Trump Wins, DeSantis Whines, Haley Withstands
2024-01-16 00:43:21
Pod Save America is a no-bullshit conversation about politics hosted by former Obama aides Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer, and Tommy Vietor. It cuts through the noise to break down the week’s news and helps people figure out what matters and how they can help. They’re regularly joined by journalists, activists, politicians, entertainers, and world leaders. You can watch on YouTube or listen to new episodes every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Ad-Free Pod Save America episodes available NOW through Friends of the Pod subscription. Head to crooked.com/friends to join today! For a transcript of an episode of Pod Save America, please email [email protected] (edited)
Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm Jon Favreau.
I'm Jon Lovett.
I'm Dan Pfeiffer.
I'm Tommy Vitor.
The gang's all here, we're back.
There's no eye on caucus.
Good to see you guys.
That's actually true, that's just us.
Well, let's get right to the news. Donald Trump is the winner of the Iowa caucuses, dominating the field with 51 percent. Ron DeSantis comes in second with 21 percent, Nikki Haley third with 19 percent, Vivek Ramaswamy with 8 percent.
And no one else cracked 1 percent. Trump narrowly lost the caucuses to Ted Cruz in 2016. Eight years later, the network's called it for him. Within 30 minutes, he's gone. He won by the biggest margin of any Republican in history.
Out of Iowa's 99 counties, I think he won 98.
Nikki Haley won one county by a vote.
She's up by one in Johnson County, she hasn't been called yet, right?
Yeah, we're recording Monday night here, so all right, so big win for Trump.
And let's hear a clip from his his victory speech.
Well, I want to thank everybody, this has been some period of time and most importantly, we want to thank the great people of Iowa.
Thank you, we love you all.
What a turnout.
What a crowd. And I really think this is time now for everybody, our country, to come together. We want to come together, whether it's Republican or Democrat, or liberal or conservative. It would be so nice if we could come together and straighten out the world and straighten out the problems, and straighten out all of the death and destruction that we're witnessing.
That's practically never been like this.
It's just so important and I want to make that a very big part of our message. We're going to come together.
We're going to come together. Classic Trump, gracious, subdued, unity candidate, unity candidate, trying to heal the divides in this country. It's about fight for the soul of the nation.
He praised Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, who he didn't say a bad word about them. He said. How much of a fun time they'd all had together.
Tonight was the night he became president.
Clip that.
Wait, don't, even if I'm right.
Let's get.
We'll get back to the speech, let's talk about the results first. So Donald Trump, 51, blows away the rest of the field. How did he do it?
How did he do it, Dan?
I think there's one number in the entrance polls that kind of shows Trump's dominance is that. He won voters who supported a national abortion ban, but he also won voters who oppose a national abortion ban.
It's a very wide coalition. He's the dominant figure, he was always going to win of most 64. I think it was caucus goers made their decision several months ago. Almost all those people picked Trump.
When you look at it that way, this was never a contest. He had this thing wrapped up from the very beginning. And all of it was just kind of playing around to see who would come in second, which we will get to eventually.
Yeah, the big question of the night, I mean, you look through the entrance polls, which you know, for some of the. Once you get into the demographics, you take it with a grain of salt. But clear majority of Republican voters 60 around 60 think Trump won in 2020. Think he's fit to be president even if he's convicted of a crime. And to me, that's how Donald Trump won.
Most Republican voters love the Trump presidency. They think he won re-election, they don't think he did anything wrong. And they want him back in the White House, and they think that he can beat Joe Biden. I mean, that just sort of explains it.
And literally no one competing in the state ran against him.
Well, that.
I'm sorry.
They ran against each other. Only Chris Christie, who parked in New Hampshire for most of the time, or a studio at John Lovett, actually made a case against the guy.
I can't believe that didn't help, but yeah, I do think. Even before you get to the campaign, though, you do see the kind of problem that they would be up against. Right? Because Nikki Haley competed for and did far better among the group of people who believe the election results were legitimate. But there just aren't enough of those people for her to win against Trump with. And then, on the other hand, you have Ron DeSantis.
In the kind of entrance polls, people who think that Donald Trump is still the president, Donald Trump does incredibly well. Nikki Haley does far worse, but Ron DeSantis kind of does in the middle, he kind of does like, I think it's like 40 of his voters believed that Donald Trump won the election, something like that.
Yeah, and you just see that there wasn't a group of people big enough that are anti-Trump and the people that like Trump. Well, there's a great restaurant, it's Trump, you know, they don't need to try a new place.
