Show: On The Town Station: KNCO File: 11:3.mp3 Air date: 2026-11-03 Source: OpenAI whisper-1 · shrunk from 27.1 MB to 5.4 MB --- transcript --- It is 11 36 and 54 degrees and today we are sharing the conversation that occurred earlier this morning with Taylor Wolfe. Has to do with the public information officer for Nevada County and that is Taylor Wolfe. Good morning Taylor. Good morning Mo. So how was your valentine or Halloween? You know I kind of stumbled there because Dave Bear used to say that every day is valentine's day for he and his wife. I love that. So very sweet. Whenever we text back and forth he's in Washington now or Washington as some say. We wish each other a happy valentine's day no matter what the holiday is. Oh that's sweet. So for Halloween how did it go for you? It was great. It was great. You know I have two young kiddos and they get really excited but they don't last very long and they get overwhelmed pretty easily but we had a great Halloween with the family and a really successful great Halloween event with the community at the county too. We hosted folks for some trick-or-treating from three to five on Friday and you know saw a bunch of families come through, some amazing decorations from staff, a lot of creativity and volunteering that went into making the event possible and we just thank the community for coming out. They came to our government center, got to interact with our staff, went up to the Madeline Helling library and got to connect with both the library but different community resources. There was also free books to pick up and then you know hop downtown to the Nevada City businesses to do some more trick-or-treating and then do it all again on Saturday with trick-or-treating penthouses. So it was a busy and fun weekend. Were you able to get that? You were talking about wearing a dinosaur costume. Did that happen? Yes, yeah. I donned my dinosaur costume and then my oldest, my son, is very much in a monster truck phase so my husband and I were monster tram mechanics on Saturday with the kids. Okay, so you're a dinosaur on Friday and a monster truck mechanic on Saturday? That's correct, yeah. You know next year I think Halloween would be on a Sunday, right? That's what I've heard, yeah. So probably it'll be Friday night again in Nevada City. Yeah, it could possibly be. We haven't started that planning yet but we'll see what happens next year but I will say just thanks to the community who showed up. We've been doing this trick-or-treat event at the county for five years and every year we see bigger crowds and more people come and attend and in large part that's, you know, also due to our staff and just trying to make it a really special event for the community and the kids. Yeah, had long chats with the librarians about Spooky Booky over the last few weeks. Yeah. But now we're heading into political season. I guess we've been in political season and today is, according to the calendar, election day and people that have not voted by mail yet, can they still go vote today and where can they vote? Yeah, absolutely. So we have nine vote centers open today in Nevada County until 8 p.m. tonight. We have our vote center over at the Government Center in Nevada City, also known as the Rood Center. We have four different vote centers open in the Grass Valley region today. One downtown Grass Valley at the Gold Miners Inn, also at the Nevada County Fairgrounds and the Sierra College Nevada County Campus, and then a little bit further out the Higgins Lions Community Center towards South County. We have one in Penn Valley at Western Gateway Park, one in North San Juan at the Community Center, and then a couple up in Truckee as well. And if you're voting today on election day, what I would recommend is if you have your vote by mail ballot and you want to fill it out in the comfort of your home but can make it and spend, you know, 10 minutes, maybe a little bit longer if there's lines, to do the SignScan Go. You can actually take that filled out ballot, verify signatures there at the vote center and scan it into our machines live so you, you know, don't have to vote in person but it can still count your vote as if you're voting in person. Of course, if you can't make it into a vote center and take the time to do the signature verification process, you can always drop it off at a local drop box. And then last but not least, if you do want to mail your ballot, your best case scenario is to go into the post office today to make sure you get a hand-canceled postmark. Basically what that means is that the postmark says that it was mailed in the mail today, otherwise you risk your ballot possibly not being counted. And of course, you can always go in and vote at a vote center in person altogether. So many options today, but if you have a few extra minutes, that SignScan Go option seems to be like a great happy medium for folks. And you can still register to vote today, right? You can still register to vote, yeah. So you can do provisional ballots and even, you know, vote by mail ballots, even if they're hand-canceled by today. These are some of the reasons why the final counts take a little bit of time because we are going through those strict, you know, signature verification processes. We have a one percent manual tally where we're actually pulling those ballots and making sure our machines are reading them properly. We have opportunities if signatures don't match up, you know, opportunities for people to come in and match their signatures and verify that their ballot is correct in theirs. And then of course, going through the processes for those provisional ballots, you know, to get them in our systems and then count the ballot as well. So, you know, a lot of process ahead, but we will, we do plan to start delivering