KSEV Mornings · October 30, 2026 · Hour 2
Mayes Middleton on the Texas attorney general’s race, Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni on inflation and energy prices, Ben Streusand on turnout, and Wayne’s final pitch on the last day of early voting.
Mayes Middleton, EJ Antoni and Ben Streusand joined Friday’s second hour of KSEV Mornings on the last day of early voting. Middleton, the Republican nominee for Texas attorney general, made his closing pitch, Heritage Foundation chief economist EJ Antoni walked through GDP, inflation and gas prices, Ben Streusand looked at the turnout numbers, and Wayne Dolcefino closed the show with a message for conservatives thinking about staying home.
Mayes Middleton: “If you do not vote, believe the polls”
“Today’s the last day of early voting. So you’ve got to go vote today,” Middleton said. He said the attorney general’s office is “the state’s law firm” and that he will enforce laws “like the ones I wrote and passed,” naming the Save Women’s Sports law, the Ten Commandments law and the law that stops “our enemies, like China and Iran from buying our land.” He said he went to Vice President JD Vance’s rally in Weatherford on Thursday, and his message on the polls was simple: “If you go vote, you don’t have to believe the polls, but if you do not vote, believe the polls.”
Asked about following Ken Paxton, Middleton said Paxton “sued Joe Biden over a hundred times” and that “Texas was the legal graveyard for Joe Biden’s failed policies.” Wayne asked him to improve the office’s response to public information requests, consumer fraud and, most of all, public corruption cases. “I have lost confidence in local DAs to prosecute local officials,” Wayne said. Middleton agreed: “If you steal from taxpayers, you need to go to jail, period, the end.” His closing line: “We don’t have another Texas to move to.”
“He’s the real deal,” Wayne said after the interview. Craig called Middleton “squeaky clean” and told conservatives sitting out over candidates they don’t like, “at least go out and vote for him, but you should really go out and vote for everybody.”
EJ Antoni on GDP, the tech selloff and AI
Wayne asked EJ Antoni, chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, about the tech selloff and the 3.4% GDP number. “We’re seeing absolutely booming numbers in terms of investment right now,” Antoni said, adding that with the Atlanta Fed’s fourth-quarter forecast, investment looks to be “up a whopping 10% this year.” On stocks: “There is one thing and one thing only that ultimately justifies equity prices and that is future earnings.” Craig asked about AI, and Antoni compared saying the economy wouldn’t be growing without it to saying the American economy of the 1860s and 1870s “would not have been growing but for the railroads.”
Energy, inflation and refining
“The current energy shock every day that goes by, it looks less and less like an energy shock, but that’s still fundamentally what it is,” Antoni said, because “energy affects the price of everything we do and everything we buy.” He said what the average weekly paycheck could buy fell about 4% under Biden, was about 2% higher than when Trump took office 13 months into his term, before the Iran war, and has since given back about half of that gain. Craig asked what more Democratic power would mean for prices. “You’re looking at one party that wants permanently high prices,” Antoni said, “and then you have another party that says these temporarily high prices are a necessary evil.” On diesel, he said, “The bottleneck is in refining capacity,” and “we haven’t built a refinery in this country in literally decades.”
Ben Streusand on turnout and Ken Paxton
Ben Streusand of The Amigos said that through midweek, Democratic turnout was up about 5% over 2022 while Republican turnout was down about 9%, with about 400,000 “3R” Republican voters who still hadn’t voted. “That gap’s got to close,” he said. On Paxton: “I’m all familiar with Paxton warts,” Streusand said, “but I think he’ll make a great senator.” He said the overarching problem is that President Trump “failed to convince the American people that the higher gas prices and prices overall are worth the cost of preventing a group of homicidal maniacs from building nuclear weapons,” adding, “I’m one of the 30% that believe that it’s worth it.” Streusand also asked whoever is at the interview table at Wings Over Houston to get veterans’ stories on the record, because those interviews get replayed.
Wayne’s final pitch
Craig said he turns 41 on Halloween, and then Wayne made his final pitch to “fellow conservatives and Republicans.” “I will never understand why you would be willing to stay home and essentially vote against your own self-interest,” Wayne said, pointing to school choice and property taxes. “We’ve doubled the budget in Harris County in 10 years. It wasn’t Republicans who did that.” He added, “We look at warts on people. Everybody screws up,” and asked whether candidates will “vote to protect you and your family from the stuff that scares us about the future of this country.”
Craig closed with driving on ice: “The worst thing to do is jerk the car hard,” he said. “Right now is the time to keep driving on ice and not turn the wheel so hard.”
Hear Craig and Wayne live weekdays from 7–9 AM Central on AM 700 KSEV, The Voice of Texas. Visit the KSEV Mornings show page for live-listening controls and more episodes. Listen live weekdays 7-9 AM CT on the KSEV app.
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