Trump Wins, DeSantis Whines, Haley Withstands

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Speaker 2 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.
I'm John Lovett. I'm Dan Pfeiffer from Tommy Vitor.
The gang's all here. We're back.

Speaker 4 There's no Ion caucus.

Speaker 2 Good to see you guys.

Speaker 2 Well, let's get right to the news. Donald Trump is the winner of the Iowa caucuses, dominating the field with 51%.
Ron DeSantis comes in second with 21%. Nikki Haley third with 19%.

Speaker 2 Vivek Ramaswamy with 8%, and no one else cracked 1%.

Speaker 2 Trump narrowly lost the caucuses to Ted Cruz in 2016. Eight years later, the networks called it for him within 30 minutes.
He won by the biggest margin of any Republican in history.

Speaker 2 Out of Iowa's 99 counties, I think he won 98. Nikki Haley won one county by a vote.

Speaker 5 She's up by one in Johnson County. She's currently in the United States.

Speaker 2 It hasn't been called yet. Right, yeah, we're recording Monday night here.

Speaker 2 All right, so big win for Trump, and let's hear a clip from his victory speech.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 2 We're going to come together. Classic Trump, gracious, subdued

Speaker 2 unity candidate trying to heal the divides in this country. It's about a fight for the soul of the nation.

Speaker 4 He praised Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis.

Speaker 4 He didn't say a bad word about them. He said how much of a fun time they'd all had together.

Speaker 5 Tonight was the night he became president.

Speaker 2 Clip that.

Speaker 5 Wait, don't, even if I'm right.

Speaker 2 We'll go back to the speech. Let's talk about the results first.
So Donald Trump, 51%,

Speaker 2 blows away the rest of the field. How did he do it? How did he do it? Dan?

Speaker 2 I think there's one number in the entrance polls that kind of shows Trump's dominance is that he won voters who support a national abortion ban, but he also won voters who oppose a national abortion ban.

Speaker 2 It's a very wide coalition.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 This was almost, when you look at it that way, this was never a contest.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the big question of the night.

Speaker 2 I mean, you look through the entrance polls, which, you know, for some of the, once you get into the demographics, maybe you take 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.

Speaker 2 And to me, that's how Donald Trump won. Like, most Republican voters love the Trump presidency.
They think he won re-election. They don't think he did anything wrong.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 5 And literally no one competing in the state ran against him.

Speaker 2 Well, that I'm sorry. They ran against each other.

Speaker 5 That's the problem. Only Chris Christie, who parked in New Hampshire for most of the time or a studio with John Lovitt, actually made a case against the guy.

Speaker 2 I can't believe that didn't help.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 Because Nikki Haley competed for and did far better among the group of people who believe the election results were legitimate.

Speaker 4 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, you know, in the in the kind of entrance polls,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 He kind of does like, I think it's like 40% of his voters believed that Donald Trump won the election, something like that.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And you just see that like there wasn't a group of people big enough that are anti-Trump.

Speaker 2 And the people that that like Trump, well, there's a great restaurant.

Speaker 4 It's Trump, you know, they don't need to try a new place.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, they saw him as an incumbent president who's running for a second term and

Speaker 2 won the last time, at least in their minds, and should be back in the White House. I thought another telling

Speaker 2 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, yes.

Speaker 2 No surprise there. But he 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.

Speaker 2 Tough.

Speaker 2 What did you guys make of the speech? The speech and the message? Tommy, what'd you think?

Speaker 5 Sort of like a benzodiazepine ad.

Speaker 5 It's a very sedated Donald Trump. A lot of acknowledgements at the top.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 That was all part of your like nine minutes where the entire country is watching you, your big moment after an election win.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, it is the lowest bar of expectations to trip over, but Donald Trump simply seeming quasi-normal on public television is a victory for him.

Speaker 5 Was he speaking to his wife's deceased parents from the grave?

Speaker 2 Was he looking up at them? The mother, deceased mother.

Speaker 4 Melania's mother passed away.