those first initial results by 8 p.m. tonight. And usually we report several times tonight on election day, ending around midnight, typically speaking, but that can differ depending on, you know, what happens and what the night brings. And where can we see those results? You can head over to our website nevada county ca.gov slash november 3 election and you can find the results dashboard there. Of course, our local media partners too often share those results as well. So, you know, they're often pulling those results from our website too. Okay, and what is the, when do the polls close tonight? So our vote centers are open till 8 p.m. tonight. So that's folks' deadlines to make it into a vote center or get their ballot dropped off at a vote-by-mail, you know, drop box. Okay, and probably post office by 4, I would guess, if you wanted to go there? Yeah, probably. You know, I don't know post office hours off the top of my head, but I would say better to play it safe than sorry, and the earlier the better if you're planning to get that hand-canceled postmark. And I will say if that's the option you're looking for, we have a lot of drop boxes. I believe there's 18 different drop boxes throughout the county. So the locations are fairly convenient. If you have a post office near you, odds are you probably have a drop box not too far away as well. So a lot of options out there for folks. Okay, and of course California has until, I believe, into December before the final, final results can be posted or collected. Yeah, so there are laws in California that require a certain amount of time before we certify our elections. For this election, the earliest we could certify is November 25th by 5 p.m., and then California law gives counties until December 3rd to certify the election. So following the results coming tonight, we'll be updating and posting results every Tuesday and Friday, excuse me, at 4 30 p.m. All right, and so yeah, get out and vote today, and we hope that you make that a part of your day if you haven't already voted. And it looks like, I don't know what you've seen so far, but it looks like some pretty massive turnout for this election all across the country. Yeah, you know, I haven't been tracking national closely, but I know that, you know, we heard our clerk recorder say earlier, our registrar voters, that we've seen around 40 percent of local ballots come in already. We expect to see another big amount come in today, so we appreciate Nevada County. We have a good history of, you know, leaning in and voting during elections, so hopefully we see so again, and our staff look forward to sharing those results as quickly as possible, you know, while going through those processes to make sure that we have an accurate vote count. All right, I'll turn you down for just a second here, and I know we don't have much, a lot of time left, but there are some other things going on. In case we get some rain, some heavy rain, or localized flooding, or that sort of thing, we have some free sand. It's not the Sandman. That would just put you to sleep if you met the Sandman, but how about some free sand? Yeah, so, you know, we've been hearing a lot of news around the atmospheric rivers, heavy rain events, and some pretty crazy videos of different events happening around the nation, but we have our annual free sand program running since this weekend, November 1st, and it goes through April, which basically provides free sand to residents to protect their properties from flooding, and, you know, we don't know what that's going to look like this year, so it's better to prepare early. We are hearing about, you know, rain in the foreseeable future, so folks can go to a hardware store, pick up their sandbags, bring a shovel and an able back, and you can pick up free sand at the Nevada County Warehouse, which is over by our government center on the corner of Highway 49 and East Broad Street at the Pin Valley Fire Protection District, and the North San Juan Community Hall, Higgins Fire Department in South County, and then we also have a location with the town of Truckee at their old corporation yard in East County. It's no cost, but again, please do remember to bring those sandbags, your own shovel, and an able back, so you can get that sand into those bags. Yeah, I know a couple of places, B&C Ace Hoenn Garden Center, and I think A to Z, just a couple of the places where you can go buy your sandbags before you head over, and how about really briefly flu shots? Yeah, so we had a really successful flu shot season. Public Health provided over 400 flu shots at our mobile community clinics throughout October. You know, it is a heavy flu season this year. Hand washing is smart, also getting your flu shot, but there's still opportunities to get your flu shots either through your primary care physician at local pharmacies, you can schedule appointments, or you can schedule appointments through Public Health in Grass Valley. That's the second, third, and fourth Tuesdays of each month, excluding holidays, from 1 to 4 p.m. at our location up on Crown Point Circle. You can schedule an appointment and find more information on our website at nevadacountyca.gov immunizations. Okay, and you know what? Here's a tip for you. When I wash one hand, I make sure I just wash both of them, you know, just to save time. Pro tip. Yeah. I'm gonna have to teach my toddler that. All right, well, Taylor, thank you so much for coming in today. Thank you, Mo. Two years ago, this was the scene as President Trump pulled off perhaps the biggest political comeback of the century. It is now clear that we've achieved the most incredible political thing. Look what happened. Is this crazy? He'd overcome impeachments, criminal indictments, memories of a nerve-wracking pandemic, even assassination