Yeah, I mean. They saw him as an incumbent president who's running for a second term and won the last time. At least in their minds, and should be back in the White House. I've got another telling question from the entrance polls. They asked People, are you part of the MAGA movement? 44 of Republican caucus goers said yes, 51 said No.
Trump got 77 of the people who said yes, no surprise there, but he's still got 25 of the No's.
He got 7 of people who told the pollsters that Trump was unfit for president if he was convicted, yeah.
Yeah, he's mopping up with them, too.
What'd you guys make of the speech, the speech and the message, Tommy, what'd you think?
Sort of like a benzodiazepine ad. It's a very sedated. Donald Trump. Yeah, a lot of acknowledgments at the top, it's got to be hard for his opponents to know.
You're going to lose to the guy who handed his speech over to a state senator, and then a guy who was wearing a jacket that looked like a wall. That was all part of your like, nine minutes, where the entire country is watching you, your big moment after an election win, yeah.
I mean, it is the lowest bar of expectations to trip over. But Donald Trump's simply seeming quasi normal on public television is a victory for him.
Was he speaking to his wife's deceased parents from the grave? was he looking at them?
I think the deceased mother.
The deceased mother.
Melania's mother passed away.
He was speaking to her, Yeah, he seemed to suggest the late husband.
Her husband or her?
She said she was very lonely.
But it won't be for long. So I think he was suggesting the husband's getting back on the market. It's not clear.
Oh, I think he means he's quite old. is he old or is he getting remarried?
We don't know he's either dating or dying.
I didn't mean to derail this. Yeah, you did.
But he was looking up in the air, like he was talking to God. That's what I was thinking.
But you also think that's where the Czech Republic is, or wherever she grew up.
Well, on the globe, you're right.
But I'm glad that you took us off course here because this is where, like, the tone in the speech at the beginning was a more subdued like disciplined tone from Donald Trump. And at first, I think we were all sitting there watching and we were a little nervous listening to it. But once he started getting to the Melania's father and the Lonely. And then he did like, 20 minutes of acknowledgments before he actually got to his stump speech, which was just his stump speech. And so the message on TV, I guess the message was, I'm a little more normal than you think. Yeah, I want people to come together, which may be maybe job well done.
But then it was just he sort of rambled on about acknowledgments, was very subdued, kind of low energy.
It worked because CNN cut him off before he got to his unpopular policy agenda.
That is true, that is true.
Yeah, yes, I think it is. It was strange to see him do that. I mean, it really was.
He was like, very, he spoke about his kids in a way he doesn't normally speak about his kids. He was very. It was very much like what it felt like was a politician addressing a liability. It felt very purposeful.
Oh yeah, it felt like the advisors were like, hey, you might be able to win this thing if people just think you're a little bit less of an asshole.
Right, right, and and by the way, like, I think it's worth comparing the way Donald Trump does those moments to the way another politician does those moments. Even like Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, who I think had like the strongest speech of the night. Nevertheless, she does acknowledgments the way every politician does.
It's like the most sort of like road and like formulaic and kind of inauthentic way of doing it. He's just he's just better at it. And that was a bit, um, a bit alarming. But I do think, though, uh, you know, they got him out there, they got him to praise. Ron DESantis and Nikki Haley, he seems so he was so generous towards them. And then Nikki Haley, which we'll get to, goes out and fucking torches him.
He is fucking rip shit right now, he is thinking about how he's going to. He's going to tear into her the next. He's so angry that he got convinced to be nice to Nikki Haley.
Well, it's. It is not a new phenomenon that once in a while, Donald Trump is on message and can show a little bit of discipline. And then, like, a week later, usually a day later, usually an hour later, or the next tweet, then, like, just loses it and goes back to being. I feel like we've had this conversation on.
Primary nights or caucus nights? Before, actually, I think of this, he's kind of good at this.
I think we've done all of this before. If we don't, if we stopped having conversations we've had before, we should shut this whole place down.
Remember the beginning of Covid, too? remember the first couple of Covid press conferences before he got into the bleach stuff.
I would put money on the fact that we're waking up to 12 all caps tweets about birdbrain. I'm sorry, sorry, truths, truths, for sure.
So just before he won Iowa, he got a bunch of endorsements. A big, big endorsement for my boy Doug Burgum, who's a who's out of the race. Marco Rubio, Mike Lee. He's now got 22 Senate endorsements, which he started. He started mentioning this tonight. It sounds like the Republican establishment, like most of the party, has just decided this is it. We're not even going to like, they're not even going to wait for New Hampshire, they're not going to wait for South Carolina.
They got two other alternatives, they got Nikki Haley, they got Ron DeSantis, they just they don't care, they're all in.
