the country in a number of different election years. We’d get these big crowds and the whole purpose of these events we were doing was to tell those people they had to show up. Just like they showed up for the event to listen to Dr. Dobson and myself and some others, that’s the way they needed to show up on Election Day and in the pre-voting.

In a constitutional republic like ours, Lincoln said the people are everything. We have this incredible and still rare right to vote. When we don’t vote, we leave the public square to people who have a vision about what America should be and what our children ought to be taught about life and death, love and sex, freedom and slavery, quite different than the vision that we have.

If we don’t show up, we set ourselves up for being governed by people who will be completely hostile to everything that we believe in. We’ve already lost some important areas of public life. The teacher unions are virtually Marxist unions. I’m not exaggerating. The resolutions they pass at their conventions are resolutions that would shock the average parent. But it explains what we know is going on in a lot of classrooms.

The same goes with the faculties of our major universities. Why do so many kids come out of our schools believing that socialism is a good thing and believing that free markets are a bad thing, or think that socialism is better than a country like America that’s a constitutional republic? We’ve lost some of those areas, but we can’t afford to lose the governing part of America.

Why is so much of what’s going on aimed at confusing Christians? Why does Mr. Talarico suggest that Jesus would like his platform? If Jesus walked into the United States Senate, He wouldn't be yelling at those senators about why they had this amount of money or that amount of money in the food stamp program or in Obamacare. He would be going into the Senate saying, "Why did you vote to let my creation, those little innocent babies, be killed in the womb?"

He would be saying, "Why are you telling the little children that bear my image that they can choose what gender they want to be?" The idea that Talarico would try to get Jesus to be a socialist endorsing his platform is incredible. Isn’t it interesting when a conservative Christian runs for office and quotes the Bible accurately, the same people like Talarico accuse us of violating the separation of church and state? They want it both ways, but it shows you how important Christian voters are. They want to confuse us, they want to demoralize us, they want us to believe it doesn’t matter, because they know if we show up in proportion to our numbers, we will be able to save America again just like has happened time after time.

Roger Marsh: Gary, it was interesting this past weekend. Lisa and I were in church listening to our pastor talk about Joshua. He was describing the different areas that Joshua and the Israelites were able to take once they got into the Promised Land.

Something I hadn't really put together was every single time God said, "I am giving you this land, now go fight for it." I thought, here’s the land, we just go in and we set up shop. But they met passionate, vicious hostility everywhere they went, but God said, "That’s your land. When you engage in the battle, I will fight with you and you will be victorious."

I wonder how many Christians are looking at Election Day 2026 in the same way, saying, "God has given us this land based on the fact that we have acknowledged Him. He’s given us this country, this nation, and we’ve squandered it in many different areas." My parents were both public school teachers. They wouldn't recognize the California Teachers Association or the National Education Association based on what happened.

My mom brought Dr. Dobson’s film series to her public school. A third of the teachers used to meet in Bible study every Wednesday. I used to join them on occasion. That was in the early 1980s. Can you imagine something like that happening now? There’s no way. Yet when it comes to the election, we don’t necessarily need to take up arms; we have two of the strongest weapons: the power of prayer and the ballot box. Talk about why this is where our new battlefield really is. It is a battlefield, and if we don’t engage, we run the risk of being run over.

Gary Bauer: Look, we’ve had to fight wars in our past. The American Revolution was a war and we defied all the odds in order to be successful against the world’s greatest power at the time. If your kids weren’t taught the real history of America, hopefully you were as a parent.

I remember what that history taught, which was our founders knew the only way they could succeed was reliance on God. They built the whole Republic on that. Then again, we had a horrendous Civil War over a basic question: can one man own another man? Of course he can’t. It took us longer than it probably should have to come to grips with that. But we did.

We’re the only nation that fought a Civil War to end slavery. 600,000 people died. Abraham Lincoln wrote an inaugural address, his second inaugural address, that refers directly to the Bible or indirectly a dozen times, saying that it was God that both judged us for the sin of slavery but also rescued us.

Then World War II, we beat the Nazis and the Japanese warlords. The Cold War, we defeated Soviet communism. So we have had to fight wars, actual wars, to preserve this as one nation under God. Now we’ve just got to vote. We’ve just got to be Christian citizens and fulfill that responsibility. I actually think it’s a sin not to do that.

If Christ came back the day before Election Day, of course the election would be canceled and every knee would bow and every head would bow. But I wouldn’t want to stand before the throne and try to explain why, when elections were deciding whether this would be one nation under God or not, I decided to be a pacifist and sit it out. It’s really important. I don’t want history to record that it was this generation of Christians that did not rise to the occasion and did not do what had to be done.

You mentioned what school used to be like with your parents, Christians and teachers. I was thinking about this the other day. If Martin Luther King were alive today, you know, he was the Reverend Martin Luther King. He based his entire appeal for civil rights based on the idea that skin color was beside the point. We were made in the image of God and the color of our skin is the least important thing about us. If he tried to give that message based on his biblical beliefs, he wouldn’t be allowed in a public square today. It wouldn't be some white segregationist standing in the schoolhouse door; it would be the leftists controlling our school system that would say, "Hey, pastor, you can't come in here and start quoting the Bible."

Think about how much we’ve already lost and why we must draw the line now and come out by the millions in just a couple of weeks.

Roger Marsh: Gary, it’s interesting when you think about Dr. King and the way that he handled business biblically, the way that he organized people to rally against injustice, but their presence, just showing up, turning the other cheek.

I remember having a conversation on our program with Dr. Alveda King, Dr. King’s niece, and she described the night that their home was almost firebombed. I think they firebombed the back of it and she was so angry. She said, "I hated every white person in our neighborhood." She said, "My dad went out very calmly and he said, 'I want everyone to go home, just go home,' to all the neighbors that were around there." He realized that half the people who were in the neighborhood didn’t live in the neighborhood. They were part of this group that was there to stir up trouble.

We can show up by the millions at the ballot box. We can make a huge statement by not being angry and having to storm anything, but just showing up and voting. I look forward to your continuing the conversation tomorrow. Gary, thanks for being with us today.