attempts, and fought his way back into the White House. They said he will start a war. I'm not going to start a war. I'm going to stop wars. The American people seemed motivated by frustration, a stagnant economy, a chaotic series of global events. This will truly be the golden age of America. That's what we have to do. Well, two years later, many of those same concerns linger. Some have even heightened. And tonight, polls will close in the midterm elections. In today's show, we're going to be focusing entirely on the midterms. Our team is here ready to go in New York at our election headquarters. And later, we will also be hearing from our team fanned out around the country. But here's what you need to keep in mind at the end of the day. A couple of numbers. The number three and the number four. Three is how many seats Democrats need to flip the House. Every single seat is up for election today. So basically, any narrow win for the Democrats, that should do it. The other number is four. That is perhaps even more important, because this is how many seats Democrats need to flip the U.S. Senate. That would have been considered a tall order, even impossible when Trump was elected two years ago. But according to the polls, more and more potential Republican pickups have become toss-ups. More toss-ups have started to lean blue. In fact, during a speech yesterday, Trump seemed to preemptively concede a certain level of defeat. For some reason, the sitting president doesn't win the midterms. But we gave this a very strong shot. And yet I don't care how much studying you've done for this. No one quite knows what's about to happen here, which is why every election day I like to cruise by one particular colleague's desk and ask him what he expects to happen. So I figured I would take that conversation today and just put it on a microphone. This is a segment I like to call How ABC's D.C. Bureau Chief Rick Klein Will Be Watching Election Night. It features, guess who, ABC's D.C. Bureau Chief Rick Klein. Rick, happy election day. We can work on branding on that, Brad, but thanks. It's great to be with you. Happy election day. It's a long title. Yeah. Hey, before we even get into how you think tonight could play out, might play out, what is different about this midterm election than other midterms that you've covered in recent memory? It's a great question. I mean, look, we see the big theme around affordability, about gas prices and diesel prices and frustration with the president. What issues matter the most to you here in Maine? I'd say gas prices, definitely. And like ending the war in Iran. We need change. We need change. We need change. A lot of that actually is familiar. If you've watched midterms in the past, we've had midterms about unpopular wars or even unpopular presidents. This happens to be about both at the same time. And the economic issues that are colliding have done something really remarkable, where the playing field, even in this very polarized time, has expanded dramatically just in the last couple of weeks. We went from a situation where Democrats really didn't have much of a shot at taking the Senate to suddenly talking about Senate races in places like South Carolina and Mississippi, not to mention Iowa and Kansas. You voted for Trump in 2016. I did. 2020. I did. 2024. I did. Oh, yes. And you're going to vote Democrat? I'm going to vote Democrat for Adam Hamilton for the U.S. Senate. So we've seen the political situation deteriorate for Republicans to a degree that there are a lot of surprises out there on the map. But of course, we won't know until the votes are counted later today and often in the days or even weeks to come where things exactly land. So there's just a greater quantity of characters and interesting figures, as well as just more dynamics at play than any midterm I can remember. And so ABC has got these race ratings, right, where they look at different states and we go, hey, according to polling and all these different factors, here's where you can imagine things landing. But can you just walk me through like election night? You'll be on the set tonight with, you know, David Muir and Lindsay Davis, the whole gang. How could you see this plausibly playing out? Like what scenarios seem real to you? Yeah, I mean, there's a scenario where this is a lot tighter, a lot closer than anyone thought. I mean, the Democrats need to pick up just three seats in the House. If they don't do that, it's disastrous for Democrats and for the polling industry, frankly. But there's also a scenario where they pick up a relatively paltry amount of seats, say less than 10 or so. And that would be something of a disappointment. And they could also fall short in the Senate very easily. They have to net four seats in the Senate. That's still a high bar. Even if you just take away the easy ones, the low hanging fruit, they could still end up a couple short. And we're going to know relatively early the direction of the night. We won't know the exact count for a long, long time, but we're going to see polls in Indiana and Kentucky close right at six o'clock. There's at least one good district in Kentucky to watch for early indications and turnout in Indiana. By seven o'clock, you've got polls closing in Georgia, South Carolina, and most of Florida. Those are big battlegrounds. And we'll see how close it is in Florida and South Carolina. Georgia, we're expecting the Democrats to win in John Ossoff. But if South Carolina and Florida are close, we're looking at a really good opportunity for Democrats to expand the map by 730, North Carolina and Ohio. Those are two prime pickup opportunities for Democrats. And then by eight o'clock, you got some of the real biggies starting to close. Michigan, Maine, Texas, the rest of Florida and in Mississippi. So