It's so embarrassing Marco Rubio feeling like he has to do it before the Iowa caucus is done for some reason. So I guess so he's.-.
Why do you guys think, why do you think that they that they needed to do this? Or they felt like they needed to do this before? Iowa? Just to get credit so they could get a job from Donald Trump or something?
They probably made a political calculation and asked the campaign when they should endorse, and the campaign said, do it this day. So that when we win Iowa by 30 points, it looks like it's all sewn up in the establishments there, and we're inevitable.
Yeah, I think they're under pressure from Trump to do it now. And it's either you do it when Trump tells you to do it, or he attacks you until you do it later.
Just to paint a little more detail on the difference in the message today versus yesterday, here's a quote from yesterday's event. These caucuses are your personal chance to score the ultimate victory over all the liars, cheaters, thugs, perverts, frauds, crooks, freaks, creeps and other quite nice people.
Trump told a crowd in Indiana, Iowa, on Sunday, Yeah.
We got to get that guy, we got to get that guy back out there.
Get him on Primetime. It is a funny thing. It's like, it's like Trump is at his most dangerous when he sounds his least dangerous, and he's at his least dangerous when he sounds his most dangerous.
He still seems pretty dangerous all the time.
Yeah.
But anyway, I agree. But yeah, well, that's Donald Trump, he, I mean, I don't know how the night could have gone better for him.
Right, and within the context of the Republican primary, right. Like, is there any? Because he also got we're going to talk about this. But, like, DeSantis and Haley ended up so close together that neither of them dropped out, and so they're both going on.
And so that's continues to be a muddle at. He doesn't have like a one-on-one challenger. And he got over 50, which was like the imaginary threshold that people made up, as like the.
Vague dropped out and they dropped a little support Vivek has. We'll go to Trump.
And and as weak, and it's a testament to just how weak and pathetic Desantis is that. The fact that he did better than Haley is ultimately good for Trump. That everyone's sort of like, Oh, that makes it so that, like, Haley isn't so clearly the only alternative, right? That that he gets to stay in. I will say, though, like it is a trick that Trump has pulled here. Which is, if Joe Biden had faced two challengers both approaching 20 points, he would be seen as incredibly weak. As an incumbent president. That Donald Trump gets the benefits of incumbency in so many respects, except in the expectations for how he should be performing in these is quite a, quite a move. I mean, because, you know, he's a, he's a former, he's a former president.
He's he, he's running like a challenger, he's getting treated politically like a challenger, and it belies the kind of weaknesses that he has. Right that, like the fact that this former president who, uh, the the has huge support inside the Republican party, uh, still faces two people. That are able to pull as much as they were able to pull. Does speak to not, it doesn't speak to a strong candidate, speaks to a weak candidate.
I, I a hundred percent agree with that. I think the throughout over the last course of this year, as we've talked about this primary. And it's like, Can someone be Trump? can Desantis be Trump? can Haley be Trump? And all of those ideas that Trump was, that we were not inevitably going to get here, were based on this fundamental analytical error. Where we treated Trump like a normal presidential candidate, not the incumbent president.
For this electorate, for these voters, he is their president.
Almost every single person who caucused tonight, they didn't ask this question in the exit polls, but we should assume it based on. Iowa voted for Trump in 2020, and yet half of them did not vote for him tonight. He under, I don't know what their internal vote goals were, but they dramatically underperformed those because he got 51 of a hundred thousand Iowans.
Yeah, right now. So far, the vote is 107,000 votes so far, and that we're almost, almost at which would?
Be underperform the 2012 Iowa Caucus, not let alone the record turnout from the last time Trump was on the ballot. Now it is there is minus 40 windchill. The outcome was not in doubt. That certainly has some impact on that, but it's a 47 drop in turnout from the last time around, and that says something.
It says something, what it means in the general, I don't know, but it's not what you would want. Coming out of here is a ringing. Is that he would dramatically overperform, that he would demonstrate his ability to bring new caucus goers out, to bring enthusiasm. That did not show up tonight, and it's just it's a piece of data to put away. That suggests that he is a more flawed general election candidate than a lot of the narrative has had to date.
Well, so just for perspective, there's 2.
2 million registered voters in Iowa, 752,000 registered Republican voters. And again, so far, 107,000 turned out tonight, with 95 of the vote in. So it's probably 110,000, maybe when all is said and done. So, yeah, it's hard to extrapolate to a general election based on 107,000 votes out of 2.2 million registered voters in the state, and then even 750,000 Republican voters.
