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As a general rule, like, don't think of this as a TV 2A. It doesn't have to be, like, formal. I know you don't swear, but you can even swear if you wanted to. I have given myself permission to call somebody a rat bastard. Oh, okay. That's a big deal for you.
Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. We're just one week away from the Iowa caucuses, and so today we're heading to the early states to get a picture of the Republican primary contest in the final stretch. To start, there is no better person to gauge the pulse of Iowa caucus goers than Ann Selzer, the pollster behind the Des Moines Register Iowa poll.
According to FiveThirtyEight's pollster readings, she's been the best pollster in the country for years running, and she's become, at least in some nerdy circles, famous for publishing outlier polls that turn out to be harbingers of eventual election results.
The first high-profile instance was during the 2008 Democratic caucuses when her poll stood out for showing Barack Obama leading Hillary Clinton in Iowa. More recently, in 2020, while the average pointed to Trump and Biden polling neck and neck in Iowa, her poll showed Trump leading by seven points. He won the state by eight.
In reality, though, Ann Selzer probably needs no introduction on this podcast. She's joined us a number of times before, and we're happy to have her back. Ann, welcome. It's a pleasure to be here, Gabe. The final stretch of the Iowa caucuses. How's it going? How are you feeling? Well, the world sort of woke up on January 2nd and decided that they needed to start paying attention to Iowa. So
So I'm booking a lot of things for after the final poll is released and doing some background stuff now. It's a lot.
I can only imagine. I should also say later in the show, we're going to be joined by a group of ABC News campaign embeds. These are the reporters who've been following the candidates across Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina for months, listening to stump speeches, perhaps hundreds of times, perhaps the same stump speech hundreds of times and hearing what voters have to say. And so we're going to begin with the data and then we'll try to fill out that picture with some color from the trail. So the data.
The most recent Des Moines Register Iowa poll was conducted the first week of December and showed Trump leading the pack with 51% support among likely caucus goers. DeSantis was at 19% and Haley was at 16%.
We've been in a bit of a polling drought over the holidays, but for the record, our averages at 538 mirror that finding almost exactly. So, Anne, at the moment, your poll is squarely within the consensus. Is that a weird feeling for you?
Well, it's usually the final poll that defies expectations. So we'll see how that one turns out. Well, which brings me to my next question. For transparency's sake, we are recording this conversation on January 5th. I think your tradition is to go into something of a media blackout the final week of the Iowa caucuses. So we're having this conversation now. Is it safe to say that you have a poll in the field as we're speaking?
We would not be speaking if I had a poll in the field. Oh, okay. I do a self-imposed, once I have data, then I don't want anything to be hinted at. So I just, I do my own self-censoring. Okay. Well, when can we expect that final poll? Well, if history is any guise, it will be very close to caucus day.
Okay, so maybe Saturday, Sunday of this coming week, we'll be anticipating it. I guess the question at this point is, can you imagine a world in which Trump doesn't win the Iowa caucus?
It's hard, but if you squint hard enough and if you hear the echo in your ear of Rick Santorum in 2012, who was only polling at mid-single digits the entire season, and then on the first night of our last poll, he got into double digits.
And then the next day, higher, and the next day, higher, and the next day, higher. And while his overall average was just 15%, the story of that poll was the trajectory that he was on. And as he's rising, Ron Paul was dropping. Mitt Romney was holding his own. But in the end, the trajectory continued, and Rick Santorum won the caucuses. So from...
Mid-single digits, which is not as good a showing as either Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley, he ended up winning. So you can never say never. Okay, but that's a very different context, right? There was nobody that year who was polling at 50% in the polling leading up to caucus day. And really, maybe the story is just how...
stable this all has been, right? I mean, oftentimes we do see in Iowa a sort of rallying of one candidate and then another, and it all creates this somewhat suspenseful, dramatic moment. To be blunt here, this just seems boring. Well, I'm sure that Rhonda Sandis and Nikki Haley don't think it's boring, and maybe Vivek Ramaswamy as well.
Mark Shields, I don't know if you remember the opinion writer, said that there's this lurking ephemeral candidate called expectations. And so that's what people want to beat now is expectations. And I think that's not only true for DeSantis and Haley. I think Donald Trump would like to beat expectations and blow out the caucuses in a way they've never been blown out before.
Right. In his mind, the sooner he can get this wrapped up and onto the general election, the better for him. Because there is a world where Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis do quite well in Iowa. Nikki Haley does quite well in New Hampshire. And then maybe you have a contest that lasts months, even if it seems clear the entire time that Trump's eventual nomination is not in jeopardy. So I think that's a good point. Also, what we're watching for in Iowa in particular is the race for second place. The conventional wisdom, right?
I think for a long time has been that DeSantis has most of the strength in terms of getting into second place. He's been endorsed by Governor Kim Reynolds. He's been endorsed by evangelical leaders in the state. How volatile is the race for second place at this point?
