Trump Wins Iowa. Now What? 40:43

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What? I can't be staying up. I can't be staying up. I got work to do. I like to say I'm not a morning person. I'm not a night person. I'm just a person. You just sleep all the time. No, I'm just awake all the time.

Hello and welcome to this late night caucus reaction edition of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. I'm Galen Druk. As we sit down to record this podcast at about a quarter past midnight Eastern time, 95% of the delegates have been allocated. Trump has 51%.

DeSantis has 21%. And Haley has 19%. Now, we could get to this later in the show. But I, for the record, will just say that FiveThirtyEight's averages going into the night showed Trump with 53%, Haley with 19%, and DeSantis with 16%, Ramaswamy with 6%, and what he does ultimately have is

is 7%. So, my friend, Elliot Morris, how are you feeling? How are you feeling about how the polls did tonight? Galen, sometimes it's just good to be right. I mean, look, we're just averaging the data. We can't take the credit for the actual measurement on behalf of the pollsters, but...

Yeah, it definitely beats being wrong. No matter who wins, loses, draws, it's always a good night in the 538 offices when the polls were the winner. Anyway, you just heard our director of data analytics, Elliott Morris. Also here with us tonight is senior elections analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Hello, Jeff. How's it going? Wearing your Iowa shirt. I appreciate that. Evening, Galen. Yes. Repping the Hawkeyes. My wife's from Iowa. I have a lot of Iowa gear. Did her parents caucus tonight?

I don't believe so, no. Well, that makes her one of the approximately 95% of Iowans who didn't caucus tonight. Yeah. I mean, it is worth noting that caucuses are lower turnout events than primaries. Roughly 5% of the voting eligible population participated in this, and that's less than participated in the regular state primary in 2022. So,

Yeah. Yeah, we got a lot of entrance poll data, like,

caucus goers think this and caucus goers think that. And I was like, we're talking about such a vanishingly small portion of even the Iowan electorate, let alone the American electorate. Not to say that there weren't some things there that were indicative of broader trends amongst the Republican electorate. But we'll get into those right after I introduce political science professor at Marquette University, Julia Azari. Welcome to the podcast, Julia. Thank you so much. Okay, so your specialty is...

the presidency and the process by which we nominate our presidents and the ways that politicians behave to get in office. And once they're in office, what's your big takeaway from the evening? Why don't you kick us off?

Yeah, I think my big takeaway mostly is that this was pretty predicted and nothing. There were no real surprises. You're welcome. Yes. Thank you. So we had to really focus on kind of, you know, people are kind of pulling out a couple of key things like what will the what will the narrative and the spin be? Who's going to get second place? I was trying to kind of look at winnowing like you had a lot of a

a lot of takes about kind of like who can benefit from Iowa other than Trump. And then I was kind of looking at like, who will, who will this eliminate? And I am a little upset with myself that I didn't more publicly predict that Ramaswamy would drop out, but I do have about eight friends on the group chat that can, that can vouch for me that I called that around 8 PM. And that's not unusual. I kind of looked at like, who's dropped out after Iowa. Like typically if you make it to the point where people are voting, if you,

If you don't drop out in December, then you kind of stick it out after Iowa through at least New Hampshire. But it is typically, you know, a variety of types of candidates. One type of candidate is the sort of long shot Ramaswamy candidate. So in some sense, this was a winnowing event. But in another sense, you know, both DeSantis and Haley were pretty upbeat in their speeches at the end of the night. So, you know, we'll see. That's kind of my takeaway. Yeah.

Yeah, I think probably one of the biggest takeaways from the evening for me was with both DeSantis and Haley getting approximately 20 percent of the vote. The seeming possibility after DeSantis was falling off in more recent polling in Iowa of DeSantis dropping out after getting in third is not the case. And now we just kind of have the same race continuing on into New Hampshire and South Carolina. Ellie, is that the way you see things?

