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There is somebody out there on TikTok who will tell you who will win the election based on astrology. I feel like political horoscopes is like a niche that someone is going to fill if they haven't already. I'm sure they have. No, no, it's already been filled. But it's also, there's a long tradition here, like Nancy Reagan, you know, famous astrology enthusiast. We don't need a model anymore, just your horoscope.
Hello and welcome to this late night New Hampshire primary reaction edition of the 538 Politics podcast. I'm Galen Druk. We are sitting down to record at a quarter past 10 p.m., which is earlier than we expected at the time of this recording.
There is about 60% of the expected votes in in the Republican primary. Donald Trump has 54% support, while Nikki Haley has 45% support. If you are inclined to look at the New York Times needle, and I myself am for the purposes at least of this podcast and in my life in general, I'm going to say that the New York Times needle is a little bit more of a support.
The projection is that Trump will lead by about 11 points, or at least that's the likeliest outcome of the evening when all is said and done. There is a contested primary on the Democratic side, unlike in Iowa and at the time of this recording, 50%.
54% of the ballots cast are unprocessed write-ins. So you might imagine that those are votes for Joe Biden or write-ins for ceasefire, although I don't think that that's a very large portion of those. And the number that have been processed for Joe Biden so far is about 17%. The number processed for Dean Phillips, well, it doesn't really have to be processed because he was actually on the ballot, is 21%. So now that I've gotten all of those caveats out of the way, let me introduce my
colleagues for the evening, senior elections analyst, Nathaniel Rakich. Welcome, Nathaniel. Hey, Galen. Good to be with you in person. I know. We are, for those watching on YouTube or the video online, you can see that we are here in person together. I'm wearing a suit, you know, because it's election night. So gotta support the suit. Are you? Yeah, I'm wearing a suit. Are you questioning whether or not... My tie is right there. I took it off for the purposes of this podcast. Sure, you did, Galen.
Also here with us is FiveThirtyEight editor Tia Yang. Welcome to the podcast. So great to have you in person. Thank you for having me. I also have to make an announcement before we go any further this evening. This week is the eighth birthday of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. So I'm going to look directly at the camera when I say this.
If you have been listening for eight years, what's wrong with you? And thank you so much for listening and supporting us all these years. We started this podcast right at the very beginning of the 2016 primary, and now it's 2024. And I'll also say that it seems like we're celebrating our birthday on the day that is, for all intents and purposes, ending this Republican primary. And the next election...
that will bring some conclusion to this whole contest will be the general election on November 5th, which is, wait for it, my birthday. So we're really, we are really just sort of worlds colliding for the FiveThirtyEight podcast, me, and the 2024 election cycle. Anyway, Tia, I'm going to start with you. I proclaimed...
in some ways that the Republican primary is over tonight. Are you there as well, spiritually, intellectually? Yeah, I think definitely what we saw tonight was, you know, another call that came not that long into the night. A lot of people had expected, I mean, like us, we're here a little bit earlier than expected. We had been planning to be on late.
to be on as the boats continued rolling in, but not quite as fast as Iowa, which was pretty shocking. But we saw projections just after 8 p.m., which is really only 10 minutes after polls closed in the latest parts in New Hampshire. So, yeah, we saw another convincing victory by Trump, even though Nikki Haley ultimately at this point is overperforming where she was in the polls a little bit.
But she really needed to take home a victory here to sort of keep hopes of her campaign alive.
Yeah, like there are so many benchmarks here. And like it was such a moving target to like I feel like a week ago, like before Iowa. Right. Everybody was like New Hampshire is going to be really close. And like it's basically a jump ball. And then like after Iowa and like, you know, Ramaswamy drops out and DeSantis drops out and Trump really kind of.
surged in the polls and it really felt like Trump was going to do really well. Then the margin right now is that it's about 10 points for Trump and in the polling average, it was 18 points for Trump. In some respects, that's an overperformance by Haley and maybe she should be getting a little bit more credit. But then in the final analysis,
Like Nikki Haley really needed like we have these like benchmarks on our site for delegates, as you guys know. And it said that basically Nikki Haley needed to win 22 of New Hampshire's 22 delegates in order to stay in this overall fight for the nomination, just because New Hampshire is such a good state for her. Like she needs needed to crush it here. And obviously, like losing by 10 points is not crushing it. So like I think at the end of the day, it is a disappointing performance for Haley, even though she is doing a little bit better than I would have guessed 24 hours ago.