You know, I think that between now and caucus night is where all the cards get thrown on the table. There isn't anything that they're going to hold back. So it's a little hard to say. You know, I say that the world wakes up on January 2nd with a January 15th caucus, that suddenly there's an urgency and an immediacy. I had a TV crew from Miami who was reporting on DeSantis who told me,
that their campaign plan was to knock on 1 million Iowa doors. And my eyebrow raised. He said, you don't think that's possible? I said, well, there are, what, 2.2, 2.3 million registered voters in Iowa? That's a lot of doors. If they had that kind of operation, it would be visible. You would see it. You would hear about it. What I took from that is they're going to throw everything that they can possibly throw
It's just the question becomes, will it be enough? One of the things that you do when you're polling is not just ask about first choice in terms of the caucus, but also the world of support. You know, how many potential DeSantis supporters are there out there? How many potential Haley supporters out there? What does the picture look like if you envision not just, you know, principal support, but also where could the, you know, potential second place candidates pick up?
Yeah. In fact, we invented a metric called the footprint, and that is first choice, second choice. And if not either of those, are you seriously considering the candidate? So that's your overall place on the ground in Iowa. And those three candidates are not that far apart from
And earlier in the cycle, Ron DeSantis led on that metric, not by a lot. But our December polls showed for the first time Donald Trump winning on that metric for the first time. So it isn't as though people aren't considering DeSantis or considering Haley, but there's just a bigger footprint for Donald Trump.
The other thing to think about in asking second choice is Iowa looks at more candidates than anybody else. So they look at candidates who end up dropping out, sometimes at the last moment. So we like to be able to go back and reallocate the first choice votes of people who were supporting a dropout candidate and see how that changes things.
And to that point, we kind of imagined, us in the political press corps, that as candidates dropped out, we would see more support going to the non-Trump candidates. The supporters for Tim Scott, for example, clearly had chosen a candidate who wasn't Trump as a first choice. And so we all sort of imagined that as the field winnowed,
Haley or DeSantis might pick up steam. We actually didn't see that at all. It looks like in your polling so far, Haley maxed out a couple polls ago. She held steady. Ron DeSantis picked up three points. Donald Trump picked up eight points. There were a couple of ways that that poll turned conventional wisdom on its head. And one of those ways was that if candidates drop out, that would benefit non-Trump candidates.
And there's no way to do the math exactly, but by all appearances, all it did was send more percentage points to Donald Trump. You know, I think...
At this point, the story of any sort of volatility or change in this primary hasn't been the rise of a non-Trump candidate. It's been the decline of DeSantis and the rise of Trump. I mean, if we're looking for gains in the polls, we're all focusing on Nikki Haley, and she has gained in the polls. But over that same time, Trump has gained about 10 percentage points of support nationally. So there's equally a story of Trump consolidating support. I'm curious about DeSantis, though. Why has DeSantis fallen off?
or not fallen off exactly, but failed to launch. And to some extent, you know, if you go back earlier in the year, there has been a decline. In a state where there's a strong conservative movement presence, why wouldn't somebody like DeSantis take off? Well, I think if you looked at him on paper and you looked at what their approach was, you would say he's taking his best shot in that he won the endorsement of our very popular Republican governor, Kim Reynolds.
and also of Bob Vanderplot, who is an evangelical leader with considerable sway. If you're looking for who should I get the endorsement from, those two would be important. And in my mind, the surprise was that the governor decided to endorse at all, given that if DeSantis doesn't end up with the nomination, there's no upside.
for her. And given that a majority of likely GOP caucus goers are supporting Trump, there's potentially a downside to it. It was a risky move, but one she may have been convinced to take because she so wanted Ron DeSantis to be the one who would rise. It doesn't appear to have helped him
The van der Plaats doesn't appear to have helped him, but some things happen invisibly. So in our final poll, this is when we see often a surge on the evangelical side. So that endorsement may end up being important. Everything that they might have put in place sounded okay. They had a candidate who was not forceful.
in taking on Trump. And if you're weak taking on Trump, then the base who is supporting Trump, because he's strong, you kind of get double demerit points that you're not strong enough to take on Trump. And if you're not strong enough to take on Trump, what will you do with foreign leaders? My feel, and having watched several focus groups where voters were explaining this, that gelled for me.
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Oftentimes at this moment in time, we're focused on the what in the run-up to caucus day. You know, what do the polls show? What's the spread going to be? And because we've mentioned that Trump at this moment in time is leading by more than 30 points,
Perhaps there's more of a focus on the who and the why. And you do really dig into this in your polling. What does the profile look like of a Trump supporter versus a Haley supporter versus a DeSantis supporter? And why are these folks supporting the candidates they are? Can we talk about the who? I mean, what does the profile of each of these candidate supporters look like? The way I would answer this is that Trump wins with every demographic group that we define in our poll. Every single one.
So there are some groups he didn't do as well with. And those groups tended to be more supportive of Nikki Haley. And the Ron DeSantis profile is rather flat. That is, there's not a lot of variation from demographic group to demographic group. And based on some other things we saw in the poll, I called it, there's more of an affinity between
between Trump and DeSantis in terms of how their respondents, how their supporters are thinking about them. And then the dis-infinity, dis-affinity, a word I had to have looked up to make sure there is a word, is really with Nikki Haley. So one of the key questions we asked was about whether Trump's legal challenges can be so mild as to not prevent him from winning in the general election.