And we should say the campaigns. When you were reading about strategies and projections a couple of weeks ago, they were predicting up to 200,000 participants. So this horrific, you know, the 12 inches of snow, 20 inches of snow like negative 40 wind chill. It has to have been a big factor. That said, if I were the Biden campaign, I'd be spinning hard that it was a weak turnout.
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Well, then let's talk about someone else who's spinning pretty hard. Ron DeSantis.
So Ron DeSantis comes in second, just edged out Nikki Haley for second place. And here he is, I guess, celebrating that.
They threw everything but the kitchen sink at us. They spent almost $50 million attacking us.
No one's faced that much all the way just through Iowa.
The media was against us.
They were writing our obituary months ago.
They even called the election before people even got a chance to vote.
But they were just so excited about the fact that they were predicting that we wouldn't.
Be able to get our ticket punched here out of Iowa, but I can tell you, because of your support. In spite of all of that that they threw at us, everyone against us, we've got our ticket punched out of Iowa.
He lost by 30 points. Yeah, great, Donald Trump beat him by 30 points, he bet everything on Iowa. How much money did he spend?
There were. In terms of advertising spend in Iowa, it was $123 million total $37 million, pro-Haley $35 million, pro-Desantis $18.
3 million pro-trump. The rest was others.
DeSantis did 154 events and visited all 99 counties.
And everyone said, No, thank you, he got that ticket punched. What happens next to Ron DeSantis in New Hampshire? He's polling at about 5 if that.
If that so, the campaign says, they're going to go right to South Carolina tomorrow or next week. Which makes me think that now he's not going to get a lot of attention as it becomes a Trump-Haley race in New Hampshire. And Ron DeSantis is just going to be hanging out in South Carolina and come in what third or fourth in New Hampshire? Maybe, like some people are still going to. I wonder if enough people are still going to be voting for Chris Christie. Even though he's out of the race and Chris Christie could still beat Ron DeSantis in New Hampshire.
I mean, I just don't understand what his path is now.
We'll talk about Haley in a minute, but you watch her speech, she had a message and she has a strategy. She's going to New Hampshire with a purpose and with some potential. Ron DESAntis gave a four minute speech that was mostly whining, and then it was some very lame lines from his stump speech.
It's this attempt at a stirring close where he talks about the sacred fire of Liberty is burning at the following locations. And I heard him do it in the event in Waukee for 30 75-year-olds. And it landed just as flat tonight as it did then. I mean, I don't know what he does next.
I think he's going to have a bunch of advisors around him telling him, if you want to preserve your political future, drop out, endorse Trump, get on the Trump train. Maybe you can figure out some path forward so you don't piss him off, but you're not going to win. New Hampshire. The Nevada caucuses don't exist. No one knows who you are in South Carolina. What are you going to do?
I will say it was the perfect speech for Ron DeSantis, because if you want to know what Ron DeSantis campaign was like, if you wanted years from now, look back on it. It was that speech. No message. He never mentioned the guy who just beat him in Iowa by 30 points. Nothing about Donald Trump, nothing even about Nikki Haley, nothing about anything except for whining about the media, whining about everyone. Thought we were out.
They counted us out and they were right.
Well, it's this idea of like, they're attacking me, they're throwing everything they can at me. The media is trying to stop me, they capital t. they're trying to stop me. Why, Ron? Why?
Why you, what? All these forces are arrayed against you? What is this powerful story? What is this?
What are you saying that scares them so thoroughly? Never guessed it.
I will say in Ron DeSantis defense here, the fact that he spoke for four minutes is the most self-aware thing he's ever done. It's taken a year and a half, but he's recognized that more Ron DeSantis is not good.
Well, yeah, I mean, they should figure that out with a 99 county.
Also, if he really understood that he would not be going to South Carolina tomorrow, he'd be going back to fucking Florida.
Well, he thinks he's going to improve his position in New Hampshire by not going there.
He should just do like five more town halls in Iowa, see how it goes. No, but he's wrong, like this guy. Hal Lambert, who is on DESantis National Finance Committee, gave the following quote to Politico I'll be frank.
I would say third place is not good, so he got a barely second, so it's a little better. But, like, still, they have no path.
Forward.
It's also it's like second place, it's like 19 to 21 percent. Kayleigh got 19, he got 21, it's a barely second place.
They wanted a close second, they didn't get that.
What he will probably do is he will go hang out in South Carolina, he will come in third, in New Hampshire if he comes in fourth. It'd be really impressive because there were only three candidates in the race.
Did asa drop?
I mean, sure, who cares?
What's that other guy's name? Binkley?
Binkley.
I think he's only on in Iowa though, right?
I think Binkley finished ahead of Asa Hutchinson, whoever Binkley is. The first time I've said that name on this podcast.