Yeah, and a reminder here. So 538's polling average showed Trump leading by 18 points, as you mentioned. A reminder here that the average polling error in a primary like this is about seven points. So folks, we're pretty much on target for the average. I know that seven points off may not make folks who hate the polls happy or join our team poll, our poll team. Team poll!
team poll. But this is an average outcome, essentially, in a race like this. Why, Tia, did she overperform to the extent that she did? Yeah. So one thing that we saw, which wasn't necessarily surprising, was that Haley overperformed in areas that were highly educated. That's something, or had a lot of highly educated voters, rather. That's something that's not surprising. We'd seen a lot of
indications that Haley was doing very well among that demographic. And her surge in the polls in the last few weeks right before the Iowa caucuses, where she had, in fact, come as close as around the margins that she's currently at against Trump just before the Iowa caucuses, before Trump also surged, that was really fueled by those voters, those highly educated voters that supported Nikki Haley more than other demographics did.
So we saw that she did well in college towns. That was the same in Iowa, where I believe the only county that she won was Johnson County. Yes. I forgot which college it is, which I'm going to get. University of Iowa. Iowa City, University of Iowa, Johnson County.
Aims, Iowa State University, Story County. I think I got that right. Don't write to me, Iowa people. Wow, you get a Iowans with four-year college degrees trophy for that performance. Thank you, yeah. Yeah, another thing that we saw too was that turnout, I think, was significantly higher than was expected. And a lot of that seemed to come from like independent voters who weren't registered as Republicans polling Republican ballots. And obviously those, or maybe not obviously, but those people have been stronger for Haley in the polls.
I think the breakdown in the exit polls was that roughly it was half an electorate that was registered Republicans, half an electorate that was registered as independent or like unenrolled. And obviously kind of the more dominant the independents were in the electorate, the better for Haley. But obviously it wasn't good enough.
So our fellow election nerd friend Steve Kornacki tweeted out at some point in the evening that Nikki Haley was actually overperforming her benchmarks in those highly educated parts of the state by, I think, three points. So if you were only given data for the evening that came from highly educated parts of New Hampshire, and I should say, New Hampshire on the whole is a highly educated place. We've talked about this before. 41% of Granite Staters have a four-year degree, whereas, like, if you want to compare that to the next states in line, Nevada, it's...
33% in South Carolina or 31% in South Carolina, it's 26%. So this is about as good as it gets for Haley, at least in the short term, for competing on turf that is amenable to her more moderate, genteel, you know, wealthy suburban message.
I don't know if she would agree with that characterization, but... She literally... I went to a Haley event this weekend in New Hampshire that was literally at a country club. She was literally talking to country club Republicans, so I think that's completely fair. This is hearsay. I don't think anyone was counting, but I heard that one of her biggest rallies in New Hampshire was at Exeter.
The town where the most elite boarding school in America resides. I believe that that rally was actually at the Exeter High School, public high school, though, and not at the... I mean, at the town Exeter. I mean, in Exeter. And for people who know New Hampshire, that's, you know, the like eastern part and kind of near the seacoast is kind of very like, you know, yeah.
Hoity-toity. Is that the scientific term? Yeah. Okay. But then on the flip side, she was performing nine points worse than her benchmarks in the more working class parts of the state. So can you help me understand what happened here? Like in my mind, when I saw that, I thought, oh, there was a surge in unaffiliated voters who are probably not going to vote
for Trump in a general election who turned out from these specific highly educated parts of the state to cast a vote for Haley. And that's just not going to happen in subsequent states. Like it might happen a little bit, but not to the degree that she would need. Is that where that strength came from?
Yeah, I would say that's definitely one source. I mean, one thing that was really interesting that we saw at the very beginning of the night once we started getting some numbers was just the projections for how many estimated votes were coming in just went up quite a bit. I think it had been estimated to be around 33% or a third of the entire eligible voting population in the state, which is massive for a primary in obviously one party. The Democratic side, which we haven't
We touched on briefly, obviously, there was a technically contested race, but New Hampshire does have primary voting rules where if you are an unaffiliated or independent voter, you can vote in either primary. It's worth noting that Donald Trump has claimed in the past that Democrats can also vote in the Republican primary. That's not true, but independents can, in fact.
They can only vote in one of the two, but they can choose. And obviously this year there are independents who probably chose to vote in the Republican primary, even if they might otherwise be Democratic leading. So you're exactly right that a lot of those voters are unlikely to be turning out and voting for Trump later and may not even be reliable Republican votes.
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There's a lot of data that we can dig into because this is our first set of exit. We got entrance polls in Iowa, but this is our first set of exit polls of the cycle. And I should say, true to form, the early exit polls were not accurate.
So when I came into the office this evening, people were like, a five-point gap? Trump only leads Nikki Haley by five points. And I said, I said in the green room, I said, I don't trust those exit polls. I was here for 2016. And indeed, the exit polls were quite a bit off.
Just as kind of like a tangential point for people who may not know exactly how the exit point polls work. So like, you know, they station people outside of polling places and say, you know, oh, hey, like, who did you vote for? And like, collect all this demographic data. But like, those polls are only better than pre-election polls in the sense that they are later weighted to the final results.
And so when people do this thing at the beginning of the night where they like try to engineer backwards, like, OK, like, you know, Trump won women, you know, 56 to 44 and, you know, won men by, you know, 50-50 or whatever. And that means that Trump is leading by X overall. Like when people try to do that, they are like,
They're dealing basically with unweighted data. And so the exit polls really, I only use them like days after the election when they have been weighted to the final results, because then they can tell you like, OK, like how did these subgroups vote relative to the state as a whole? But we didn't know that that kind of overall number yet.
Yeah, and we can dig into that data later. I think in this particular case, we have a sense that the Trump and Haley coalitions are quite distinct. So there's not a ton of mystery of like, how did Trump win? Or, you know, how did Haley perform the way she did? Let's turn to the Democratic side for a second before we maybe continue to dig into some of the wonkier stuff.
We proclaimed that the Republican primary was over tonight. We're not proclaiming that on behalf of anyone other than ourselves in this podcast room. Don't interpret this to be some sort of ABC projection or even 538 projection. We're just taking our own individual reputations, I guess. The opinions of this podcast reflect only the individuals on it.
Are we also ready to proclaim that the Democratic primary is over tonight or is, had it already been proclaimed as such? Yeah. I mean, the, you know, there obviously was not ever a competitive race for the Democratic primary. Um,
But but yes, the result tonight in New Hampshire, there was some kind of palace intrigue about like, oh, like, you know, is Biden going to get only like 55 percent of the vote? And is that going to be like a bad sign for him, given all the headlines about how dissatisfied Democrats are with him and stuff like that at the end of the day? So depending on the source or different sources have been kind of like treating those write in votes differently. And so Edison Research, which we use here at ABC News, found that.
has been kind of counting the votes more slowly, but has been taking the time to separate out the Biden write-ins from the other write-ins. And the last I saw before going on the podcast, it was Biden was winning 66% of the vote overall. Phillips was winning 20%. And the other write-ins, which include like ceasefire and the protest votes, were only 6%. And Marianne Williamson, bless her soul, was coming in at 4% at the very end. So that was, I think, a strong performance by Biden, considering that he was not
actually on the ballot. It had to be, you know, obviously people had to write him in and didn't signal a lot of dissatisfaction with him. And obviously in subsequent states where he is on the ballot, you know, I think you can expect him to get well into like the 80s. And, you know, yeah, I mean, obviously, you
incumbent presidents don't lose primaries, period. But like if this was going to be interesting at all, you would have somebody like, you know, Gretchen Whitmer or somebody be in it and it would actually be like you would get more attention. But yeah, the Dean Phillips thing is kind of just an exercise in vanity.
Yeah, I would say this is sort of a proof negative for the idea that maybe Dean Phillips was going to launch some sort of actual competitive bid against Biden. While we don't think that even an overperformance by Dean Phillips would have signaled real weakness for Biden winning the nomination, it could have signaled some weakness in grassroots enthusiasm since this was a write-in campaign orchestrated by New Hampshire voters, obviously, to get the vote out for Biden.