And DeSantis supporters, well, Trump supporters, of course, were off the charts and saying that's correct. And DeSantis supporters, a majority said that's correct. A majority of Nikki Haley supporters said no. His legal challenges will make it impossible for him to win the general election. So that's really the cleavage is Nikki Haley against Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump. And that kind of tells the story.
When it comes to the question of why likely cause goers are supporting who they're supporting, sometimes it can be more difficult to answer that question with polling. It also takes focus groups, which I know you conduct as well. And actually, when it comes to this question,
I thought of something that you said the last time we spoke. I listened to our conversation last night, to be transparent, right after the 2020 election. And you said that the sense you got from polling and focus groups is that the attacks from Democrats and coverage in the media of things that Trump says or does are treated as self-evidently bad or wrong. But in fact, those exact things, and I think you used COVID policy and immigration policy as examples, were
are the very reason that many voters like him. Are you still finding that to be the case, you know, now a little over three years later? In spades, yes. In our December poll, we asked some questions about things that Donald Trump had said that the consensus of the news media that I attend to said these are things that he should not have said. So this is talking about
about immigrants and they're tainting the blood and those sorts of things. And the idea of even asking about this was to see if there is anything that would give Trump supporters pause, any one of these elements. I think we tested eight elements.
elements like that. And five of them, a majority said it made them more likely to support him because he said that. And I think this is, we've seen this all along, but it's a hard thing for mainstream media, I'm going to say, in general, to get their mind wrapped around that why would you be more likely to support somebody who has coarse language and some mean-spiritedness
And I think it's because that has been dormant in our society, but not absent. And so Trump has given voice to things that people felt all along and that now they just can be more open about having those opinions, taking those positions than they were before.
Yeah, that polling that you did really stuck out to me. And, you know, to give an example, you asked about Trump's commitment to deal with immigration through, quote, sweeping raids, giant camps and mass deportations.
50% of likely Republican caucus members said that would make them more likely to support Trump, 22% less likely, 27% said it didn't matter. And there's, you know, there's similar questions here, like you mentioned, you know, quote, are immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally are, quote, poisoning the blood of America? You see similar results to comments like the radical left thugs that live like vermin in the U.S.,
What did strike me, though, as well, is that the one comment that really seemed to repel likely Republican caucus goers was that 2020 election fraud justifies terminating parts of the U.S. Constitution. 47% of likely Republican caucus goers said that made them less likely to support Trump, while only 14% said it made them more likely. Is this some indication that
challenging Trump as a threat to democracy is actually one of his weaknesses? Well, I would be more specific. I think the idea would be that he's a threat to the Constitution.
I don't think Americans of any ilk are all that excited about making changes to the Constitution or terminating changes to the Constitution. You have to keep in mind the rhetorical trick of talking about democracy and that if he's a threat to democracy, you can hear that as a threat to Democrats, which Republicans, many Trump supporters, they want to be a threat to Democrats.
So if they were saying a threat to the republic, you know, just rhetorically, I'm very, very interested in how language is working for and against. There are liberal commentators that will talk about, we're a liberal democracy, you know, and what they're doing is illiberal. I'm going...
You're not having the intended effect here you hoped for. Right, right. This reminds me of Nancy Pelosi when House Speaker constantly referred to the United States as a republic when talking about these issues. It was a choice because she was trying to speak to the median voter. In all of these assessments, what are Trump's weaknesses?
In Iowa? Or if you'd like to talk about the country as a whole, but, you know, Iowa was not so long ago a battleground state. Correct. But a lot of things have changed in Iowa since it was a purple state. When Barack Obama was elected, he won almost half of the 99 Iowa counties.
And when Donald Trump won, Hillary Clinton won maybe five or six counties. So you look at that map and
The color shift is remarkable. We no longer have any of our Washington delegation that is a Democrat. They're all Republicans. All statewide offices, with one exception, are held by Republicans. The statehouse has super majorities of Republicans. So Iowa is a red state, and it happened relatively quickly. In terms of Donald Trump's weaknesses...
I think if you know how to do it, the jujitsu of turning him on himself is perhaps at least a plausible way forward. So you don't attack him, you just create a situation where he attacks himself. There's no way to pull that, really. So I just think...
he comes across as very strong, very confident, very certain, and that is comforting to a lot of people. And they listen to other politicians who it's in their nature to not stake out a strong position. They say they're going to fight, but in terms of the actual position, they want to leave themselves wiggle room. So he's quite a difference from that and one that nobody seems to have really mastered how to take that down.
You know, the past couple times that we talked, we were talking a lot about polling methodology, and I'm glad that we could dig into the meat of the subject here and not just talk about the mechanics behind it. And usually that comes after the actual election when everyone's wringing their hands about the polls or not. You know, maybe this election, everything will be just fine. Right.
But the last time we talked again, you told me that you hadn't changed your methodology since 2008, or at least hadn't changed it much since 2008, and that it was quite straightforward. And you were very transparent about letting the data speak for itself. Are there any changes that you have made over the past three or four years, whether it regards response rates or the new ways of contacting voters or anything like that?