He's going to lose, he could lose to some zombie, he could lose to Christie. like to zombie Christie, that'd be amazing. I mean, look, dignity has not been something he's been very protective of, right? DESantis.
But I do think the only thing he gets by not going to New Hampshire is a little, you know. He gets a beat of people not asking him to like, he gets an extra moment to decide to stop running.
And I guess it depends on what happens in New Hampshire, right? If Trump were to win by a lot, maybe he just gets out. Then if it's a close in New Hampshire, you know, who knows? I think I would be surprised if he is still campaigning when the South Carolina primary happens in five weeks.
Does the outcome in New Hampshire affect? Is there any way? Look, I don't think it does. But is there any story that you could tell Ron DeSantis about how the outcome in New Hampshire? Whether, let's say Haley surprises or Trump destroys, or whatever it is, is there an outcome in New Hampshire that changes? What Ron DESantis can say is his path?
There's no outcome in New Hampshire that can change the inevitable reality that Donald Trump's going to be the Republican nominee.
Well, right, but is there a way in which, let's say, Haley outperforms that leaves more room for him, or Trump outperforms that leaves less?
It is over when those reporters, when the media wrote the obituary of his campaign months ago, they were correct.
Yeah, I would dust that off.
I would keep that in your dress folder.
What was the quote from the DESantis officials of the New York Times and the Post? Basically, we've got him on hospice care, we're trying to keep him comfortable until the inevitable.
It's taking a while.
He'll keep going until the bank account runs dry.
It is about like, it is like the Monty Python thing of, like, it's just a flesh wound. The reporters are even like, You're dead, you're done, you're fucking toast. He's like, No, no, no, I'm fighting.
Just a stump in Iowa.
You can, actually. If you look at Ron DeSantis meager performance here, you could actually see a path or a better version of Ron DeSantis. Who was a less awkward, terrible candidate running a smarter campaign. I don't want to say he would have beaten Trump, but he could have been much more successful. Because when you look at DESantis path to coming in second, what he did was is he got a decent amount of the non-Trump vote and some of the Trump vote. So when they asked people if they were members of the MAGA movement or not, DESantis got 30 of the non-MAGA supporters, but 11 of the MAGA supporters.
Haley got 3 of the MAGA supporters. So if you see a better version of someone who had made an argument against Trump from a position of strength, you could have put that together to come close.
I don't want to take anything away from Ron DeSantis being one of the worst candidates I've ever seen. But even if you were a good candidate, or a candidate who could figure out how to get more of that MAGA vote, which you clearly need? I just think that they're trapped, all these candidates and once you start attacking Trump, you're by definition not MAGA anymore, because that's what Trump. So it's like, it's really. We keep saying, like, Oh, they got to go after Trump more, but then when they go after Trump, we're like, Well, if we like it, then clearly it's not going to work.
I think that there's.
Like, this is all fantasy politics, and we'll get into fantasy politics for Nikki Haley in a minute here. But it is....
I love it's only fantasy. Player left in this team went through Tim Sky, Chris Christie.
I think a better candidate could have gotten to lose to Trump by a more normal amount. That does not mean it's going to change who's going to be the nominee. But there was a better path for someone like Ron DeSantis that Nikki Haley could never have had that path.
Someone could have got 25, 26, 27, 30.
Before DESantis launched his campaign, before he spent any money, before anyone knocked a door for him, he was at around 30. In Iowa, he went down to 20%.
Yeah, I was just saying a better candidate exactly exactly could have held on to more of that.
But I think it's even.
I actually think it's even more like, I think they're going to say the DeSantis people, they're going to go to like, kind of. The fundamental structural dynamics, right? And those are true, right? There weren't enough people who were anti-Trump, and all the pro-Trump people were Trump.
It's as simple as that, except great politicians have the ability to change that dynamic, right? That's what it means. Obama is somebody who changed the underlying dynamics in a primary, Donald Trump is somebody who could change the dynamics in a primary. Through kind of an understanding, a deeper understanding of the electorate and charisma, political talent which Ron DESantis doesn't have. And so we don't know what it would be like if we had been watching a primary unfold in which a candidate with those kinds of political strengths was able to kind of shape the story. In such a way that you don't end up with people like Marco Rubio feeling they have but no choice to endorse today.
And you don't see the inevitability kind of coming behind Trump. I mean, the polls were even better, there were polls that showed Ron DeSantis sort of ahead. At one point, right? Like there was a moment where a better politician might've been able to take that momentum and change something that didn't change.
I think that is all true in a normal electorate, I think the Republican Party's electorate right now, at least a vast majority of the electorate, is not normal. And that they really, really like Donald Trump, and the only path to a non-Trump candidate was Trump's gonna lose to Joe Biden. And over the last several months, and this is when Donald Trump has become dominant in the primary, even more so than he was before. Joe Biden has looked very weak in the general election, and you know, we can say that the polls are wrong, the polls are gonna change, whatever. But at least in the period of the Republican primary, it looked very easy to beat Joe Biden.
And so, therefore, if you like Donald Trump and you think he won the last election and you want him back in the White House. And the only thing that was stopping you before is you're worried he might lose. Well, if he's beaten Joe Biden, then why would you vote for anyone else?
Yeah, I think that's all true. I just think that when you see how Ron DESantis has got to second, you can see what if you squint hard enough. You can see the inklings of a coalition that someone who could have given a stronger challenge to Trump.
I agree with that.
All right, speaking of a stronger challenge to Trump. Let's talk about Nikki Haley. So she came in third just by a hair, and she gave the last speech of the night. After Trump and Ramaswamy and Desantis all spoke, Let's listen.
I can safely say tonight Iowa made this Republican primary a two-person race.
Trump and Biden are both about 80 years old.
Trump and Biden both put our country trillions of dollars deeper in debt, and our kids will never forgive them for it.
Trump and Biden both lack a vision for our country's future because both are consumed.
By the past, by investigations, by vendettas, by grievances.
America deserves better.
All right, Nikki Haley, what do we think? Love it, she going to do it.
Yeah, she's going to fucking, Yeah, no, I'll tell you. When I think a speech is good, that's how, you know, it's going to really work for some fucking Maga goon in South Carolina.
That's a pretty good general election message.
Yeah.
It was a good speech, I mean, it was a message.
It was a message.
It was a good message. The bar is so low because Desantis doesn't have a message.
It's generational, it's spending. She always hits Trump on. spending. The debt is the only thing she really hits him on. It's this vision of the future, and not getting consumed by investigations and vendettas and grievances.
I mean, think like that hits on the things people like least about Trump and also sweeps up Biden in the broadside.
The other point she makes is if the country does not want a Biden-Trump rematch, a Biden-Trump rematch is a toss up. Which was sort of got a little kind of like, ooh, it's a little bit in the room, but I win on the line side, yeah, right.
Yeah.
It's all a great message, but to what end?
Yeah, I mean, so here's the demographics that Haley won in Iowa moderates, independent women, college graduate women, people with advanced degrees, and people who believe Biden won in 2020..
So Jews.
What percentage of the Republican Party do you think those demographics comprise in 2024? Like 30, that's generous.
Not, not even close, not even close.
And now in New Hampshire, probably a lot more than in Iowa, right? Which is why, you know, maybe outside shot at winning New Hampshire.
And you have independents and you have Democrats.
Yes, right, I mean, the New Hampshire thing is, she could win New Hampshire. Like that seems, that is in the realm of possibility, but as we said, it's likely, but definitely.
Possible.
It is possible, and New Hampshire is unlike every other state that's going to vote.
It's probably one of the most college educated states in terms of a Republican electorate in the primary.
Gallup declared it to be the least religious state in the country in 2016.
The evangelical vote was 24 in New Hampshire in 2016, it was 55 in Iowa. Tonight. The Haley won 13 of those voters. When you get to South Carolina, her home state.
In 2016, the evangelical vote was over 70%.
The last poll out of South Carolina was an Emerson poll January 2nd and 3rd. It was Trump 54, Haley 25..
It's just you can't conjure a path that lines up with the profile of voters that Nikki Haley has attracted to date. That gets you another win. Like, Donald Trump will probably win all 50 primaries if he wins in New Hampshire, as Al Gore did in 2000..
And again, Nikki Haley started this primary with a message that was, and sort of the voters, that she was trying to go for. More. Similar to what DESantis was doing. And then, as she did again, what we've all advised any of these Republican candidates to do, which was actually criticize Donald Trump. She started getting all the never Trump love. And, you know, Larry Hogan, governor of Maryland, endorsed her over the weekend. And he was like, it's time for the party to come together around Nikki Haley. It's like, Dude, what party are you talking about? The party that you're talking about doesn't exist anymore.
It's a cafe, Milano.
A cocktail party?
And the more that, like the never Trump old guard Republican establishment starts coalescing around Nikki Haley. The angrier the MAGA base and Donald Trump are going to get, and the more they're going to attack her. And so, like, I don't, there's just no, I don't know what the middle ground is.
Well, they're all, they're all sleeping in the bed they made. Which is not, which is spending the last few years indulging the election lie which renders like useless her. One of her, if not her most compelling arguments was, which is that she's much more electable. We, I believe that's true. I think she's a much more, she's a much more, uh, dangerous general election candidate. Oh yeah, uh, those the polls have been showed it for forever.
There, it's like, it's, it's indisputable, um, but as you pointed out, you know, this campaign has taken place while Biden is weak, and they've convinced their entire party that Donald Trump won the election. And so, uh, you know, the other part of the problem, too, is that. Like, maybe it was a strategy change that maybe she had to figure out that there was no way to kind of compete for the voters. The way DeSantis was, or maybe it was more like she was, you know, I don't know, slowly coming to be able to be as critical of Trump as she is. But giving a speech like this now, like, what, what is that for? What does that get you?
Like, I don't know, I'm sure, yeah, just, but just that's it just gets you. New Hampshire.
Yeah.
They, they have an ad up. I don't know where's Haley's campaign or her, I assume it's one of her. Co-founders of Rivax has an ad up with almost this exact message. In New Hampshire. It's been up for probably a week or so now, yeah.
I mean, that's it, that's, that's the only play, so you, you do it right.
Um, but just again, it just. We don't know what it would be like if there had been a concerted message against Donald Trump for a year. Because there just wasn't, there wasn't. I mean, Nikki Haley slowly tiptoeing up to this, Ron DESantis, occasionally mentioning Trump in in in passing, refusing to do it when he loses. Uh, we just they, they. There was never a concerted case against Trump at any point in this primary.
Vivek Ramaswamy Uh, he was gaining in the polls, a rapid rise. And then he sat down for an interview with Tommy, and now tonight, it's the end of the road for him.
It was very similar to the Sarah Palin Katie Kirk interview 2008.
Yes, I was going to, Yeah, that's very good, Dan, that's right.
It's fully edited.
America's sweetheart Tommy Vitor.
Tommy, what do you think happened? Any final thoughts on Vivek's candidacy?
I mean, I was trying to Google while we were talking how much he personally spent on the campaign, I feel like I heard him say it was like $15 million. But I could be wrong. I was in viewed one way, coming out of nowhere as a 38 year old to run this campaign and getting 7 of the vote in in Iowa. And making this huge name for yourself in conservative circles is a huge win for his personal brand and future in politics, et cetera, et cetera. It's also a huge win for him. If his actual goal was to do a ton of marketing for anti-woke investment products that he happens to sell. Or to start a new media business and be the next Ben Shapiro or whatever. So, I mean, I think, you know, there's a bit of a Pete Buttigieg feeling to his campaign.
They're in no way similar. I don't like you fucking dickheads.
Clip that.
They're not remotely similar, but they both-.
And I'm the one they don't like.
But they both came out of nowhere. To, you know, launch these encouraging campaigns. And they had a moment. And now people who know who they are, and they could, you know, he could have a future in the Republican Party, we'll see.
Donald Trump's Transportation Secretary.
I thought commerce.
Okay, well, yeah, we'll see.
Commerce makes sense.
But which is not going to happen, Why? Because we're going to win.
Oh, right, yeah.
So that's good.
Can these results tell us anything about the general election? We already made the point that it's tough to extrapolate, at least about Iowa, because it's such a small number of people that actually turned out. But Dan, what do you think? Because I did hear a lot of Biden surrogates tonight talk about how well it shows that Trump is pretty weak, the fact that he only got 50 when he's the incumbent.
And what do you make of that?
Well, I agree that this is an underwhelming victory for Trump in the context of showing general election strength. It doesn't necessarily mean that he is any weaker than we already thought he was, but he did not outperform our expectations. His vaunted, newly organized, newly strategic campaign did not deliver some set of new caucus goers or a big turnout, despite the weather or anything like that. So in that sense, I think it is not a positive sign for him in the general election, for the primary. Obviously, this is everything he could possibly hope for in his victory.
But once again, as we point out, it's 107,000 Iowans, 63 of them over the age of 50. It doesn't give us a real picture of the electorate. But I don't think Trump demonstrated unexpected or surprising strength. If anything, it's weaker than I expected he would do.
So I do think it was interesting that. 32 of Republican caucus goers in the entrance poll said that if Donald Trump is convicted of a crime, he's unfit to be president. Does that matter much in a Republican primary? No, because it's 32, but if those caucus goers in a general election decided not to vote for him? If Donald Trump just loses a small percentage of the Republican vote in a very close race, that's a real problem for him. The way they asked that question, is he unfit?