He's an unpopular incumbent. And our colleague Jeff had written on the live blog about a previous example where in, I believe, the 1960s, it was Johnson who faced sort of a protest situation where he was a write-in candidate. He was incumbent. It wasn't expected that he would face a significant challenge, but actually a strong write-in campaign by McCarthy. Eugene McCarthy. Yes, by Eugene McCarthy. Yeah.
effectively forced him out of the race. He just barely hung on to a right in victory there and ended up dropping out shortly after when Kennedy jumped into the race. And they really saw that voters saw that sort of as a sign of weakness of the incumbent. So that was sort of Dean Phillips, like ideal situation, like pipe dream situation. And that definitely did not happen tonight. And even then, that would not have led to a Dean Phillips victory in
in terms of securing the Democratic nomination, it would be more like maybe Joe Biden sort of stays in the race, but then once he's secured enough delegates that the establishment, whatever, has the majority of the delegates would say, actually, I'm not seeking re-election. My delegates...
can go select somebody else. At which point Gavin Newsom says, friends, I've been here the whole time. I mean, obviously, even that is a fantastical situation. Like, even if Biden had done poorly today and poorly is like winning, like,
50% of the vote. He just would have kind of, I think, shrugged it off and been like, wait for South Carolina, where he would then romp because A, he's on the ballot and B, kind of like South Carolina and black voters are his base. I should note, we should note that New Hampshire is not worth any delegates on the Democratic side because they are violating DNC rules by going this early. And that's why Biden's not on the ballot is that he kind of sat out the contest because he kind of doesn't view it as legitimate.
We'll put those like West Wing fanfic situations to bed for now, but I reserve the right to bring them back up months from now if the head-to-head hypothetical polling has not changed. Speaking of that head-to-head hypothetical polling, like if we are considering this to be the spiritual end of the Republican primary and also the Democratic primary that never began,
What would you like to say about the starting point of the general election? First of all, I would say, like, obviously, with each primary contest so far, and there have only been two, we've just been collecting more data basically about like, we went into Iowa, looking at the national polls, looking at things like endorsements, these dominant leads that Donald Trump has, we knew that it was important.
basically over and it was kind of a formality and our though that view had just been reinforced by the two contests that we have. That said, I do like want to say that like we are we do still have a contested Republican primary. This is probably going to go to South Carolina where I assume that will be the kind of actual quote unquote death blow contest. So I'm not sure, you know, while we're kind of like all kind of like
ready to get it over with and get like kind of get on with the inevitable. It's not over quite yet. That said, I think that like obviously the general election, like I think both Biden and Trump are eager to move on to it. I think Biden, because he feels like he can be like, obviously there's been lots of news about his struggles in the polls and stuff lately, general election polls. And I think he is eager to get a get Trump involved
in the limelight and be kind of start to get out on the campaign trail and maybe like sell some of his accomplishments that he feels like aren't getting across. And I think Trump obviously is looking to consolidate the Republican Party and just kind of stamp out all remaining opposition on on that side and also take it to Biden.
Yeah, I think there's there's been some debate over this, but I think that ultimately a lot of people think that it's actually good for Biden to sort of have Trump as his opponent, not just because of polling, but like to have an opponent there. And also because a lot of a lot of voters were very motivated against Trump in the same way that
You know, people are always motivated by negative partisanship these days. Trump is an especially polarizing figure. And so the idea for some people is that Biden might actually have a better chance of turning out voters and motivating people to be enthusiastic about him if it's really hitting home that like the alternative is Trump, who is very unpopular among people who might right now be thinking, well, it's still competitive on the Republican side, but now they're going to start seeing headlines that
Trump is a presumptive nominee or getting there again, only the opinions of people on this podcast. But yeah, I think that that's one thing. And I guess another topic that I would say off of your question, what we're taking away here, looking forward to the general would be just
the amount and the speed and the strength with which the GOP has united behind Trump after his victory in Iowa. We saw it tonight in his victory speech alone that some of his former rivals were standing behind him. Ramaswamy got some airtime briefly calling for him to drop out. In fact, that was all he got out of the endorsement. He said, I'll endorse you, but I want two minutes to speak at your New Hampshire victory rally.