Not in terms of the new ways of contacting voters. The one change we did make in this cycle, we used the Secretary of State's list of registered voters as our sample frame. Before, we would poll just those who had been defined as active voters. And the Secretary of State and the Iowa Legislature made some change in how that was going to be defined. And after talking it over with the sponsors of the poll, we decided we will leave no one out.
So whether you are designated by the Secretary of State as an active voter, whether you voted in 2022, and whether you voted in 2020, it doesn't matter. Everybody has an equal chance to be contacted by our polling operation. And this really speaks to my philosophy about polling, which there are a few of us who think this way and a lot who don't, is that I want to be in a position where my data will reveal to me
what this future electorate or caucus going public, what they look like. So I call it polling forward. That is, I don't make any assumptions about who they are, how many there are, what their demographics are going to be. And there are a fair number of polling operations that are making models of what they think the 2024 caucus going public is going to look like and weight their data to look like that.
And I think they're pulling backwards. They're predicting the last caucus. And caucuses are so volatile. There were 50% more who turned up in 2016 than did in 2012. But you have to think there's going to be some demography that gets switched around a bit when you have changes like that. So I like to be in a place where my data show me the future.
I live and die by that. For the uninitiated here, what are the tenets of how you do that? We start with a sample frame. We've cast it as broadly as we can cast. We're not able to contact 17-year-olds who are eligible to caucus if they will be 18 by election day. We do miss that small segment of the caucus-going population. But other than that,
If you're a registered voter, we're going to send out the sample frame for telephone lookups and we're going to include you in the mix.
Then what we do when we have somebody on the phone is to ask whether they will definitely go to caucus, probably go to caucus, might or might not, or probably won't go to caucus. If you say might or might not or probably not, we're going to capture from the data file your age, your sex, and what county you live in.
And now we've got the 3,000, 5,000 people that we've talked to, that we have that data for, and we can weight that data set to look like the registered voter data list, to known parameters. And then we extract data.
from that the people who are likely caucus goers. So if older people are more likely to caucus, they're going to show up proportionately larger in our final respondent pool, and so on and so on. So it's random selection, it's waiting to known parameters, and then let the chips fall where they may. Has your thinking about the challenges facing the industry evolved much over the past few years? I mean, the last time we talked, there was a lot of
conversation about how maybe COVID had affected response rates because Democrats were more liable to stay home and therefore perhaps answer the phone. There's been conversations about, you know, Trump supporters in and of themselves being less likely to take pollsters' calls, not necessarily lie to pollsters, aka the shy Trump voter theory, but actually just be less inclined to speak to a pollster. And then, of course, there's the constant question of,
In an industry where we used to have 30% response rates and now we have 1% to 2% response rates, there are just going to be challenges, whether they're financial or sort of quality of data challenges. Do any of those stick out to you as sort of the biggest thing you're concerned about in 2024? Or do you have new concerns coming into this year?
Well, I say one of the secrets of my success is that I worry a lot. But then what is it I could do about it? So there are some polling operations that they'll do some random dialing, but then they'll go on the web and sort of get people. I don't know how they're choosing who they're getting. And as I said, if they're going to try to weight their data, they have only to look at the past data.
to figure out how you're going to do that. So that makes me nervous. Some pollsters are using panels that they work through people who say, poll me, poll me a lot. And again, I don't know how you divide what the demographic makeup should be of this future electorate. My approach is very expensive.
And that is a hurdle we've managed to overcome with having multiple partners. It is the Des Moines Register, Mediacom, NBC News is our national media partner for this round because it takes a village to put together the Iron Polk for caucuses because it's such a small group of people who go. The incidence is low.
Can I ask what your response rate is like? Our response rate, you know, there's funny ways of trying to figure all of that out, is a little higher than the average. And I give credit to, if you pick up the phone, the first thing you hear is, I'm Galen calling from the Iowa poll.
It's a known entity. It's been around since 1943. And not everybody in Iowa has been around since 1943. But I think it doesn't give us double the boost. But I think we've been closer to 5% rather than 1 or 2%. Every little bit helps. Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, if one of the challenges for polling is institutional trust, then a trusted institution behind the poll, I'm sure, can help the cause.
Any closing thoughts here as we are a week out from caucus day and you get ready to go into your media blackout and conduct the actual poll? Yeah, well, I'll be back once our poll is released. So I'm really paying attention to whether I can pick up any shift.
In the overall mood, there's sometimes, you know, you feel the ground pulse that things are starting to happen. People are starting to get excited. We have, I've seen seven yard signs. I actually saw one more today that was new. Two are Ron DeSantis and six are in front of Vivek Ramaswamy's headquarters. It's unusual. You can't really see the campaign happening like I used to be able to.
