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Five USB Drives With No Votes on Them: Jim Pfaff on The Bill Mitchell Show | Aug 12, 2026

Published: August 12, 2026
Network: The Bill Mitchell Show
Analysis: Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff

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Francesca Hong held a 22-point lead a week before Wisconsin’s governor’s race — and she lost. Then came the detail Jim Pfaff called weird and goofy: five USB drives announced in Milwaukee County that didn’t have votes on them. On the August 12 edition of The Bill Mitchell Show, the Conservative Caucus President put the upset in the larger frame of election integrity — vote custody as the prime factor in elections, 230 years of precinct-counted voting as the gold standard, and a call for the DOJ to look into what happened. From there, the conversation ranged across prediction markets and skewed polls, the Democratic Socialists of America’s two-way play for the Democrat Party, and why Pfaff believes the 2026 trend is shifting toward Republicans — if their leadership stops playing games.

Topics Covered

• A 22-Point Lead Vanishes in Wisconsin
• Custody Is a Prime Factor in Voting
• Prediction Markets vs. the Polls
• A Case for a DOJ Investigation
• The DSA’s Real Agenda
• From Clinton’s Triangulation to the 2026 Outlook
• Key Takeaways

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A 22-Point Lead Vanishes in Wisconsin

Host Bill Mitchell opened with the result nobody saw coming: Francesca Hong, up 22 points a week before the election, lost. Pfaff agreed no one predicted it — the polls “were probably wrong,” he said — but what made the night strange to him was Milwaukee County’s announcement that five USB drives didn’t have votes on them. Officials held a big press conference about it, “so apparently there’s something there,” but Pfaff isn’t sure even they know what happened.

“And it just throws more of this fuel on the fire of what the heck is happening with our elections, especially when you consider the fact that there are definitely some Democrat establishment people who are not comfortable with the, uh, Democrat Socialists of America, e.g., communists, and what they’re doing.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Pfaff also flagged a political oddity: AOC and Bernie Sanders stayed out of the race. Their stated explanation was a focus on winning Congress rather than state races — “Well, maybe,” Pfaff said, “but they’re part of a movement”. Mitchell laid out the official account of the USB drives — a clerk loaded election audit data onto the drives instead of the votes, discovered the error, and went back for the real data — while noting that Governor Tony Evers had campaigned with the winner for a week and a late surge was possible, though “we’re never going to know what really happened down there.” He also observed that the same explanation would be given in a less innocent scenario.

“You know, this USB thing might be the 2026 version of a water main break.”
— Bill Mitchell, The Bill Mitchell Show

Pfaff’s reply: “You know, exactly.” Maybe USB drives went missing; maybe other drives were brought into the process that no one can account for. He was careful about what he was and was not asserting — “I’m not making that claim. I’m just saying this is fishy.”

Custody Is a Prime Factor in Voting

Even if the official explanation is entirely innocent, Pfaff argued, it exposes the real defect: votes on a portable drive, carried from one location to another, is a chain-of-custody failure baked into the process. “this is why we should never have computer voting systems”, he said — and you shouldn’t connect them to the internet.

“Like, custody is a prime factor in voting. This is what it’s all about, because if you have poor custody, then you have the potential for fraud.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

He reached for a precedent next door in Minnesota: Norm Coleman leading Al Franken until, as he put it, “shazam!” — someone forgot 3,000 undelivered ballots in the trunk of a car. Those are the kinds of things you cannot have happen in elections. The alternative is the way America used to run them: votes counted at the precinct, tallied by the people there, and held without moving anywhere. “Like the custody was never a problem.”

“This is why I say for 230 years of our history about that, we had the gold standard in elections in the United States.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

What changed? Pfaff dated the shift to this century — “It’s been since Norm Eisen and Marc Elias and then later Barack Obama got involved in all this.” He stressed he cannot account for what happened in Wisconsin and is going on information he has not been able to validate. But his bottom line did not depend on proving anything: “even if nothing corrupt took place, the process sucks and no one can trust it.”

Prediction Markets vs. the Polls

Mitchell turned to how badly the forecasting tools missed. Prediction markets, he argued, are not betting on the final outcome — “They’re betting on what the next bettor is going to do” — which is why Hong could sit above 90% in the markets and then watch the odds fall off a cliff as returns came in. Polling, in his view, has a deeper problem: “caller ID killed the polling star,” and with response rates at 1 or 2 percent instead of the 90 percent a truly random sample needs, “there’s a lot of plug and play that goes on.”

Pfaff pushed back — gently — on the polling point. “Well, I’m going to slightly disagree with that.” There are methodologies that still get good data, he said. The reliability problem lives somewhere else: in the art of modeling who will actually turn out.

“reliability of polls is less because of getting enough statistical data and more about skewing the outcome.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

He walked through the taxonomy: an “A” poll surveys all voters, who won’t all show up; “RV” means registered voters, same problem; “LV,” likely voters, is closer — but even determining a likely voter mixes self-reporting with voter-roll history, and every pollster still has to model turnout on top of the sample. That modeling step is fair, Pfaff said, but it is also “another way they really skew the outcome.” On the markets themselves, he is a fan — he likes Polymarket, and sees the markets as a compilation of people putting real money on the line after doing real research.

“The prediction markets do better than worse. They’re not typically wrong.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Still, given the choice, he would trust a poll over the market — though Polymarket remains “a very useful tool to kind of get a sense of what’s going on.”

A Case for a DOJ Investigation

Pfaff then connected the two threads. If prediction markets are not typically wrong, what happened Tuesday night that no bettor could predict for? Ballot problems no model accounts for, he suggested — and that, in his view, makes the question serious enough for federal review.