Speaker 2 He was speaking to her.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he seemed to suggest the late

Speaker 2 husband, her husband, or her.

Speaker 5 He said he was very lonely.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 4 Is he old or remarried?

Speaker 2 We don't know. He's either

Speaker 2 David or Die.

Speaker 8 But he was looking up in the air like he was talking to God.

Speaker 5 That's what I was.

Speaker 2 But he also thinks that's where the Czech Republic is or whatever she's wrote.

Speaker 2 Well, in the club, you're right. assistant.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And at first, I think we were all sitting there watching it. We were a little nervous listening to it.
But once he started getting to the

Speaker 2 Melania's father and the lonely, and then he did like... 20 minutes of acknowledgements before he actually got to his stump speech, which was just his stump speech.

Speaker 2 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 maybe

Speaker 2 job well done. But then it was just, he sort of rambled on about acknowledgements, was very subdued, kind of low energy.
It worked because CNN cut him off before he got to his unpopular policy agenda.

Speaker 2 It's true. That is true.
That is true.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yes, I think, like, it is, it was strange to see him.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 He was very, it was very much like what it felt like was a politician addressing a liability. It felt very purposeful.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Nikki Haley, who think had like the strongest speech of the night, nevertheless, she does acknowledgements the way every politician does. It's like the most sort of like road and like

Speaker 4 formulaic and kind of inauthentic way of doing it. He's just, he's just better at it.
And that was a bit

Speaker 4 alarming. But I do think, though,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 The next, he's so angry that he got convinced to be nice to Nikki Haley.

Speaker 2 Well, it is not a new phenomenon that once in a while Donald Trump is on message and can show a little bit of discipline.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 5 I feel like we've had this conversation on primary nights or caucus nights before, actually. I think this he's kind of good at.

Speaker 2 this. I think that we've done all of this before.
Remember the beginning.

Speaker 4 If we stopped having conversations we've had before, we should shut this whole place down.

Speaker 2 Remember the beginning of COVID too? Remember the first couple COVID press conferences before he got into the bleach stuff?

Speaker 2 I would put money on the fact that we're waking up to 12 all-caps tweets about bird brain.

Speaker 2 I'm sorry, Seth. Truths.
Truths.

Speaker 2 For sure. So just before

Speaker 2 he won Iowa, he got a bunch of endorsements.

Speaker 2 Big, big endorsement from my boy Doug Bergham, who's out of the race. Marco Rubio, Mike Lee.
He's now got 22 Senate endorsements, which he started mentioning this tonight.

Speaker 2 It sounds like the Republican establishment, like most of the party, has just decided this is it. We're not even going to like

Speaker 2 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 DeSanches.

Speaker 2 They just, they don't care.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 5 They probably made a political calculation and asked the campaign when they should endorse and the campaign to do it this day so that when we win Iowa by 30 points, it looks like it's all sewn up and the establishment's there and we're inevitable.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think they're under pressure from Trump to do it now. It's either you do it when Trump tells you to do it or he attacks you until you do it later.

Speaker 5 Just to paint a little more detail on the difference in the message today versus yesterday, here's a quote from yesterday's event.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Trump told a crowd in Indianola, Iowa, on Sunday.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we got to get that guy. We got to get that guy back out.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 He still seems pretty dangerous all the time. Yeah.
But anyway, I agree. But yeah.
Well, that's Donald Trump. I mean, I don't know how the night could have gone better for him, right?

Speaker 2 Within the context of the Republican primary, right? Like, is there any

Speaker 2 explained? 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.

Speaker 2 And so this continues to be a muddle. 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.

Speaker 5 And Vivek dropped out.

Speaker 2 And Vivek dropped out.

Speaker 5 The little support Vivek has will go to Trump.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 That he gets to stay in.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 That Donald Trump gets the benefits of incumbency

Speaker 4 in so many respects, except in the expectations for how he should be performing in these, is

Speaker 4 quite a move. I mean, because

Speaker 4 a four 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 uh and

Speaker 4 it belies the kind of weaknesses that he has right that like the fact that this former president who uh 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 his doesn't speak to a strong candidate speaks to a weak candidate yeah i i 100 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 beat Trump?