You mean because fewer people are putting up lawn signs and things like that? I've seen not a single Trump sign, you know, in the city of metro area of Des Moines. What do you chalk that up to? Just a sort of cynicism about politics in general? I don't really know beyond that. I think most of the campaigning that's going on is not visible to the naked eye, that there's so much that's happening. My social media is,
and people making phone calls. And so that's why I say this Ron DeSantis knock on a million doors is
I think we would see it. That's a huge effort to mobilize that and to engage with that. So I think you just can't see it. And I'm a little sad about that. I know. Well, what's happening to Iowa? They're not the first in the nation for Democrats anymore. They don't have lawn signs all over the place. Anne, is this the end of an era? Maybe. If it is, I'm braced for it.
I asked you actually when we last spoke is, you know, was the 2020 primary finally the nail in the coffin for at least the Democratic caucuses in Iowa? And you told me something along the lines of, you know, there have been rumblings for a while, but if Democrats have ever actually had a strong case, it's this time. And it looks like that happened. But again, we will see what happens the next time Democrats have a
competitive primary. But that's it for now. Thank you so much for joining me today. My pleasure. Good to talk to you. Up next, we're hitting the trail with campaign embeds.
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There's a long-running tradition that during presidential campaigns, reporters embed with the various candidates to observe and scrutinize the people who are vying to become president of the United States. Today, we're going to hear from three such reporters who've camped out in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina for months, crisscrossing those states, talking to voters, and watching the candidates make their pitches. Kendall Ross is ABC's embed base in Iowa. Welcome, Kendall. Hi. Thank you.
Kelsey Walsh is the embed based in New Hampshire. Welcome to the podcast. It's great to be here. And Gabriela Abdul-Hakim is covering South Carolina. Welcome, Gabriela. Hello, hello.
It's so good to have all three of you here. I'll say we've hung out on the trail at the debates and so on. And it's been really exciting to track your reporting over the past several months. I know this is grueling, grueling work. You truly, I mean, especially Kendall, Vivek Ramaswamy is also one of the candidates that you've been assigned to, has been campaigning like no other. Getting your emails at like
One o'clock in the morning of something that Vivek Ramaswamy just said on the trail, truly inspiring work. McKendon, you're based in Iowa, so let's start with you. One week until the caucuses. Can you sort of just set the scene? Like, how many events are happening? Who's campaigning the most aggressively? Is Nikki Haley, like...
more focused on New Hampshire. Is she still there in Iowa trying to get second place? Set the scene for us. Yes. Well, thank you for reading my emails, Galen. You know, I appreciate that. But, you know, one week out, Vivek Ramaswamy's
I would say still campaigning the hardest. So far, he's done 278 events. It'll be in the 280s after today. So he's done the full grass lead twice over. That's visiting all 99 counties in Iowa. I think I've been to maybe every pizza ranch in Iowa at this point with him. So that's been a journey for sure. But Trump is still the front runner in the state. When you're driving around
you see Trump yard signs, you see the barn signs, you see Trump flags, you know, so his presence in the state is, you know, cannot be overstated, really. That said, Iowa voters are still looking for another option, really, at this point. Other candidates, their pitch is that, you know, he had his time, and now it's time for another candidate to kind of move forward and step into the spotlight there. Nikki Haley.
She has been campaigning not as regularly in Iowa, but her name still comes up in conversation. DeSantis has been second place in polls for a long time. It really seems like DeSantis and Haley fighting for second place, DeSantis seeming to take that over at the moment. He has done a total of upwards of 130 events here in Iowa. So
His campaign and then also the Never Back Down Super PAC have a large presence here as well, large mailing operation, door knocking operations as well. So their infrastructure is really kind of settled into the state.
You have lesser known candidates who are still sticking it out as well. You have Asa Hutchinson still campaigning here. He has a campaign event today. Kendall, I got to be honest. I did not even, I fully do this for a living and did not realize that Asa Hutchinson was still in the race. So thank you for reminding us. God bless New Hampshire. All right. We will circle back around to Iowa. I want to get in our New Hampshire and South Carolina embeds.
Kelsey, you're in New Hampshire. Pretty different vibe, different electorate in New Hampshire. Talk about, set the scene for us there. Yeah, so in New Hampshire, obviously, Donald Trump is the frontrunner. However, it will be a close battle
finish. And it's all about who can close the gap on Donald Trump, right? At the beginning of the election season, Ron DeSantis was that person. However, he has done a complete 180 with Nikki Haley. And a lot of that, Kendall mentioned that Never Back Down and Ron DeSantis had the infrastructure in Iowa. He had that too in New Hampshire. But the problem was, is he just did not show up here.