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Do you think we make it to South Carolina? And I know that's one of those like, it's like hard to use data to try to come to a conclusion on that question. But yeah, but I think this is actually kind of like the most interesting question right now, which is like, when is this finally going to be over? I think it's really interesting.
I could see Haley kind of pulling around DeSantis. So obviously DeSantis came in second in Iowa, which I think like qualified as a mild overperformance for him, but then ended up dropping out five days later when there really wasn't much new information available. Like I think everybody knew he was going to be limping to a distant third place in New Hampshire, and he was already kind of looking ahead to Nevada and South Carolina, but he decided to drop out anyway.
And I think that there could be something similar with Haley where maybe in kind of the harsh light of day, she looks at her chances in a few days or maybe a few weeks and says, you know what, this isn't worth it. There is a long time to go until South Carolina. It is a month away. And like,
I could definitely see a situation where like maybe she goes down there, she campaigns really hard, does the same thing she's been doing in New Hampshire, like shaking hands and all that stuff. Maybe in two weeks looks at the polls. If like it's made a dent, maybe she's encouraged and she tries to go for it. Obviously, she knows the state very well, has relationships there.
But if it doesn't dent the polls, then maybe at that point she drops out because like who wants to get blown out by like 35 points in your home state? Like that's just embarrassing. So I kind of feel like it's 50-50 whether we make it to South Carolina at all. And I do think if we make it to South Carolina, obviously at that point, she would have to win South Carolina to justify staying in the race. And I think because it's her home state, because, you know, you lose the first three contests in a row, it looks bad. Like,
That's just like a clear marker where like if she doesn't win, then she drops out. And that's kind of the perfect bow to put on the situation. So Nathaniel used a lot of words to say it's a 50-50 proposition. Do you want to come down any stronger? I can use fewer words and say I also think it's about 50-50. That was good analysis, by the way. I learned important things from the thing that got us to it's a 50-50 proposition. And I respect that.
your desire to not prognosticate on something that there's almost no use in prognosticating on because Nikki Haley will do what she wants. But yeah, I mean, to the point about saving face, it's not even...
Like, right now, the polls show Trump leading her by, like, 40 points almost. Yeah, I think it was 37 when I checked, yeah. I am curious from both of you. We'll start with you, Tia. The most interesting piece of data that you took away from tonight, because, like, in the run-up to these elections, we're always, like, trying to parse through, like,
The limited data that we have, but then on election night, all of a sudden we get like a truckload of data. And it does take some time to sort through it all. But what's one piece that you picked apart, picked out as being the most interesting to you? One thing that sort of surprised me actually was how well Haley did.
I think that while we saw a surge going into Iowa, like I said, she's actually so far performing around where she was before. Trump also surged after his victory there. We also saw like one poll that I was looking at beforehand had her favorability dropping from like 22 percent positive to three percent positive. And Trump's went up.
I think 20 to 32 percent. And that was something that I had in mind going in because it seemed like the polls were pretty rapidly changing in that week between Iowa and New Hampshire. Trump experienced a pretty huge spike and it just, you know, DeSantis dropped out only a few days before this contest, obviously. And we all expected that to impact the race in some way. It definitely changed.
the tenor of the race for it to be just Trump versus Haley and Trump really training his sights on her as the only opponent left. So I actually thought that she would almost do worse than the polls, to be honest. Right, because we talk about the phenomenon of momentum. It seemed like the momentum was on Trump's side. And when you have a situation like that, it's more common that the polls are off and that they would have been off in this case, underestimating Trump's performance.
I think I was most interested in the turnout numbers and how much higher they were than we were expecting. I thought that was interesting in that they're obviously 2020
in 2022 were high turnout elections. Every indication has been the 2024 will be another high turnout election. But then turnout was pretty low in Iowa, but also like it was a caucus and it was like negative a gazillion degrees and stuff like that. And this kind of like was like a reminder that like, oh, yeah, like this is probably we're in this high turnout environment. And like,
Yeah. And like the turnout projections were, as Tia mentioned, revised upward significantly. And I think obviously that's a good sign for democracy. But I think that was interesting and also kind of feeds into, I think, the idea that Haley, it's an explanation for why Haley outperformed her polls, because I think that there were more independents in the electorate who maybe a lot of pollsters weren't expecting to be there.
Yeah, that sort of plays off of what you said, Tia. But for me, an interesting piece of data from the evening was the gap in enthusiasm for people who voted for Trump versus people who voted for Nikki Haley. Folks who voted for Trump were very enthusiastic about their choice, but folks who were literally talking to a pollster as they were going in to cast a ballot for Nikki Haley registered enthusiasm, but not an overwhelming enthusiasm and
And to me, it's data that starts to get at one of the defining characteristics, I think, of the 2024 election, which is a lot of people have a negative view of Biden and a negative view of Trump. And...
So there's going to be somewhere in the range of like 15% of the electorate who has a negative view of both of them. And they're going to have to decide, it could end up being even bigger by the time the campaigns are said and done. Usually, I mean, these candidates are starting at negative nine for Trump and negative 15 for Biden favorability. And usually over the course of a campaign, candidates only get less popular. Now they have 100% name recognition. So a lot of the negative feelings may already be built in. But
if we know anything about political campaigns, like, don't underestimate how sort of negative they can get. So that chunk of the electorate, that 15%, and we can update those numbers as we get more data because I'm approximating that right now, they're looking for something else. And in New Hampshire, they had that something else, which was go and cast a vote for Nikki Haley, even if they're, like...
you know a democrat who's kind of down or like democrat leaning who's down on biden but doesn't necessarily love voting for a republican they could cast that vote for nikki haley now that we're getting into the general election they're gonna have to choose one of like three things which is not vote vote third party
or hold their nose and vote for one of the two, at this point, seeming options. And so I think the segment of the electorate that we saw turn out for Nikki Haley tonight is also going to be a key portion of the electorate in terms of deciding who wins the 2024 election in November.
Yeah. One thing that I thought was really interesting coming out of Iowa was there was some polling showing that Nikki Haley supporters and obviously that was a smaller number in Iowa where she came in third than it was in New Hampshire. But that that sample would be or at least it was likely caucus goers. But that was all Republicans because in Iowa only registered Republicans were participating in the caucuses. And.
And as few as I think it was 23 percent of Haley voters said that they would vote for Trump if he was the nominee, which is pretty striking. Again, that's a small number of voters. But those are Republican voters, unlike in New Hampshire, where, as we mentioned, a lot of those voters might be lean Democrats who are independent and chose to vote in the Republican primaries.
So there definitely is a subset of what I guess we can now call the Haley voter who might never support Trump. The never Trump of this year, I suppose. All right. Any closing thoughts before we leave this podcast for the evening? I just think it's worth reiterating, like, if you like.
went into a lab and tried to engineer a state that would be good demographically for Nikki Haley, it was New Hampshire. And she still lost by 10 points. Like, this is the reason why people like us are saying this race is over. Like, I think I totally understand, like, for a layperson coming in, like, they're like, only two states have voted. Like, most of the delegates haven't been awarded yet. Like, it's a long road to go. And obviously, that's the argument that Nikki Haley is making. But like,
the reason why we can be so confident that Trump is this close to putting the race away is that subsequent states are just like much more favorable for him demographically. Like we have our like
delegate benchmark tracker that kind of basically approximates this and estimates what Trump's best state is, what Haley's best state is. And New Hampshire is literally Haley's best state. And then there are states like in the deep south where like we're like basically projecting we don't have like polls there yet. A 70 point loss. Exactly right. Like something crazy. And like these are the types of states that are going to vote on Super Tuesday and are worth a lot of delegates. And so like
Well, and California, where she also trails by like 60 percentage points and California awards the most delegates of any state in the Republican primary. So like, yeah, she's going to flop in Alabama, but she's going to flop in California, too. Right. So I think that basically the takeaway from tonight is that like this is probably Nikki Haley's high watermark and something drastic needs to change.
change, like, you know, Trump dropping out of the race because of his legal scandals or something like that. And maybe that's a reason why she'll stick around for a month until South Carolina, because something crazy could happen. I guess that's as good a reason as any at this point. But yeah, like basically, this is why we are so confident that Trump has this thing locked up. All right. Well, thank you for those wise words to end on. And thank you, Tia, for joining us in person tonight. It's been fun. Sure. Thanks for having me again.
My name is Galen Droop. Tony Chow is in the control room. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chertavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon. ♪