Speaker 2 CSAS beat Trump? Could Haley beat Trump? And all of those ideas that Trump was, that we were not inevitably going to get here were based on this

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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%

Speaker 2 of 100,000 Iowans. Yeah, right now, so far, the vote is 107,000 votes so far.
Yeah. And we're almost, almost in.
Which would underperform the 2012.

Speaker 2 Iowa caucus, let alone the record turnout from the last time Trump was on the ballot. Now, it is, there is minus 40 winchill.
The outcome was not in doubt. That

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 he that he would dramatically overperform, that he would demonstrate his ability to bring new caucus goers out, to bring enthusiasm.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So it's probably 110,000 maybe when all is said and done. So yeah,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 5 And we should say the campaigns, when you were reading about strategies and projections a couple weeks ago, they were predicting up to 200,000 participants.

Speaker 5 So this horrific, you know, the 12 inches of snow, 20 inches of snow, like negative 40 windshield, it has to have been a big factor.

Speaker 5 That's a, if I were the Biden campaign, I'd be spinning hard that it was a weak turnout.

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Speaker 2 Listen to new episodes of Dissonant at the Doorstep each Saturday, beginning January 13th in the Pod Save the World feed, wherever you get your podcast. I just listened to the first two episodes.

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Speaker 5 We were at the White House when this all happened and went down, and it was an insane story of like this guy escaping his village and getting into the embassy and Obama negotiating him out and all the diplomacy.

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Speaker 2 Incredible story. Highly recommend.

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Speaker 2 Well, then let's talk about someone else who's spinning pretty hard. Ron DeSantis.

Speaker 2 So Ron DeSantis comes in second, just edged out Nikki Haley for second place. And here he is, I guess, celebrating that.

Speaker 9 They threw everything but the kitchen sink at us. They spent almost $50 million

Speaker 9 attacking us. No one's faced that much all the way, just through Iowa.

Speaker 9 The media was against us. They were writing our obituary months ago.

Speaker 9 They even called the election before people even got a chance to vote.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 2 He lost by 30 points. Graham busted.

Speaker 2 Donald Trump beat him by 30 points. He bet everything on Iowa.
How much money did he spend?

Speaker 2 There were Jeb Bush levels of 2005.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 2 The rest was others. DeSantis did 154 events and visited all 99 counties.
All 99 counties. And everyone said, no, thank you.

Speaker 5 And just, yeah.

Speaker 2 But he got that ticket punched. Like, what happens next to Ron DeSantis? Like, he, so he, in New New Hampshire, uh, he's polling at about 5%.

Speaker 2 If that. If that.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And Ron DeSantis is just going to be hanging out in South Carolina and come in, what, third or fourth in New Hampshire?

Speaker 2 Maybe like, maybe like some people are still going to be, I wonder if enough people are still going to be voting for Chris Christie, even though he's out of the race.

Speaker 2 And he could be Chris Christie because he'll 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.

Speaker 5 She had a message and she has a strategy. She's going to New Hampshire with a purpose and with some potential.

Speaker 5 Ron DeSantis gave a four-minute speech that was mostly whining, and then it was some very lame lines from his stump speech.

Speaker 2 It's this.

Speaker 5 attempt at a stirring close where he talks about the sacred fire of liberty is burning at the following locations.

Speaker 5 And I heard him do it at a walk in the event in Waukee for 30, 75-year-olds, and it landed just as flat tonight as it did then. I mean, like, I don't know what he does next.

Speaker 5 I think he's going to have a bunch of advisors around and telling him, if you want to preserve your political future, drop out, endorse Trump, get on the Trump train.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 What are you going to do?

Speaker 2 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 want to years from now, look back on it, it was that speech. No message.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 5 Running against the A.

Speaker 2 Whining about everyone thought we were out. They counted us out and they were right.
Well,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 Why, Ron? Why? Why you?

Speaker 4 All these forces are arrayed against you.