He's had about 15 days in the Granite State. And for Granite State voters, that's not enough. They want to meet their candidate three, four times. And so his polling has dropped significantly here. They're going all in on Iowa. And to Granite State voters, that's very upsetting. Nikki Haley, she has spent a lot of time here and she's made that
visit every seven to 10 days here in the Granite State. And that's what matters because they see her, they like her, but she's betting on an electability argument, right? And as Kendall mentioned, in Iowa,
They tie her to the Trump administration. Here in New Hampshire, they don't want her a part of the Trump administration. Several times voters have asked her, say no to being vice president. If you say no, we will vote for you. They don't want her tied to Trump at all. They want her to be her own person, her own candidate. And she's really appealing to that independent voter. A lot of these voters might be Democrats, Republicans.
who, again, just don't want Trump involved. Chris Christie has spent a lot of time here in the state. He does about three town halls a week. He
He takes every question. His town halls are long. I want to mention Vivek Ramaswamy as well, because he was New Hampshire's person. He peaked in August. He was the guy. Despite not being here for the last month, Vivek Ramaswamy has survived.
spent a lot of time in the Granite State. The thing that happened with Vivek is, did he peak too early? New Hampshire voters saw him a lot. And like I said earlier, New Hampshire wants to see a candidate three or four times. But on that fourth visit is when Granite State voters were like,
I don't know if this is my person. The first time, second time, they were enthusiastic. They loved him. He was the next generation of Trump. He was the new person. But on that third and fourth time, there was a slight change. Why go for him when they can go for Donald Trump? They view him as Trump-lite, and they feel that they're throwing their vote away on him when they can just go for the person himself, Donald Trump. And so what you see with Vivek
Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis' crowd is, we don't need the other guy. We already have Trump and we're going to go with him. It's all up to Chris Christie and Nikki Haley to gain those new voters, people who are dissatisfied with Donald Trump.
Yeah, Kelsey, I gotta say, I'm looking at the polling right now that's actually just been updated in our averages. Trump right now at an average of 42% in New Hampshire. Haley at 29%. Christie at 11%. So...
You know, this could get interesting if Haley is able to consolidate Chris Christie's support. Now, you can probably tell me better why people are supporting Chris Christie over Nikki Haley. But part of me wonders if Nikki Haley finishes well in Iowa, do the Chris Christie supporters say, well...
if we don't want Trump to be the nominee, she's really the most viable alternative. But actually, let me put that question to you. What do you hear from Chris Christie supporters about why they're choosing Christie over Haley? So Chris Christie supporters are very keen on the message, the anti-Trump message. He's bringing a message of hope and
that there's a new generation. I will say the argument that, you know, Chris Christie voters are going to go to Nikki Haley, the first person who will tell you that's wrong is Chris Christie himself. Because seven out of 10 voters at a Christie event would go for Nikki Haley. But there's that 30% that's keeping Chris Christie in in this race. That percent that would not go to Nikki Haley would actually go to Donald Trump.
And so Chris Christie says, I have to stay in this race. In fact, he said he would support Nikki Haley if she did one thing. Flat out said that she would not accept Donald Trump's vice president position, which she has not done. She will not say yes or no. She will say that Donald Trump was the right president at the right time, and now we don't support him. He chaos...
And confusion follows him everywhere. But when she is directly asked, will you be Donald Trump's vice president? She does not answer. She goes on this whole tangent of something else. And so one voter actually here in New Hampshire pressed
her. He held up his ballot and said, I'm between you and Chris Christie. All I need to know is that you will not support Donald Trump. And Nikki Haley gave her, he was the right president at the right time. And he's no longer that person. And that supporter walked away, or voter, walked away very disappointed. He wanted a yes or no. He wanted, I'm not supporting Donald Trump. And if Nikki Haley said that,
he would not vote for Chris Christie. So that percent is people that do not believe that Nikki Haley will stand up to Donald Trump.
All right. We'll likewise come back to New Hampshire. But Gabriella, you are currently sitting in a parking lot. Are you in Charleston right now? I'm in Charleston, South Carolina, sitting in a parking lot, making sure no one does anything weird. And you're outside of a Biden event, actually, right? Joe Biden is in South Carolina today. Yes, I'm outside of the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, at his second campaign event of the year.
So that starts around noon. So I'm sitting here waiting, making sure I'm here before security gets weird. Maybe we'll check in on the I mean, I guess, you know, technically there is a Democratic primary, although for all intents and purposes, it's noncompetitive. Let's talk about the Republican primary first.
South Carolina gets short shrift when it comes to the early states sometimes. Although South Carolina also likes to say that, you know, oh, Iowa and New Hampshire get weird and kind of figure it out. South Carolina clarifies who the actual nominee is going to be. I don't know if you have thoughts on that, but paint a picture for me. What is the campaign like from Charleston? I mean, South Carolina has picked the Republican nominee yesterday.
Every year for the past, I want to say 30 years, except for one year they didn't. Right now, people have not been...
really campaigning in South Carolina right now. The Republican race will look, I think, very different after New Hampshire. Trump hasn't been here since November. DeSantis hasn't been here since December. Haley hasn't been here since November. So I think people are very much waiting to see. But there really hasn't been very much campaigning in South Carolina. This is a ruby red state
It's a place where Trump won in 2020 and 2016. He's leading by nearly 30 points in this state. It's really not a race at all. But, you know, I went door knocking with AFP about a couple of weeks ago. And that's Americans for Prosperity, the group that endorsed Nikki Haley. We went door knocking for Nikki Haley and we did it in Columbia, South Carolina, which is generally a blue area.
But the majority of people that we spoke to wanted Nikki Haley. And the people that did want Nikki Haley were almost afraid to say it. They would not go on camera. They didn't want their names taken down. They were like, OK, we want Nikki Haley, but we don't want anyone to know that we want Nikki Haley.