“I have to say, the federal government does have jurisdiction to take a look at what happens in elections, and I would have the DOJ looking into that to see if there were irregularities.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

His case for why investigations matter came from his home state. A fellow Hoosier, Pete Seat, delivered what Pfaff called a great takedown of David Axelrod on MS NOW that has gone viral: Barack Obama, Seat pointed out, “actually was not legitimately on the Indiana ballot in 2008” because of actual fraud in St. Joseph County — home of South Bend — where Democrat elected officials are in jail right now. The scheme was only discovered two years after the fact. That, Pfaff argued, is precisely the point: these things sometimes surface only afterward, and only if someone looks.

“So if we’re not willing to inspect our elections and inspected by anyone that wants to inspect it, then we’ve got a very big problem that allows fraud to take place.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

“At a minimum,” he concluded, “there needs to be an investigation of this.” Mitchell added that Wisconsin could have done without the USB episode either way — even as a mistake, it is not a shining moment.

The DSA’s Real Agenda

Mitchell raised the larger question hanging over the race: what is the Democratic Socialists of America actually playing for? He noted the DSA is not a political party — it cannot nominate candidates; it is “basically a club” — and floated a theory: the DSA might prefer that Democrats lose in November, so it can tell the party in 2028 that the establishment failed and the radicals could have won. Pfaff’s answer: “There, there’s going to be a little bit of that.” He pointed out the DSA mostly targets relatively safe Democrat seats rather than competitive ones like a governor’s race — which, he suggested, is one unstated reason AOC and Bernie Sanders stayed out of Wisconsin.

“Like, they don’t care if Democrats lose. They want to pick up the pieces at the end.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

But the movement also wants wins, Pfaff said, because every elected member builds momentum inside the Democrat caucus — exactly as the Squad has done, effectively threatening Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, and Chuck Schumer to go their way. In his telling, “the DSA is actually not all that different than what already exists in the Democrat Party” — it “was already well radical left”. The end state is explicit: “it is their goal to implement communism in this country”. That is why Pfaff wants Republicans, if they hold the House, to confront the oath of office head-on. Members swear to uphold and defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic — and swear the oath is made without “a purpose of evasion.” The DSA’s stated intentions, he argued, fail that test.

“So I think that the Republicans need to take a very serious look at refusing to seat the inevitable DSA members that are gonna show up in these New York and that one Denver, Colorado district.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

It is the same socialist movement TCC has tracked from the streets to the ballot in our analysis of the Madison protests and the rule of law.

From Clinton’s Triangulation to the 2026 Outlook

Mitchell contrasted today’s Democrats with Bill Clinton, who triangulated to the middle after the Contract with America — where today’s party runs on how it would actually govern, far left. Pfaff refined the history: Clinton was a man of the left but “more in the JFK liberal mode.” In the ’80s and early ’90s he helped form an organization to pull the Democrat Party toward the middle to win a governing coalition. “It was Hillary who was the radical leftist.” Her wing took hold of the party early this century. It seems like ancient history now, but Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi were once on video arguing for strict immigration policies and voter ID — because the governing coalition of that era, with the World War II generation still voting, was far more conservative. Two things changed.

“all of our educational institutions are teaching a godless, socialist, almost pagan style of thinking that is not consistent with the American Constitution and the American founding.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Second, those students grew up and began voting that way — and the leftward drift was funded, Pfaff said, by NGO money that “went on steroids” in the Obama administration, financing political efforts with tax dollars. Still, he believes the core of the country is strong; Donald Trump’s election is evidence of it. Asked for the final word, Pfaff pointed listeners to theconservativecaucus.com and offered his read on the cycle: at the beginning of the year he feared 2026 would play out like a typical off-year, with Democrats better than even to take the House. “I think that’s shifting. I think there’s a DSA factor.” The frustration is that it should not even be close — “it would be a supermajority that we’d be looking at if Republicans were actually doing what they need to do.”

“So I don’t want people to let John Thune or Mike Johnson off the hook. This is a very important time and we need to tell them, get on our side, get on Donald Trump’s side and stop playing these games because that’s how you win.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

The public learned a lesson during the Biden administration, Pfaff concluded — and there is still enough momentum that Republicans could keep Congress.

Key Takeaways

1. A 22-point lead vanished overnight – Francesca Hong led Wisconsin’s governor’s race by 22 points a week out and lost — the same night Milwaukee County announced five USB drives with no votes on them.
2. Custody is the core issue – Even the official clerk-error explanation exposes a chain-of-custody failure; for 230 years, precinct-counted elections were America’s gold standard.
3. Pfaff wants the DOJ to look – The federal government has jurisdiction over elections, and Indiana 2008 — fraud proven two years later, officials jailed — shows why unexamined elections invite fraud.
4. Polls are skewed more than starved – The reliability problem is less about response rates and more about turnout modeling; Pfaff trusts a good poll over Polymarket, though the markets “do better than worse.”
5. The DSA plays a two-way game – Win seats and pull the Democrat caucus further left, or lose and pick up the pieces in 2028; Pfaff says Republicans should refuse to seat DSA members over the oath of office.
6. 2026 is shifting – A DSA factor is building against Democrats, but Pfaff won’t let John Thune or Mike Johnson off the hook: a supermajority is on the table if Republicans do what they need to do.

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About The Conservative Caucus:
The Conservative Caucus is a grassroots public policy action organization, formed in 1974. Headed by President Jim Pfaff, the Caucus is committed to advancing free enterprise, limited government, and traditional values.

Originally broadcast Aug 12, 2026 on The Bill Mitchell Show.