Speaker 2 What is this powerful story?

Speaker 4 What is this? What are you saying that scares them so thoroughly? Never guessed to it.

Speaker 2 I will say in Ron DeSantis' defense here. Okay.
The fact that he... Just clip that.
Just clip that.

Speaker 2 The fact that he spoke for four minutes is the most self-aware thing he's ever done.

Speaker 2 It's taken a year and a half, but he's recognized that more Ron DeSantis is not good. Well, yeah, I mean, he should have figured that out before he went to 99 counties.

Speaker 2 Also, if he really understood that, he would not be going to South Carolina tomorrow. He'd be going back to fucking Florida.

Speaker 2 Well, he thinks he's going to improve his position in New Hampshire by not going there.

Speaker 5 He should just do like five more town halls in Iowa.

Speaker 2 See how it goes.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 So he got a barely second. So it's a little better, but like, still, they have no path forward.

Speaker 2 It's also, it's like second place.

Speaker 2 It's like two, 19 to 21 percent kaylee got 19 he got 20 rounds he's barely second place they wanted a close second they didn't get that it's i he's 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 as far as

Speaker 2 did asa drop i mean sure who cares what's the other guy's name binkley

Speaker 2 i think he's only on in iowa though right binkley finished ahead of asa hutchinson what a disaster binkley is the first time i've said that name on this box he's gonna lose He could lose to some zombie.

Speaker 4 He could lose to Christie, like to zombie Christie. That would be amazing.

Speaker 7 I mean, look, he is,

Speaker 4 he's not worried. Dignity has not been something he's been very protective of, right?

Speaker 2 DeSantis.

Speaker 4 DeSantis. But I do think the only thing he gets by not going to New Hampshire is a little,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 he gets a beat of people not asking him to, like, he gets an extra moment to decide to stop running.

Speaker 2 No. And then 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?

Speaker 2 Well, that's the thing. But I think he, I would be surprised if he is still campaigning when the South Carolina primary happens in five weeks.

Speaker 4 Me too.

Speaker 4 Does the outcome in New Hampshire affect, is there any way in which, 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 4 But is there a way in which, let's say, Haley outperforms, that leaves more room for him?

Speaker 2 Or when 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.

Speaker 2 I would dust that off.

Speaker 2 I would keep that in your dress folder.

Speaker 4 What was the quote from the DeSantis officials of the New York Times of the Post?

Speaker 5 Basically, we've got him on hospice care. We're trying to keep him comfortable until the inevitable.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's taking a while. He'll keep going until the bank account runs dry.

Speaker 4 It is about like, it is like the Monty Python thing of like, it's just a flesh wound. Like, like, the reporters have been like, you're dead.
You're done. You're fucking toast.

Speaker 4 He's like, no, no, no, I'm fine.

Speaker 5 It's just a stump in Iowa.

Speaker 2 You can actually, if you look at Ron DeSantis's meager performance here, you could actually see a path where a better version of Ron DeSantis.

Speaker 2 who was a less awkward, terrible candidate running a smarter campaign. I don't say you would have beaten Trump, but he could have been much more successful.

Speaker 2 Because when you look at DeSantis' path to coming in second, what he did was he got a decent amount of the non-Trump vote and some of the Trump vote.

Speaker 2 So in the, 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I don't want to take anything away from Ron DeSantis being this one of the worst candidates I've ever seen.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 they're trapped, all these candidates. And

Speaker 2 once you start attacking Trump, you're by definition not MAGA anymore. Cause that's what Trump, you know, so it's like, it's really, we keep saying like, oh, they got to go after Trump more.

Speaker 2 But then when they go after Trump, we're like, well, if we like it, then clearly it's not going to work.

Speaker 2 I think that there's, like, it's, this is all fantasy politics, and we'll get to fantasy politics for Nikki Haley in a minute here. But it is, I just think

Speaker 2 the only fantasy player left in this team

Speaker 2 went through Tim Sky and Chris Christie.

Speaker 2 My last one, I think a better candidate could have gotten to lose a Trump by a more normal amount.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but that's that does not mean it's going to change who's going to win the nominee, but there was a better path for someone like Ron DeSantis. That Nikki Haley could never have had that path.

Speaker 2 Someone could have gotten 25, 26,

Speaker 2 30, 30.

Speaker 5 Before DeSantis launched his campaign, before he spent any money, before anyone knocked a door for him, he was at around 30% in Iowa.

Speaker 2 Yeah. He went down to 2020.

Speaker 2 A better candidate

Speaker 2 could have held on to more of that.

Speaker 4 But I think it's even, I actually think it's even more.

Speaker 4 Like, I think the dynamic, like, they're going to say the DeSantis people, all they're going to, they're going to go to like kind of the fundamental structural dynamics, right?

Speaker 8 And those are true, right?

Speaker 4 There weren't enough people who were anti-Trump and all the pro-Trump people were Trump. Like, it's as simple as that.
Except like... Great politicians have the ability to change that dynamic, right?

Speaker 4 Like that's, that's what it means. Like they, to, like, Obama is somebody who changed the underlying dynamics in a primary.

Speaker 4 Donald Trump is somebody who could change the dynamics in a primary through like kind of an understanding, a deeper understanding of the electorate and charisma, political talent, which Ron DeSantis doesn't have.

Speaker 4 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 like you don't end up with people like Marco Rubio feeling they have but no choice to endorse today.

Speaker 4 And like you don't, you don't see the inevitability kind 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?

Speaker 4 Like there was a moment where a better politician might have been able to take that momentum and change something that didn't change.

Speaker 2 I think that is all true in a normal electorate.

Speaker 2 I think the Republican Party's electorate right now, at least the vast majority of the electorate is not normal in that they really, really like Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 And the only path to a non-Trump candidate was Trump's going to lose to Joe Biden.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And, you know, we can say that the polls are wrong, the polls are going to change, whatever, but at least in the period of the Republican primary, it looked very easy to beat Joe Biden.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 if he's beaten Joe Biden, then why would you vote for anyone else? I think that's all true.

Speaker 2 I just think that when you see how Rones has got to second, you can see what the, if you squint hard enough, you can see the inklings of a coalition of someone who could have given a stronger challenge to Trump.

Speaker 2 I agree with that.

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Speaker 2 All right, speaking of stronger challenge to Trump, let's talk about Nikki Haley.

Speaker 2 So she came in third just by her hair, and she gave the last speech of the night after Trump and Ramaswamy and DeSantis all spoke. Let's listen.

Speaker 15 I can safely say

Speaker 15 tonight, Iowa made this Republican primary a two-person race.

Speaker 15 Trump and Biden are both about 80 years old.

Speaker 15 Trump and Biden both put our country trillions of dollars deeper in debt, and our kids will never forgive them for it.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 2 All right. Nikki Haley, what do we think? Love it? She gonna do it? Yeah, she's gonna fucking do it.
Yeah, no, that's how you know.

Speaker 4 When I think a speech is good, that's how you know it's gonna really work for some fucking MAGA goon

Speaker 4 in South Carolina.

Speaker 5 That's pretty good general election message.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It was a good speech. I mean, it was a message.
It was a message. It was a speech.

Speaker 2 The bar is so low because none of the, none of DeSantis doesn't have a message.

Speaker 5 It's generational. It's spending.
She always hits Trump on spending. The debt is the only thing she really hits him on.

Speaker 5 It's this vision of the future and not getting consumed by investigations and vendettas and grievances.

Speaker 5 I mean, I think that hits on the things people like least about Trump and also sweeps up Biden and the broadside.

Speaker 4 The other point she makes is

Speaker 4 if

Speaker 4 the country does not want a Biden-Trump rematch, a Biden-Trump rematch is a toss-up, which has sort of got a little kind of like ooze a little bit in the room, but I win in a landslide. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 5 And that's what what the popular vote argument should we keep losing the popular vote in past elections. We want to win bigger.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It's all a great message, but to what end? Yeah, I mean, so

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 What percentage of the Republican Party do you think those demographics comprise in 2024? Like 30%?