So I'm interested in seeing, like, what actually happens, as Kelsey was saying, in New Hampshire. Like, even though Trump is obviously the frontrunner, are the polls—I don't want to say they're wrong, obviously, but is there something where people aren't reporting how they actually feel because they're fearful of local politics? I think that whisper is heard almost everywhere on the campaign trail. Chris Christie at events says that people whisper to him to stay in New Hampshire.
you know, you're doing the good fight. You're going against Donald Trump. We can't have Donald Trump, another four years of Donald Trump. And they'll whisper to him.
On the contrary, there's this other whisper, this soft voice that Gabby's mentioning. We don't want Donald Trump, but we don't want anyone to know that we're no longer with him. We voted for him in 16 and 20, and now we are going for Nikki Haley, but we cannot tell our friends and family. So there's a soft whisper or soft Trump hold that's happening here in New Hampshire that we don't want to tell anyone, but
We're going to go to the ballot box and we're going to select someone other than Donald Trump this go around. Yeah. All right. I got to step in for the polling here. Right. My sense, I think it's unlikely that people are straight up lying to pollsters and like there's this maybe majority coalition for Haley right in this moment. But people are too shy to say so.
If anything, I would imagine that if Nikki Haley performs really well in the early states, Iowa and New Hampshire, that creates a permission structure to be like, oh, okay, like we actually – I mean, we've seen this before. Obama 2008 is the prime example where –
Hillary Clinton was pulling ahead of Barack Obama in pretty much every state until Barack Obama won Iowa. And that created a permission structure for people to be like, oh, maybe we aren't going to support Hillary Clinton. Maybe we will support Barack Obama once you see that high profile win. I do want to ask you, though, because back in 2016, everyone said, oh, there's a shy Trump voter. You know, people are supporting Trump, but they don't want to talk about it. You're telling me the opposite. You're saying that
Trump is the dominant force and people who support alternatives are whispering about it. Why do you think that is? I think in South Carolina specifically, this is a very proudly Southern state. Again, Trump is very popular here. I think that I think in general in the South, people don't discuss politics. I don't think
I don't think people would want to talk about it either way. But I think that the grain, the general grain here is that people don't want to upset the status quo. And I think that they're afraid that, you know, it's going to cause some kind of rift inside of their community. A lot of people say... I had a few people actually who weren't actually from South Carolina I spoke to, and they were like...
You know, I'm from Michigan. I'm from Missouri. And I don't really know what the politics are down here because you have to remember during the pandemic, a lot of people moved down to South Carolina. They had very loose COVID rules back then. And it's very cheap. It's beautiful down here. I know Kendall and Kelsey are dealing with some serious weather, but I was on the beach yesterday. It was very nice. So...
Wow. Do I have the best primary state? I don't know. But yeah, it's a place people want to be. People want to be here. They want to move down here. It's beautiful. It's cheap.
There's a lot of new faces here from 2020. What I've been hearing from the ground from voters is that they do like what Nikki Haley is saying. You know, she's from this state. A lot of people said, you know, I enjoyed her tenure from 2011 to 2017. She had very high favorability ratings when she was governor. And I think, you know, she has that home state advantage. But again, this is a very heavily Trump state.
Yeah, to put some polling to that, according to our averages right now, Trump is at 53% in South Carolina, Haley at 24%, DeSantis at 13%, and then it drops off quickly, Christie at just 4%. So still, as you mentioned, a really steep hill to climb for Nikki Haley.
And she's only been kind of inching up in those polls. Like, she's at 24 percent and she's only about two points up from last month, while Trump is five points up. So obviously, you know, Trump is still very much gaining momentum. He is at where he was in 2020 and 2016. So, again, like you said, it is a very steep hill. It's like a 30 point difference.
To your question about, you know, the quiet non-Trump voter, I, again, I cover a lot of Ramaswamy events for full disclosure. But there's one woman who told Ramaswamy there that, you know, I like you. I think you're great. But how can we not vote for Trump right now? And so, again, the loyalty is strong. They are really riding for Donald Trump here. And a lot of that has to do with they feel that his
many legal troubles, you know, in Maine and Colorado, removing him from the primary ballot, even if temporarily, has fueled them to vote for him more. I've spoken to several voters who have told me that, if anything, it's only increasing their feelings of support. They feel that to leave him or to not vote for him right now would be abandoning him. And so there's also this very personal kind of relationship there that people feel that they cannot...
leave him behind in a moment of struggle for him right now. Kelsey brought up and Gabriella brought up a few things that I thought were very interesting. I should mention, I'd be remiss to mention that Christy has not been in Iowa at all.
this cycle. And so has not stepped foot here once, has not done one event here. And so for him to not be in Iowa at all and then still not have that infrastructure in New Hampshire could be very devastating to his campaign because, you know, where do you go from here? Another thing that Kelsey brought up is people asking, why should I vote for you when Donald Trump is in the race? Even if I like you, if I like what you have to say, I still like his policies. He has a track record.