Yeah, look, you got one guy at 51% and then everyone else is 30 points behind him. I feel like we've been having the same conversation for a while. So I'm trying to think of something, you know, perhaps new to say. But at the end of the day, if there's not some event in the national race to change how Republican voters view Trump, then to me, this story is going to be

More of the same through the rest of the primary just looking at the numbers now for our delegate benchmarks, which came out last week. I think we podcasted about them. Trump doesn't need that many delegates in the next five or six contests just because of how strong he is in the races after Biden.

you know, the immediate early races, New Hampshire, South Carolina, even if you have some sort of coalescing around DeSantis and Haley, you know, and they shoot up to 30 or 35% of the vote, Trump with his Ramaswami bounce, perhaps if we're just assuming the Ramaswami voters go to Donald Trump, we'll still be at 60% of the vote. And look, it's just hard to beat someone who's at 60% of the vote.

Jeff, I think there was some clear sense going into tonight that Haley had her coalition that was more college educated voters. DeSantis had his coalition that was more religious voters. How much of that was borne out in the data tonight? I would say it was borne out a fair bit. For instance, you know, with Haley,

Basically, the caucus electorate, according to the entrance poll, split about evenly between people who were college graduates and people who weren't. Four-year degree is what that means. And she won 28 percent among the half who said that they were college graduates and 9 percent among the ones who said they weren't.

Compare that to Trump, who we know is usually stronger, even though he has been leading national polls among college-educated voters, tends to be stronger among those without one. 67% among those without a college degree and 37% with one. DeSantis, among white evangelicals who made up about 55% of the electorate, again, according to the entrance poll, DeSantis won 27% of them, while Trump won 53% of them.

so desantis was second there and clearly ahead of haley he doubled haley's mark uh among that group i guess it's worth noting also that desantis won a similar percentage of college educated voters um to haley but did a little better among those without one so maybe that helps explain why he finished just ahead of her again with entrance polls there's a margin of error like any poll but you know they are helpful to some extent in trying to understand just what happened

As the entrance polls come out, we're all trying to analyze in real time. To me, part of the signal in all of this now is that, like, yes, there are still underlying trends within the Republican Party of college educated voters have an affinity more towards a certain type of candidate. And there are still evangelical voters who probably don't think Donald Trump shares their Christian values.

But like the real signal here is Trump is winning across basically every single demographic in the Republican Party. And when you have a situation like that, it's usually essentially because an incumbent is running for reelection. There are no lanes. There's just the this is our leader and we're supporting our leader. You know, how different is that looking back to the 2016 results, Jeff?

It is substantially different. For one thing, obviously, in 2016, we had a very crowded race on the Republican side.

Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses with 28 percent of the vote. Trump's winning with 51 percent tonight. So substantially different there. Trump had 24 percent in 2016. So he roughly doubled, slightly more than doubled his vote share. If you're thinking about sort of what was going on in terms of the entrance polls and what we found, it's like Cruz did best among very conservative voters.

And this time around, Trump did best among very conservative voters, won a substantial – around half of them. Basically half the electorate identified as very conservative, and Trump won about three in five of those voters. So that's a big change from 2016 when Cruz was winning those voters disproportionately in the 40s even though it was a crowded race. And so I think to some extent you can see how Trump –

has sort of taken over that more conservative part of the Republican Party, whereas I think in 2016, you could argue that he was in many voters' eyes seen as a more moderate choice. So if you sort of think about his administration appointing Supreme Court justices, the fall of Review Wade and how conservative voters view him, he's now viewed much more favorably by them and is – they're sort of like a bedrock of his coalition now.

I was thinking about how there's been a number of elections where the Iowa caucuses haven't been predictive of the nominee. And so, like, if you think back to 2016 with Ted Cruz wins and 2008 Mike Huckabee wins, which, you know, feels a little bit hard to believe in some ways, 2012 Rick Santorum. And in all of those cases, it's like there's this rift between

very conservative, kind of religious conservative voters that are driving the Iowa Republican caucus and then the sort of where the mainstream of the party is at, where they're picking people, specifically people like McCain and Romney, right?

And this is kind of my meta theory about Trump in general, is that he is, for all of the other complicated qualities he brings to the table, he's sort of a coordination point in the Republican Party that does bring together the disparate parts of the coalition. And regardless of whatever else is going on, that's kind of what we see borne out. And I thought it was sort of interesting that tonight, basically his total reflected political

What if, you know, that more conservative evangelical candidate, the Cruz, Huckabee, Santorum type candidate, it kind of merged with the more kind of businessy traditional Republican? And that's kind of what it looks like. It's interesting because, what was it, Ronald Reagan, who talked about the three-legged stool of the Republican Party, social conservatives, more sort of neoconservative on foreign policy individuals, and then sort of fiscal conservatives.

And it feels like definitely that the neocons have gotten shoved out to some extent when it comes to Trump. But the other two, it's like almost like they're two legs to the stool now. And they're like strong enough to kind of hold it up together or at least and maybe the neocons hold their nose and vote for it, I guess. Some of them do, but they've been replaced by the sort of America first foreign policy ideology. Yes.

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I talked to plenty of different voters. I mean, honestly, in Iowa, when you talk to a lot of people amongst the general public who are not at campaign rallies, you quickly realize how weird caucusing is and how the vast majority of Iowans do not participate in it. If you think you're going to go hang out some mall

or downtown area, which by the way, no one's out walking around downtown areas in negative 20 degree weather anyway, and just find people who are going to caucus, you're wrong because you just encounter lots of people who say, no, I don't caucus. I never have. And so like, once again,

This is a very weird thing that we do in America, which is not only that we start with Iowa, but we start with an electorate in Iowa that represents like somewhere between, you know, like the highest turnout you'll get in one of these when both sides are competitive is like 16% turnout amongst eligible voters. Okay.

All of that is to say that I talked to one guy, Tom Donnelly was his name. He told me he supported John Kasich back in 2016. He thought Trump was, quote, a nut job. And he ended up voting for Donald Trump because he was holding his nose and he was casting a vote against Hillary Clinton. Fast forward eight years, he was super enthusiastic about Donald Trump. He thought he had done a great job as president. He thought he was being unfairly persecuted in the different

Yeah.

is now happily behind Trump. I mean, he's an example, a more moderate example of that happening. He lives in Des Moines, Iowa, so a more sort of like urban college educated part of the electorate. There was actually recently an article in the New York Times describing exactly this, which is that lots of college educated Republicans have found their way back to Trump. But there are also examples of that in amongst the evangelical sectors of Iowa as well.

And so it really is just a story of Trump's ultimate strength and sway.

Here's a question that I have that I had throughout the evening. If you go back a year in our national polling average, you see in January of 2023, Trump was only leading DeSantis by nine points. That was at Trump's worst point in time. And I think if you even go back a little bit before that, our average doesn't go back before that, at least publicly available average. But there was a moment in time where things were quite close and DeSantis in some polls was beating Trump nationally. And I think if you even go back a little bit before that, our average doesn't go back before that, at least publicly available average.

Was it like preordained in some ways that once things got competitive, this would happen? And if not, what is the chain of events that brought us to this moment?

I mean I don't think it was preordained. It's funny. DeSantis himself has said something along the lines of if there were one thing he could have changed about this campaign, it's that Trump wouldn't have been indicted, indicted repeatedly. It served as a bit of a rallying point to Trump and it did not damage him notably in the polls. I think Elliott has done some analysis on that that he could probably add more to.

I wouldn't say it's just that. I just think it's probably a combination of...

Trump and his continued appeal among Republicans, the fact that DeSantis was a name that a lot of Republicans had heard of, but they didn't actually know him that well. So once he became, you know, especially because he waited until May to formally declare, perhaps he wasn't returning fire on Trump and Trump was training his fire on DeSantis. And so that helped define DeSantis. Again, a lot of this is like speculative, of course. But DeSantis, again,

So basically he was strongest before he got into the race by some measure. So some of it is maybe hard to nail down, but I can't imagine that giving opportunities for Republican candidates to not criticize Trump –

over things like the indictments and to or to sort of implicitly support Trump or explicitly support Trump during that when you're trying to overtake Trump to make a case against Trump, even if it's implicit, not explicit. It's kind of hard to do that if you find yourself continuing to have to support him because you're worried about the Republican base getting angry at you if you if you're not sort of supporting Trump's position.

I think there's some level of him, of all the candidates really, being forced to shoot themselves in the foot in this regard, you know, with Trump's indictments, forcing them to sort of support their party leader. The story of the DeSantis campaign gets told as some, you know, some guy who like...

couldn't impress a crowd or had a weird smile or didn't really know how to relate to people. And maybe that's true. Anecdotally, it doesn't seem like he's the most likable guy, to use some old bad terminology from the 2020 campaign. And maybe that's true. But we also just know from our historical study of the primary polls, there's a correlation between

how well known you are and your favorability. And usually it's negative. As someone gets better known, at least in the recent history of presidential primary polls, they tend to become less popular, not more popular. So there's

I think there's a bit of us reading too much into DeSantis' personality weaknesses, maybe let's call them, and more just like you're kind of fundamentally sort of set up to fail or if not fail, to lose ground. Like when you're entering...

when you're entering the race as a popular guy who's popular among the very small group of people who already know you. Like the other people who come to know you probably aren't going to arrive at the same popular outlook as the people who already do. Yeah. I mean, I think it again kind of goes back to the coalition issue.

This is my theory of DeSantis. And I agree with Elliot that there's a little bit of an overemphasis on personality characteristics. But in a lot of ways, DeSantis, I think, fits in with this sort of story that's also 2019 and Kamala Harris and 2015 and Scott Walker. We have this candidate who seems like the obvious candidate who has all the right traits.

And then it turns out that they sort of like poke at this unarticulated problem or cleavage in the party. And in DeSantis' case, it's the culture war stuff. And so he goes after the culture war stuff in a way that's like it goes after Disney. So instead of bringing together, you know, business and evangelical interests, it's like, let's find a place where they're at odds and emphasize that. That is not how you bring a coalition together. And I think there's a lot of discomfort here.

even within the Republican coalition around this sort of really hardline culture war stuff. And Trump is very, I don't know if this is deliberately strategic or he just has these kinds of instincts or what's going on there, but he kind of talks around some of that stuff in ways that I think makes it a little ambiguous and therefore everybody can read what they want to read into what he says. And DeSantis is,

has not been ambiguous and has really pursued this kind of stuff. And I just think that that wasn't the kind of winner in the Republican coalition that he thought it was going to be. And DeSantis happened to be kind of the closest rival. It's possible we could be telling this story about any one of the other candidates, but DeSantis was the one that seemed like the most obvious alternative.

i will say that one of the difficulties uh for desantis is that he has sort of tried to be trumpy in terms of his instincts but a bit more policy driven very focused on the issue of the day uh in in a certain way you know at the end of the day i think his his greatest challenge because he still is has very good favorability numbers basically second only to trump among republican republican voters

His problem is that why go to DeSantis when you have the genuine article there to vote for? And this maybe brings us to a fundamental thing, which is that even in the caucus entrance poll tonight, what, two-thirds of Republican voters thought that Biden did not win legitimately in 2020? Yeah.

If you don't think Trump lost in 2020, does that make you maybe less inclined to say, well, maybe we should look for an alternative because Trump lost that election? It's no coincidence that of the 29 percent who said that Biden did win legitimately in 2020, Haley won half of them.

And only 5 percent of those who said Biden didn't win legitimately, which was 66 percent of the electorate, and Trump won about 70 percent of those voters. So that remains like a fundamental thing that I think also can help explain some of Trump's appeal because the belief that something was wrong with the 2020 election is sort of marrow deep within the Republican Party at this point.

Yeah, it's interesting the way you two have described Trump and DeSantis is sort of like Trump positions himself as somebody who just wants to be liked by everyone. I mean, this is the way he was described by people who were covering him, you know, eight years ago, too. This isn't novel, but that ends up putting him in a place where he's very policy nonspecific and essentially says what he thinks you want to hear out of him. Whereas DeSantis took a very policy heavy approach, which is, you know, he's a very

which does sort of hamstring you when in some ways we can have this debate tonight or we can have it another time. I think we've talked about this on the podcast before, but the Republican Party has in some ways become more coalitional as the Democratic Party has become more ideological. We used to think of those two things as reversed. Like we had the three-legged stool of Reaganism, the conservative ideology that accompanied the three legs of the stool was very important. Meanwhile, Democrats had to piece together

Some like white working class voters with voters of color and also this like yuppie crowd in cities. And you sort of had to devise a like Clinton or Obama style like, hey, you know, I'm inspirational. You like me. I'm young, like cultural appeal to people, maybe more than ideological appeal. Whereas Trump is now seemingly more of a coalitional leader and Democrats are looking for somebody who is like ideologically pure and really beating themselves up over fights about

and foreign policy and race and things that make life difficult, I think, in some ways for Democrats today. DeSantis was trying to run in a party that was ideologically pure almost. And I don't know, maybe if Trump wasn't in the race, that would have worked. And so this analysis is bullshit. But being an ideological purist is always going to get you in trouble when you're trying to win millions of people who have very different views.

and lives and things like that. I do want to ask in all of this, I feel like one data point in the entrance poll that got pulled out of the poll

pulled out was that 63% of Americans or sorry, not Americans. In fact, emphatically not Americans, 63% of Iowa caucus goers who are Americans, but just not Americans. Small segment, very small segment, 63% of the 117,000 Iowans who turned out tonight in the freezing cold to caucus said that they don't care if Trump is indicted.

And everyone was like, whoa, like, that's crazy. To me, that's like a small amount, like 87% of caucus goers identified as conservative. And 36% of them would be like, they wouldn't vote for Trump if he was convicted.

Well, it wasn't quite phrased that way. It's fit to be president. Yeah. Yeah. If Trump were convicted, right, would you consider him fit to be president? 65% said yes and 31% said no.

And obviously among those who considered him fit under those circumstances, he won 72% of them. Among the 31% who said no, about 80 – yeah, like 82% went for Haley or DeSantis. That doesn't mean that those voters are going to consider the Democratic ticket in November by any means.

But it does make you wonder that if Trump is convicted of something, even if a small portion of them are, that could be a significant factor nationally if you sort of extrapolate from that. Yeah, to me, that echoes what The New York Times found, which is that in polling today, Trump would win a national election. But if convicted, he wouldn't win.

People are responsive to the information about the indictments, for sure. And they're not popular, especially the ones relating to January 6th and to the documents. And I think that's I think I mean, if I can jump in and speak for for my profession, I think for us, it's like we've been a little bit like partisanship oriented.

Pilled and so it's I think a little bit surprising when people are driven by things other than partisanship But in fact that is that is the case. Not everybody is a strong partisan and that's I think you sort of see that bear out but also to the point I think Galen raised earlier even if it's not a large segment in a close election everything matters and so we could be looking at some pretty you know, pretty significant block of voters and

Yeah. So maybe these 32% or whatever it is of Republicans who say Trump wouldn't be fit to be president if he were convicted, maybe 80% of them still vote for him. But that's a large enough percentage to probably throw an election that's decided by 10 or 40,000 votes or whatever it might be. But on, yeah, I mean, on balance, I think we can probably say pretty safely based on the data that like, it doesn't help you. We don't know how much it doesn't help you, but it probably doesn't help you to be convicted of a crime.

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As much as we say partisanship, a lot of Americans are just not fully read into what the parties are all about. Don't want to talk about politics, find it distasteful, aren't like your A to Z sort of Democrat on the issues or A to Z Republican on the issues. But I will say that in these entrance polls, electability is not very important to people.

41% of caucus goers said the most important aspect of a candidate, a nominee, is that they share my values. 12% has the right temperament, so, you know, in the basement.

Thirty one percent is fights for people like me. And I will say of the thirty one percent, 81 percent went to Trump, a huge margin. And then 14 percent said can defeat Joe Biden. If this were the Democratic primary in 2020, it would have been like 60 percent say can defeat Donald Trump. You know, 20 percent say, you know, fights for people like me, like 20 percent says has the right temperament.

or something like that. If not higher for the electability. I hear what you're saying. But that was also an artifact of the specific circumstances of that election. Democrats weren't like that before.

It was sort of a 2016 specific response. The trauma of 2016. The trauma. Exactly. So I think I mean, I don't have all the data in front of me, but that's sort of my understanding. I've got there's a nice graph of a YouGov poll that shows the sort of electability versus shares my values going back a couple cycles and Democrats sort of flip.

primary voters. It's a poll of primary voters on the electability question. And you can really see that coming out of the surprise 2016 result as very specific narrative about what happened in 2016. It's also worth noting sort of in the context of people being asked to choose one of four things that were most important to them in terms of candidate quality, even if more people picked can defeat Joe Biden,

We've seen in poll after poll that plenty of Republicans think that Donald Trump is the most electable Republican. And again, if two thirds of your voters think that Biden won didn't win legitimately and Trump did win, you don't think he's you know, you don't view Trump as a losing candidate. Right. So, again, I think that can tie back into it. And just this general the general view among Republicans that.

Trump is an electable candidate. You won't hear that from all of them, obviously, but in a lot of polls, if voters are asked –

which candidate is sort of the most electable, who has the best shot at beating Biden, they say Trump. Now, some of that is Trump leads in all those polls. And so people are answering the candidate that they're supporting. But at the same time, it's still noteworthy that they say that across the board. I think it sort of gets to the point that electability or agrees with me on the issues kind of dichotomy. A lot of voters kind of view them as, you know,

You know, like they don't separate them out in terms of how they think about things. So I think that's that's worth noting. Right. Like, oh, somebody who's going to secure the border and make America prosperous. That seems like somebody who would win an election. So great. Yes, that person shares my values and is electable. And I'll say that, I mean, for people who think that Trump is electable, yes.

Elliott crunched the numbers earlier today. And yes, Haley is correct. She, in this hypothetical polling, leads by more than Trump, but it's by like one point, not like 16 points. I think she leads by on average three points over Biden and Trump leads by on average two points over Biden. She also has better favorability ratings, which would seem to affirm the polling average horse race numbers too. Like her unfavorable rating is like

plus five, plus six or something. And Trump is plus 10 and DeSantis is plus 15 or plus 20, unfavorable. So I think she's onto something, but maybe like more of the point, if the Republican party did care about electability, well, and they were processing that information rationally, then she would probably be doing better. Okay. Last question here. How much longer are we covering this primary based on tonight's results? Because I think some of us were ready to be like, it'll be over after New Hampshire. Yeah.

I mean, and I don't mean I know everyone thinks that it's spiritually over, psychically over, but I mean, materially over as far as like, all right, we we get to call him the presumptive nominee in the media and we start covering the general election. I like primaries. I think it might make me unpopular. Yeah.

But I think party fights are great. Intra-party fights. Sometimes you get real policy disagreements, which advance policy conversations, which is probably good. And also delegate allocation is pretty cool from a nerdy point of view. Modeling that sort of thing gives you something to track over time. And it's an event that sort of

unfolds over the course of weeks or months. But I don't think you should not cover a presidential primary just because you are 99.9% sure that eventually someone is going to win because the content...

of the primary battle can be really important. I mean, we wouldn't have had a lot of these, just to pick an example, a lot of these Trump speeches with, I think, a sharp increase in, you know, the Trumpiness, let's just say, I don't want to call it conservative or the Trumpiness of his rhetoric on immigration over the past three months, probably without the primary or maybe without the primary, just as an example. So, yeah, I think we should keep covering it.