Speaker 2 That's generous.

Speaker 2 Not even close. Not even close.
And now, in New Hampshire, probably a lot more than in Iowa, right? Like, which is why, you know, maybe outside shot at winning New Hampshire.

Speaker 4 And you have independents and you have Democrats.

Speaker 2 Right. I mean, the New Hampshire thing is she could win New Hampshire.
Like, that seems, that is in the realm of possibility.

Speaker 2 I don't think 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

Speaker 2 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%

Speaker 2 in Iowa tonight. The Healy won 13% of those voters.
When you get to South Carolina, her home state, in 2016, the evangelical vote was over 70%.

Speaker 5 Yeah. The last poll out of South Carolina was an Emerson poll January 2nd 2nd and 3rd.

Speaker 2 It was Trump 54, Haley 25.

Speaker 2 It's just,

Speaker 2 you can't conjure a path that lines up with the, with the profile of voters that Nikki Haley has attracted to date that gets you another win.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 and sort of the voters that she was trying to go for more similar to what DeSantis was doing.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's like, dude, what party are you talking about? The party that you're talking about doesn't exist in the city. It's a cafe Milano.

Speaker 2 A cocktail party.

Speaker 2 And the more that 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.

Speaker 2 And so there's just no, I don't know what the middle ground is.

Speaker 4 Well, 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...

Speaker 4 like useless her one of her if not her most compelling arguments was which is that she's much more electable we we i believe that's true i think she's a much more she's a much more dangerous general election candidate.

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4 The polls have been showed it forever. It's like, it's, it's indisputable.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And so, you know, the other part of the problem, too, is that like maybe it was a strategy change that

Speaker 4 maybe she had to figure out that there was no way to kind of compete for the voters the way DeSantis was.

Speaker 4 Or maybe it was more like she was, you know, I don't know, slowly coming to be be able to be as critical of Trump as she is. But giving a speech like this now, like, what is that for?

Speaker 4 What does that get you? Like, I don't know. New Hampshire.
Yeah. But just, that's it.
Just gets you in New Hampshire. Yeah.

Speaker 2 They, they have an ad up. I don't know where it's Haley's campaign.

Speaker 2 I assume it's one of her co-founded super packs has an ad up with almost this exact message in New Hampshire that's been up for probably a week or so now. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's, that's, that's the only play. So you

Speaker 2 do it, right?

Speaker 4 But it's 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.

Speaker 4 I mean, Nikki Haley slowly tiptoeing up to this. Ron DeSantis occasionally mentioning Trump

Speaker 4 in passing, refusing to do it when he loses.

Speaker 4 We just,

Speaker 4 there was never a concerted case against Trump at any point in this primary.

Speaker 2 Vivek Ramaswamy,

Speaker 2 he was... gaining in the polls, a rapid rise, and then he sat down for an interview with Tommy.

Speaker 2 And now tonight tonight, it's the end of the road for him. It was very similar to the Sarah Palin Kitty Kirk interview, 2008.
Yes, I was going to. Yeah, that's very good, Dan.
That's it.

Speaker 2 Receive fully edited.

Speaker 2 Tommy Sweetheart, Tommy Vitor. Tommy, what do you think happened? Any final thoughts on Vivek's candidacy?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Listen, viewed one way, coming out of nowhere as a 38-year-old to run this campaign and getting 7% of the vote in Iowa and making this huge name for yourself in conservative circles is a huge win for his personal brand and future and politics, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 So I mean, I think, you know, there's a bit of a Pete Bootage Edge feeling to his campaign. They're in no way similar.
Don't know.

Speaker 2 Clip that.

Speaker 5 They're not remotely similar.

Speaker 2 And I'm the one they don't like.

Speaker 5 But they both came out of nowhere to launch the cursion campaigns. And they had a moment.
And now people know who they are. And they could, you know, he could have a future in the Republican Party.

Speaker 2 We'll see.

Speaker 2 He's just a job. Don't transportation secretary.

Speaker 4 I thought commerce.

Speaker 2 Okay. Well, yeah, we'll see.

Speaker 5 Commerce makes sense.

Speaker 4 But which is not going to happen.

Speaker 2 Why?

Speaker 4 Because we're going to win.

Speaker 2 Oh, right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So that's good. Can these results tell us anything about the general election?

Speaker 2 He 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 What do you make of that? Well, I agree that this is an underwhelming victory for Trump in the context of a general, showing general election strength.

Speaker 2 It doesn't necessarily mean that he is any weaker than we already thought he was, but

Speaker 2 he did not outperform our expectations. His vaunted

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So in that sense, I think it... 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.

Speaker 2 But once again, as we point out, it's 107,000 Iowans, 63% of them over the age of 50.

Speaker 2 It does not 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Because does that matter much in a Republican primary? No, because it's 32%. But if those caucus goers

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 The way they asked that question, is he unfit? You know, 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.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 And 43% of Haley's supporters said they'd vote for Biden over Trump. If that's right, and we start seeing that pattern,

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 Haley, they had Haley having too many,

Speaker 2 they over-represented 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.

Speaker 2 That seems highly impossible. But more, I think even more important than that number is 24% of Republican caucus governors said that they would not vote for Trump if he were the nominee.

Speaker 2 And now this is not random Republicans. It's not rhinos.
It's not passive political participants. These are people

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And obviously the parties always unite after primaries, even not particularly divisive ones like like this one.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Trump got 92% of the Republican vote last time. Yeah.
Yeah. That was

Speaker 4 that 32% is what jumped out at me, but also that what some chunk of them, some chunk of those voters still caucus for Trump, even though if he's convicted, they believe he's unfit.

Speaker 4 And I think it just speaks to we spent a a lot of, 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.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 There is a huge percentage of people who have told posters that if Donald Trump is convicted of the crime, they will not vote for him.

Speaker 4 How does that hold? Is that real? What happens when a former president is on trial

Speaker 4 for multiple felonies in multiple cases at the same time? Like these are all

Speaker 4 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? And just, I don't think we know. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Biden campaign today also released their fourth quarter fundraising totals, 97 million, 117 million cash on hand. How much does this matter as

Speaker 2 a measure of enthusiasm at this point?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 That speaks to obviously some measure of enthusiasm. And we'll be interested to see what the, I don't know if it was released or or not, the small dollar versus big dollar donations in there.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 All right. Well, we will, we got New Hampshire.
uh a week from tuesday

Speaker 2 and maybe a debate thursday there's supposed to be 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.

Speaker 4 Why would Haley debate someone who she no longer views as being in the race?

Speaker 2 Good point. Why would you bother?

Speaker 2 Before this, I think Ron DeSantis hadn't said he was definitely going to show up.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Dan's over there throwing the kitchen sink at me.

Speaker 2 Me and my friends in the media.

Speaker 4 Everything but the kitchen sink.

Speaker 5 We should say his staff was right that AP calling the race before the caucus scores had voted in some precincts is ridiculous.

Speaker 2 I don't like it. It was ridiculous.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 2 Because if you're sitting there

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Like, maybe you're not going to leave, but like, do you change your vote at that point? Because you think it doesn't matter. I mean,

Speaker 2 it's not a great thing to do.

Speaker 4 Even if it doesn't change, it just, it's so insulting. It's so insulting insulting to people who are showing up to vote.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Republican caucus goers love the AP.

Speaker 2 Trust the pros.

Speaker 5 What a way to restore trust in the media than to call the race before the votes have been cast.

Speaker 2 We haven't been down that road before. Unbelievable.
Unbelievable. All right, that's all we got.

Speaker 2 Again, we're doing three PSAs a week now, three Posse PSAs a week. So I think we'll have one

Speaker 2 on Wednesday. wednesday wednesday and friday wednesday and friday we're gonna we're gonna feed you content like your foie gru gis

Speaker 2 bye everyone we'll talk to you soon bye

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