You could see Republican voters say, Yeah, he's unfit, but also Joe Biden's even worse, and so I'm going to go with him anyway. I thought that. Ann Seltzer, in her poll, which ended up being fairly accurate, again, asked Haley supporters, Who would you vote for in a general election? and 43 of Haley's supporters said they'd vote for Biden over Trump. If that's right and we start seeing that pattern, then I think that's a problem for Donald Trump.
When we go back and look at that poll, it's probably going to suggest that Haley having too many.
They overrepresented independents as supporters of Haley, because I think half of her supporters were independents in that poll, which independents made up a fraction of the caucus participants. That seems highly impossible, but I think even more important than that number is 24 of Republican.
Caucus goers said that they would not vote for Trump if he were the nominee. And now, this is not random Republicans, it's not rhinos, it's not passive political participants. These are people who, three days before the caucus, told a pollster that they were going to brave sub-zero temperatures to vote, would not vote for Trump.
And obviously the parties always unite after primaries, even not particularly divisive ones like this one. But if that number, if half that number, or really a quarter of that number, were to not vote for Trump. And that happened in states across this country, including the battleground states. Joe Biden would win, and he'd win by a larger margin than he did in 2020. Trump got 92 of the Republican vote last time.
Yeah, yeah, that was that. 32 is what jumped out at me. But also that some chunk of those voters still caucus for Trump, even though if he's convicted, they believe he's unfit. And I think it just speaks to. There's a lot of tension and time rightly focused on the ways in which Joe Biden is a weaker general election candidate in 2024 than he was in 2020..
He is older, he has all the kind of negatives of incumbency. But there are all these ways in which Donald Trump is going to be a weaker candidate. There was a poll that came out in the last couple of days that showed just how many disengaged and independent voters don't yet actually believe Donald Trump is going to be the nominee. There is a huge percentage of people who have told posters that if Donald Trump is convicted of a crime, they will not vote for him.
How does that hold? Is that real? What happens when a former president is on trial for multiple felonies in multiple cases at the same time? These are all untested, these are all unprecedented.
And I think the question is just how much weaker will Donald Trump be? By the time we were to get to November, I don't think we know.
Biden campaign today also released their fourth quarter fundraising totals 97 million 117 million cash on hand. How much does this matter as a measure of enthusiasm at this point?
I think it's a very positive sign. That at the darkest moments in the polls, in the middle of an internal, a very public, very emotionally tortured Democratic party debate about Joe Biden's candidacy, he raised a record amount of money. That speaks to, obviously, some measure of enthusiasm, and we'll be interested to see what the N.FO is releasing. Not the small dollar versus big dollar donations in there. But one thing it definitely speaks to is a well-run campaign because that takes serious, serious work and strategy and planning and fundraising. And they pulled that off quite well.
And whatever it signals about enthusiasm, it certainly signals that they're going to have the money they need to run this race, which is quite important. All right, well, we will. We got New Hampshire a week from Tuesday and maybe a debate Thursday. There's supposed to be a debate Thursday between again. I guess just Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, but we don't know if they're both going to do it.
Why would Haley debate someone who she no longer views as being in the race?
Good point.
Why would you bother?
And before this, I think Ron DESantis hadn't said he was definitely going to show up.
I just assumed Ron DeSantis I thought there was a real chance Ron DeSantis would be out of the race by then, but like everyone else, I underestimated him.
Dan's over there, throwing the kitchen sink at the guy.
Me and my friends in the media.
Everything but the kitchen sink.
We should say his staff was right. That AP calling the race before the caucus scores had voted in some of these things is ridiculous. I don't like that.
It was ridiculous.
The upside of that is what you beat some of the other outlets. The downside is suddenly you're the story in the most unhelpful way possible.
Because if you're sitting there at the caucus site, you show up, they close the doors, and then you see an alert on your phone that says, Oh, Donald Trump won. Like, maybe you're not going to leave it. Like, do you change your vote at that point? Because you think it doesn't matter? I think it's not a great thing to do.
Even if it doesn't change it, just it's so insulting, it's so insulting to people who are showing up to vote, it sucks.
Look, if there are two things American people trust right now, it's the media and our electoral system. So I don't see what the problem is.
Republican caucus goers love the AP and they trust the process.
What a way to restore trust in the media, then to call the race before the votes have been cast.
Yeah, we haven't been down that road before.
Unbelievable.
Unbelievable. All right, that's all we got again. We're doing three PSAs a week now, three Pod Save Americas a week.
So I think we'll have one on on on Wednesday, Wednesday and Friday, Wednesday and Friday.
We're going to, we're going to feed you content like you're foie gras geese.
Bye everyone, we'll talk to you soon.
Bye.
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