in that eight or nine o'clock hour, as we start to see numbers, I think we'll have a sense if we're talking about a smaller scenario or something quite a bit bigger. Right. And how do you gauge that? Like, are there states that are going to make you go, oh, wow, GOP is overperforming here or, oh, wow, Democrat, this is not just a blue wave. This is a blue tsunami of sorts or anything in between. Oh, definitely. And the race ratings play into this a little bit. But, you know, on the House side of things, if any seats flip in some of these redder places, Florida was a place where Democrats are really on the defensive after an aggressive redistricting by Governor Ron DeSantis. That's almost certainly not going to work. And it's possible the Democrats hold or even win a seat or two that they weren't going to otherwise come through with. Pennsylvania, there's three really solid Republican seats in the past where people have just defied expectations. Maine on the Senate side is kind of similar. Susan Collins has withstood all these challenges in the Trump era by putting some distance between herself and the rest of the Republican Party. I think she's done a fantastic job and I think we would be foolish to get rid of her. We're going to be looking at Latino voters in Texas. Remember how Donald Trump swung them so dramatically. Republicans were so confident of their chances going into this year that they actually redrew the districts in the middle of the decade to make it more favorable. The problem is that could easily backfire because those voters might not necessarily end up being Republican voters. And then if you look at places like Kansas and Iowa, they were never supposed to be on the map. And if Democrats are able to pick up seats in states like that, it changes rather dramatically what it means for the Democratic coalition, what it means for Republicans going forward to say nothing of some of these states in the South. The black voters that seem to have woken up in Mississippi, for instance, that's a big deal. South Carolina, where Darlene Graham is running for a full term after her brother's passing just a few months ago. Democrats in shouting distance on that one. Then that starts to look a lot different. Then you start to talk about new coalitions. And Texas, I mean, look, everything's big in Texas, right? And we know this race so many times. We've talked about Texas as potentially competitive. This is one of the absolute marquee matchups. And to have James Tallarico against the very unpopular and scandal played Ken Paxton, the longtime attorney general. I think Ken's a solid guy. I mean, I know a lot of people that feel like his personal issues are an issue. Is he a flawed candidate? Yeah. But every candidate's flawed. And there's still Democratic defense. They have to hold on in Michigan. Abdul Al-Sayed has kind of rocked the political establishment and got a lot of late breaking developments that seem to have complicated things for voters. But if he succumbs to Mike Rogers, then we're actually talking about a Republican pickup in a big battleground state. Is it a given? Say I'm just thinking of like possibilities. Like how connected are these states? Like if Maine goes blue early and Susan Collins is out of a job all of a sudden, does that mean that all of a sudden Kansas is in play for Democrats or Texas is in play for Democrats? Like how connected are each of these things? Yeah, look, the issues that are animating this year are very similar. And if there's a big rebellion against the Republican Party, then Susan Collins can only withstand so much of that. And I think it's a similar situation in Iowa where Josh Turek has a spirited Democratic campaign against Congresswoman Ashley Hinson. That would be the national environment in large part. The Obama coalition that used to make Iowa winnable for Democrats would be back in play. Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, that's where there's a governor's race. A lot of these states connect to each other. And the issues certainly connect. And the broad swath of the upper Midwest, that's one big area for the battleground. And we hear so much about diesel prices, gas prices, tariffs and what it's meant for people. And then Latino voters in places like Texas and Florida. And finally, black voters in the South. That's the connective tissue of a North Carolina and a Georgia and a South Carolina and a Mississippi. So, yes, the tendency is that that states flip in kind of a similar direction, that the country speaks in a national mood during a national election cycle. But there are always exceptions. It could be that Democrats do extraordinarily well, but Susan Collins is left standing. It could be that we're waiting on Maine, waiting on Alaska for several days, even knowing the Democrats have the majority. Or it could be that the majority hinges on those states that take a heck of a long time to count. Yeah. And Rick and Rachel Scott will be in front of the screens as the numbers are literally coming in from that decision desk, from the desk late night coming up. I'm sure. Thank you so much, Rick. Thanks, Brad. Tune in to The Ramsey Show today at noon. Brought to you by Zion Capital, your trusted Ramsey smartvester pros right here in Nevada County. Save more at Grass Valley Provisions with their loyalty program. Sign up in-store and get 20 percent off your first purchase, plus a one cent pre-roll welcome gift. Earn points with every visit and unlock more rewards as you move through the loyalty tiers. You must be 21 or older with a valid I.D. Shop G.B. Provisions dot com or visit 403 Idaho Maryland Road. Open daily, nine to nine. Grass Valley Provisions, lift up your day the Grass Valley way. Tune in to The Ramsey Show today at noon. Brought to you by. --- end of transcript ---