Rama Swamy's pitch as of late has been that he thinks that Trump will not be allowed to be in the election in some way. And so, you know, candidates are pitching their ways, you know, differently, trying to talk to voters about convince them of why, you know, maybe Trump might not be their best option. But I think Trump's presence is they have to do a lot of work to overcome that.
It'd be a disservice not to mention why people support Donald Trump. He is the frontrunner. He has the stronghold. I mean, he's leading the polls in all three of these states. And I know for New Hampshire voters, there's three things of why they support him. It's immigration, national security, and the economy. Those questions are brought up at every single town hall. People are with Donald Trump because...
They don't like the war in Ukraine. They don't like that we're funding the war in Ukraine. Immigration, the first question at any town hall, we need to close our border. That is what voters, even New Hampshire, we're not even near the southern border.
And it's mentioned every single time. Yes, the northern border is mentioned a couple of times. Vaikramaswamy is the only candidate to go to the northern border and share a message about immigration there. But people are very concerned about immigration. And then the third one is the economy. My business was better off
under Donald Trump is what voters are saying. My pocketbook was better off. Eggs weren't expensive at the grocery store. I could afford things. So I want to go back to that. And so when Ron DeSantis or Vivek Ramaswamy come in and share those similar messages, at the end of the day, I think that it's almost this feeling of,
I'll support him again because I felt better. My family was better protected. You know, this is what matters to me. And that's why Donald Trump has the stronghold. It's interesting.
interesting that those questions are asked to Chris Christie and Nikki Haley. But I will say that one thing that differentiates them is they're often asked about abortion. They're often asked about other questions, you know, social security. And the types of questions that are asked at Nikki Haley or Chris Christie events are a lot different than the questions asked at the Vaikramaswamy or Ron DeSantis event here.
Yeah, I like to say that in this campaign, we're actually dealing with a situation where there's almost two incumbents running, right? People know, voters know what life is like under Trump, and they know what life is like under Biden. One of the biggest challenges in running a campaign is getting people to imagine the vision, imagine what it would be like for you to be president. But for all of the voters that you're talking about that support Trump, they don't have to imagine.
Maybe you look back with rose-colored glasses. Maybe you have a partisan perspective of what life was like under Trump. But for all of the things that you're saying, the border, the economy, national security, or foreign conflicts, Trump doesn't have to convince people per se. Trump can just say, well, you already know what life was like under my presidency.
I think that's also a big part of their strategy here in Iowa, the fact that he has a track record and they know that he has supporters here. This is not a matter of him winning over Iowans as the other candidates in the race have to do. This is a matter of making sure that his supporters show up on caucus night and caucus for him. That has been their main focus, training people on how to caucus, making sure they know where to go.
gathering precinct captains to make sure they have a strong voice in the room. His campaign here has not been an issue campaign. It has not been a policy campaign. This has been him reminding people, as if they would have been able to forget, that he is in the race, that he is really their best option. Their only option even is how he would pitch it to voters. And so that's what they need to come out to do on January 15th.
And I will say it to that point, here in New Hampshire, the yard signs that are up for Donald Trump have been there. They've been there since 2016. They have seen every storm, every rain, you know, they have weathered everything, but they're still standing strong. There is, yes, a few new signs, Trump 2024, but most of the time, all the Trump-
literature or signage that you see here on the ground in New Hampshire has been there in 16 and 20, and now they'll go for him again in 2024. Whereas the most signage that you see is Nikki Haley, because they have to remind people that there's someone else that they can go to. Nikki Haley signs are everywhere here in New Hampshire, but they just went up
as of late in September, October, November, there wasn't much political activity happening here. The New Hampshire voter is finally tuning in. They are showing up now. This week will be quiet here due to the Iowa caucuses, but what will the final week look like? You know, what campaigns are pushing forward with their message and can they close that gap on the front runner who's been here since 2016?
Yeah. Gabriella, I'm curious. Obviously, Nikki Haley recently had a bit of a gaffe in her response to a voter at a town hall about the cause of the Civil War. Famously, as governor of South Carolina, she took down the Confederate flag from the state capitol after originally saying that she wanted to keep it up because it was part of the state's heritage. But
She campaigned to take it down after a mass shooting at the church that you're sitting outside of, that you're out of right now. Have you heard voters talk about this at all, their thoughts on her response to that question? I think that in South Carolina, I think that most voters...
respect her track record for what she did was no small thing in South Carolina. She asked for the Confederate flag to be taken down five days after that incident happened. She met with all nine families. She went to all nine funerals for those families. It was something that I think deeply affected her, and she immediately acted. I think she responded in the way a South Carolinian would want her to respond.
And she even said it when she was like, well, what do you want me to say? I think she was kind of looking to see, you know, how should I respond to this to make you happy? But because she responded in a way that she knew
From her home state, how people would want her to respond. So I don't think there was any I think as a black voter, I think there was no surprise there at all. But I think that for a general South Carolinian, I think she responded the way they wanted her to respond. Kelsey, when you were there, how did how did the voters react to that?
Yeah. So in New Hampshire, when the moment happened, I talked to a couple of voters after. Were you at that event, Kelsey? