Who benefits as Christie ends presidential bid before Iowa caucus?
2024-01-12 00:27:57
Every Friday, Guardian columnist and former Washington correspondent, Jonathan Freedland, invites experts to help analyse the latest in American politics. From politicians to journalists covering the White House and beyond, Jonathan and his guests give listeners behind the scenes access to how the American political machine works.
This is The Guardian.
Another one bites the dust.
Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, the chief Trump critic in the Republican primary field, dropping out of the race tonight.
Hours before, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis took to the debate stage in Iowa on Wednesday night. More than a thousand miles away in New Hampshire, Chris Christie bowed to what had come to seem inevitable when he announced he was dropping out of the presidential race. I would rather lose by telling the truth than lie in order to win. The former New Jersey governor was the only candidate happy to attack Donald Trump relentlessly in a field of Republicans trying to beat the former president while not offending the party base that loves him. I've never believed that Donald Trump was a foregone conclusion as our nominee in this race, and I knew that the case had to be made against him. So, with only three days until Iowans caucus for their pick to be the Republican presidential nominee, who will come out on top?
I'm Jonathan Friedland, columnist at The Guardian, and this is Politics Weekly America.
I think Christie realized that before he got humiliated in Iowa and perhaps even in New Hampshire, it was probably time for him to bow out.
Elaine Kamarck is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, an author of the book Primary Politics Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates its presidential Candidates. She was also an advisor to Al Gore during his presidential campaign back in 2000..
Fields these days tend to be very crowded, they really form in the spring of the year before election year. And there's lots of time and there are lots of indices that people look at to see if these candidates are doing well or not. How much money have they raised, how much support do they have from other notables in their party?
How are they doing in the polls that are taken? I mean, there's a lot of tea leaves, so to speak, that candidates and close observers look at long before the process gets started. So people often do drop out on the eve of the first primaries.
In this contest, it's happened because we've seen former Vice President Mike Pence fall by the wayside. Senator Tim Scott and others dropping out before they could, in a way, before they get bruised by coming seventh or ninth.
Oh yeah, Joe Biden, by the way, Joe Biden himself, way back in 2008, dropped out very early, so it's common, frankly.
And while all this was going on, with Chris Christie following that path and exiting the race before he could be pushed out. Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, as we mentioned at the top, were debating yet again the fifth of these Republican debates in the CNN debate in Iowa. Officially, the Republican National Committee are just not holding these anymore, which means that these news channels hold them themselves. Yet again, Donald Trump did not take part. He was doing his own town hall in the very warm and congenial environment of Fox News. So it left Haley and DeSantis to sort of duke it out against each other.
Do you think either of them achieved anything for themselves with this fifth and final pre-Iowa debate?
It's unclear, partially because they both got into this very, very nasty. You did this, you lied about this, you lied about this.
You lied about this, That's not true. That's such a lie. Ron. That is wrong. You've supported all that money going over there.
So let's put our own people first. You're just so desperate.
And she also said.
And with a great deal of detail about each other's records, which, frankly, to anybody else, was pretty incomprehensible. It was something that I think most voters maybe looked at and said, what, I don't understand, who's on first here? You know? It was really, very confusing.
A couple of times when they let up on that, frankly, they were both quite good. The segment on immigration, boy, the Democrats need to watch that segment and internalize those critiques. She, she ridiculed that when Donald Trump was formed, I'm telling you you need a wall.
You can't trust politicians to do this. If the wall's there, it's a physical fact of life.
And it's a huge thank you, governor, thank you, governor.
Go to DESantis Lies dot com. I said, you can't just build a wall, you have to do more than build a wall. Because that's a very powerful issue to use against Democrats in the fall, and DESantis, I think, perhaps stops the bleeding because he was better than usual.
But he was already on the downhill slope.
Yeah, it's very interesting your point about him stopping the bleeding because he has been pretty bad in these debates this time. But, you know, stronger, steadier performance, more capable. And yet the question is whether it's too late. I mean, and in some ways, everything a little bit overshadowed by the news from Chris Christie, because that was the sort of news story of the night.
Just in terms of that dropout by him, who benefits from that? Where do we imagine Christie's voters going? I mean, the assumption has always been that because he was anti-trump himself, he'll go to whoever is the most anti-trump of the other two. So who's that?
Well, I believe it'll go to Haley. I mean, I believe the conventional wisdom is it'll go to Haley. Neither of them really took on Trump, and, of course, Democrats and commentators always want them to, you know, go for the jugular when they're talking about Trump. That's not a good strategy in a party where more than 50 percent of the people like Trump and feel good about him.
You know, that's not a great strategy. But Haley was much more clear on one of the central issues of the night, which is How do you feel about January 6th? But at the end of the day, I will always defend and fight for the Constitution. That's what we should do as Americans. I think what happened on January 6th was a terrible day and I think President Trump will have to answer for it.
Never again should we have an insurrection. And she said that quite plainly and forcefully, whereas DeSantis kind of hemmed and hawed about it and changed the topic. So I think that, given that and a couple other things, she said. I think a lot of the Christie support, which wasn't significant in other states, but is significant in New Hampshire, should go to Haley.
Now, meanwhile, there was one other candidate who is still in the race who was again not on the debate stage, namely, Vivek Ramaswamy. Who's a sort of Trump mini-me, a tech entrepreneur whose positions on Trump, or rather, whose positions on policy, are almost identical to Trump's. He didn't qualify, He wasn't deemed to have enough support to qualify for Wednesday's debate. Instead, he was on a podcast with the right-wing commentator Tim Pool. It's a question there of why someone like him doesn't drop out.
But in a way, the larger question is how the mechanics of dropping out work. Because you've been a senior advisor on presidential campaigns before. Obviously gore in 2000.
There was no question of dropping out in those campaigns, but how does that work? Exactly? Who is the person who goes to the candidate and says, You know what? I think the time has come to drop out. That seems a pretty hard conversation to have.
And I'm just imagining I'm gaming out here. The scenario in which Ron DeSantis, as many predict, you know, trails or doesn't do well enough out of Iowa, really gets beaten badly. Comes in the poor third in New Hampshire. Or the polls will say he will. At what point does somebody, perhaps even before the New Hampshire primary, go to him and say, Governor, time's up?
Well, for most people, what happens is they simply start to run out of money. It becomes more and more difficult to pay people, it becomes extremely difficult to ask people to work long hours in strange places with no money. With regard to candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy, they're basically self-financing their campaign. And if he had older children, I would say, Oh, it's the kids that come to him and say, Dan, what are you doing with our inheritance here?
Pissing it away in the wind. And I think that that's how that works. His children are not old enough to tell him that maybe his wife is telling them that or something. But he has already stopped spending money on television in Iowa.
And his excuse is, he's running a different kind of campaign, he's running a social media campaign. We can tell from our statistics on social media that he has spent large amounts of money on social media advertising. But it doesn't seem to have made much difference to him in the polls. So, you know, it's a tricky thing, this campaign business.
You can spend and spend and spend on TV, radio, social media, organization, on the ground, and no one ever really knows what will make everything click. In this case, all of his spending hasn't really gotten him over about 5 percent in the polls.
Yeah, and the speculation is that he doesn't really care because he's putting down a future investment, investing, as you say, his own money. Either in a future career as a sort of Fox pundit or something. Or he's thinking that just in case something happens that trips up Donald Trump, he's there to be the darling of the Trump base who could scoop up that support. That's the theory, but we're talking now, just a few days before Iowans vote in what is known as a caucus. Now, we've particularly wanted to speak to you because you quite literally wrote the book on primary politics.
And people, I think, especially outside the United States, may trip up and get confused by this distinction between caucuses and primaries. So let's try to unpack that. For our listeners, Iowa is not a primary, it's a caucus.
Can you explain the difference?
Sure, caucuses are meetings of the party faithful, and usually they take place in a series of meetings. The first ones will be at the precinct level. And those people will elect delegates to the county conventions. Who will elect delegates to the congressional district conventions and elect delegates to the state conventions? And only in these latter meetings will delegates to the national conventions be elected.
In Iowa, those meetings will happen in places like church basements, school cafeterias and community centers in more than 1600 precincts across 99 counties. This is the kind of party convention system that, frankly, was the way Americans nominated presidential candidates all the way from 1831 to 1968..
When voters arrive at their caucuses, they fill out a slip of paper indicating their presidential preference. And that paper is a private ballot. And it's gathered up and sent to party headquarters and it's counted. And then they have the rest of their meetings, and the meetings determine eventually who their National Convention delegates will be. So, in some senses, the Iowa Republican caucuses have turned into a party-run primary, followed by a traditional caucus.
Caucuses are kind of on their way out. Very few states are using caucuses anymore. In part because they're unwieldy and they require people to hang around for three or four hours on a winter night. They disenfranchise a lot of people who can't be there, either very old people or soldiers who are deployed somewhere else and can't participate. They've become the least preferred way to run the nomination system.
I mean, it is quite true what you say about unwieldy, and they are, it seems, on their way out, but they really are quite something to see. Yes, I've been at those Iowa caucuses. Down to the point where there will be three or four people just gathering in the front room of a farmhouse with the farmer and two or three of his neighbors. You know, and the vet or something, and they'll sit around and talk about who their preferred candidate is.
And then once they've made a decision, and there would be. Sometimes, if they were slightly larger, in a high school gym or something, you'd have people moving over, you know, there'd be a table for Nikki Haley and a table for Rhonda Sanders. People would move over as they were persuaded by their neighbors and friends. And then, as I understood it, somebody would get on the phone and sort of wire the local county headquarters and say, OK, this little hamlet. We give four of our votes to candidate A and six of our votes to candidate B, and so on. It felt a very a kind of very old fashioned, but very authentic expression of the sort of civic, democratic spirit.
Yes, I mean, that's why they lived on as long as they did right. Is that, in fact, they're really remarkable exercises in democracy because of the way people have to debate with each other over issues and over the candidates? The problem is that they're just too big these days to do that.
There's almost no farmhouse caucuses left, they're very large, they'd be given the craziness. In some places of the country, they often have police protection there. And they end up not being those old fashioned exercises in democracy and being sort of primaries where lots of people can't participate. And so most medium sized states that used to have caucuses, states like Washington State and Minnesota, have gotten rid of them and just gone to a presidential primary.
And in the case of Iowa, though, which has held on to these because it's an important tradition of the state. It's going on across a big landscape, isn't it? There's ninety nine counties, many of them very rural, quite sparsely populated in Iowa. And just because you, you will have witnessed it, too. When people do gather in those rooms, the business of persuasion, the sort of speeches local people would make you, you must have heard some of those. How does that work?
Well, people get up and they speak on behalf of their candidates and they are quite powerful. And they're talking almost always to a room full of people, that where they know a lot of them. And so, you know, sometimes it can be quite jovial, you know? Because, oh, I know old Sarah over there, she doesn't really, she doesn't really believe that Ron DeSantis is is a good guy. But so they can be quite jovial because they are among neighbors, really.
Sometimes it will change opinions, but the caucus you're describing is more the Democratic Caucus than the Republican Caucus. The Republican Caucus tended to be again among neighbors and doing party business and electing delegates. But the presidential preference happens when you come in the door. And so there is no opportunity for switching things around. Because they are in these, often quite far flung places.
It can take some time to collect all these slips of paper and to get come up with a number. When are we likely to know who wins in Iowa on Monday? And I suppose we should be prepared for things can go wrong in these caucuses.
Oh yeah, I mean, again, that's another reason why caucuses are dying is that, you know, you literally are dealing with slips of paper. You're not dealing with voting machines, you're not dealing with ballots that have been properly printed and stored and protected until the night of the election. There's no provisions for recounts, as there are when you run a state run primary.
And so, if anything goes wrong, as it did, by the way, on caucus night for the Democrats in 2020, you're really in a world of chaos.
Because what happened then, remind us what happened.
Well, what happened four years ago was that they basically could not get all the ballots counted.
Caucus goers and candidates frustrated by the stunning failure to release the final results. After problems with a new app, Precinct Captains were supposed to use, many trying to phone in their figures.
I couldn't get through. I tried a number of times. And there was also a breakdown in the software that people were using to phone in the ballots. They were basically supposed to get on their cell phones and access a particular app and use that to report the findings. Well, it crashed.
So the fallback was to get on the telephone and call in the results, and, of course, the lines were jammed for hours and hours.
The decision to put out incomplete numbers infuriating contenders like Elizabeth Warren.
I think they ought to get it together and release all of the data. They really did not have good results until the next morning and there are lots of recriminations. The State party chairman resigned in distress after the after caucus night in Iowa. The winners were sort of Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders, but it wasn't really clear who won.
It was a mess.
Yes, and I remember in 2012, among the Republicans, it was more or less a dead heat with Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney. And so there was confusion that night, too. And the other thing that people do say about Iowa is that, you know. Besides the argument that it's a bit unrepresentative in the sense of a lot of disproportionately white electorate, unlike the rest of the country. And so on that, it has a pretty terrible track record of picking winners, and particularly on the Republican side.
And you know, I mentioned Rick Santorum, you know who he? It was Ted Cruz, who won in 2016, Pat Robertson in 1988, Mike Huckabee in 2008. I mean, they don't often tell you much about who is going to make it even to the nomination, let alone the White House.
Well, that's right. And again, that's because the caucus system requires people to turn out on a Monday evening at between certain hours. It's not like an election where you can vote all day long, anytime that's convenient, they require you to turn out.
They require you to stay there at least for a while. The Republican system is a little bit easier than the Democratic system, because you can leave after you cast your ballot. Therefore, only the most committed and often the most ideological voters turn out and participate in caucuses.
That kind of voter, the Iowan voter. Do they have a particular type at the risk of sounding like I'm on a dating app? Do they have a type of Republican that they favor more than any other?
Absolutely. The Republican Party in Iowa is known for the preponderance of evangelical voters in their party. God puts people over us in office, and I believe God put Donald Trump there and I want him back in again. So when you see a Republican primary, it's very, very clear that there's a lot of evangelical voters in there. They've got an agenda.
That's who you're going to get in those caucuses.
And yet the person they're going for, by huge numbers, according to the last polls before the contest, is somebody who nobody would ever confuse. For a man of God, namely, Donald Trump, he's, you know, miles ahead. And yet Donald Trump chose to spend Thursday not in Iowa campaigning. Taking advantage of this huge lead he has there. But instead to be in court, making a court appearance that he didn't need to make.
In Washington, former President Donald Trump appeared before a federal appeals court for the historic arguments over whether he should be immune from prosecution for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
How do you explain that?
I explain it as follows that so far, Donald Trump's legal troubles have actually been ironically good for him politically. So he can campaign in Iowa, or he can campaign from the courtroom, dredging up. You know how unfair this is and how persecuted he is, and that's what he's chosen to do. I think if he were not so far ahead in Iowa, people might question that choice, but right now, given how significant his lead is, that's probably a pretty rational choice.
Let's talk about what happens immediately afterwards. I remember that on voting night in Iowa, the busiest place in the whole state is Des Moines Airport. Where suddenly all the candidates and their teams and the press get on whatever flights they can to head north to New Hampshire for the primary. Is your guess that everybody who's currently in the race, as you and I speak now, will still be in the race this time next week?
Hard to say. First of all, who knows what Vivek Ramaswamy will do? The real question is, Desantis, Desantis has placed all of his bets and money in Iowa. He has visited every 99 county, as he keeps telling us repeatedly.
He's really staked a lot on Iowa and he's doing very poorly in New Hampshire. So unless he has a substantial night in Iowa, and a substantial night means coming in a nice, clean, powerful second to Donald Trump. I'm not sure he can go on to New Hampshire. So he might be someone who you see drop out, Ramaswamy might be somebody you see drop out. In which case, there'd be basically two airplanes to New Hampshire, the Trump campaign and the Haley campaign.
Yeah, people always say there's just two, maximum three tickets out of Iowa. I think you might be right, it could just be down to two. And it really does depend in this race for second place. The margin, not the margin between the number one and number two, but really, in a way, between two and three. As you say, they'll be looking for a clean win.
Now, Elaine We always do like to ask our guests on the podcast a what else? question, something completely different this week. President Biden was only told that the United States defense secretary, Lloyd Austin was being treated for cancer on Tuesday, even though Lloyd Austin had spent several days in intensive care. Out of action.
Doctors at Walter Reed say Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was hospitalized due to complications from a surgery to treat prostate cancer. President Biden and other top administration officials were not informed of Austin's hospitalization and diagnosis for several days.
After the president himself, the Defense Secretary is the most senior figure in the entire chain of command for the U.
S military. And yet, it seems no one, including the White House, knew where he was. What would you make of this? What does it say about the Biden White House?
How damaging do you think it might be?
Well, I think it's probably more damaging to Secretary Austin than it is to the White House, per se. I mean, he did not, and no one in his circle thought, to inform the White House that he was going into surgery and will be in the hospital. I mean, this was, this was a very, very bad judgment on the part of Austin himself and the people around him. And we remember this was over the holidays, so the expectation was not high that the Secretary of Defense would be calling in and chatting with the president.
Right, I mean, people were going off to their family gatherings, etc. I think he first went in on December 22nd, three days before Christmas. So I don't think they expected to hear from the secretary, but boy, oh boy, he should have known to tell them and let them know.
And they're they're looking at this, the Pentagon is looking at this. They they have understood, rather belatedly, that this was a big problem.
Do you think it's possible that once he has fully recovered, he will be under some pressure to quietly resign?
He may be, although what it sounds like, frankly, is that his health problems are more serious than they thought they would be. And that alone might do it.
Elaine came up. We will be watching what happens in Iowa and in New Hampshire as the events unfold. We are so grateful to you for giving us your insight and perspective. Thanks so much for joining me on Politics Weekly America.
Thank you so much for having me.
And that is all from me. For this week, we will be back with an immediate episode on Tuesday dropping first thing in the morning, bringing you those all important results from Iowa. Which will have just happened before I head to New Hampshire for our three part primary election special, which will start next Friday, the 19th of January. So make sure to listen to that before I go, I'd like to ask a quick favor.
If you have a minute to spare, it would be great if you could leave us a review. Wherever you listen, those reviews mean a lot. They really help the podcast, and they're also very useful for us in knowing what kinds of things you want to hear more about. But for now, it's goodbye.
The producer is Daniel Stevens and the executive producer is Maz Ebtehaj. I'm Jonathan Friedland, thanks as always for listening.
This is The Guardian.
The Guardian.
v1.0.0.260408-1-a910ba6_os