I also like primaries. I enjoy covering intra-party stuff. I think that is where a lot of the really interesting debates are going on. But I'm sort of thinking that this one will be likely very substantially over by Super Tuesday, except also around then we're going to start having some more information about these trials. And this is really, I mean, I think this is like

The crucial thing about this whole primary process, in some ways, it feels very normal and like what you would expect of like an unpopular incumbent president or a president in this sort of situation where they're running, you know, like if Jimmy Carter had run an 84 or something where they have a lot of advantages, but they also have some detractors. And so this all feels kind of normal. And then.

We've got the history of January 6th and the indictments around election subversion, two of them, and the document stuff and the disqualification cases. It's like a lot of really abnormal stuff. And I think that that's the wild card in this primary is what bubbles up with some of these less normal things. And I think it's important for those of us who talk about elections not to lose sight of this other context.

Amen, Julia. In fact, we were having a meeting earlier today with some of the producers and we were talking about how we're going to cover, you know, Trump's legal liability once we get into March.

And one thing we were talking about was covering moments in time where the courts have had to weigh into electoral politics in significant ways and maybe how they ruled, how it shaped public opinion and things like that. But yeah, in this moment where every media person is in Iowa and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it can sort of feel normal. But we are going to get to a place where—

Within two months where things don't feel normal again. I think maybe by then the presumptive nominee is facing serious criminal charges. Yeah. Regarding when this is sort of done, I think South Carolina kind of looms large on February 24th. You know, if Haley ends up having a strong performance in New Hampshire and, you know, our polling average doesn't really...

I mean there haven't been polls yet that have accounted for the fact that Christie has dropped out. And so I'm very interested to see where his support goes in New Hampshire because we know from second-choice polling that – I mean it could be like two-thirds of his vote moves to Haley, which would narrow the gap. Of course, Ramaswamy just dropped out, and most of his vote might go to Trump.

All this is to say that New Hampshire is all set up to be much more interesting than Iowa because of the nature of the electorate, the fact that it's not nearly as religious. It's a much larger electorate. It will involve independents who vote in the Republican primary because of the nature of the primary being partially open, unlike a closed caucus where you had to be a registered Republican. And even if you were switching your registration at the caucuses,

a lot of people aren't showing up to do that so uh the primary is a much higher turnout just a much higher turnout just a lot more people are involved and so the circumstances for a new hampshire upset are there i don't think it's not likely but it's much more likely than anything having happened in iowa so that's that's a big deal and it's like in a world where haley comes close which is where it sort of feels like right now

You know, she her carrying on to South Carolina would make sense. And then, you know, I guess she risks defeat in her home state. But it is what it is, I guess. Or she pulls off the incredible upset in New Hampshire and maybe this thing goes on even a bit longer. But obviously, none of this changes the fact that Trump is very much a heavy favorite to be the nominee. OK, final question here. Yes or no.

I know this is West Wing fanfic, but was there or will there be in the next couple days a conversation between somebody on Haley's team and somebody on DeSantis' team about joining their 20% together and being on the same ticket, given that tonight clarified very little as far as the second place, third place situation goes? Running on the same ticket in a primary is not a thing. And there's not like a...

Maybe there are conversations, but there's no coordination mechanism. And that's really what determines what happens in these things. Talk to President Cruz and Vice President Carly Fiorina about that one, Julia. Yeah, I wrote a piece about it at the time on the site. And what did you say? That it was a fool's errand? Or did you say, hello, President Cruz? Yeah, I was like, no, I said that picking a woman as your running mate is like a time-honored desperation move. Yeah.

from Geraldine Ferraro to Sarah Palin. All right. Well, we're going to leave things there with those sharp, sharp words, Julia. Thank you, Elliot, Julia, and Jeff for joining me this evening. Thank you, Galen. All right. Thanks, Galen. Good morning.

Thank you and good morning. My name is Galen Drew. Tony Chow is in the control room. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Trotavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcast 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 a review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.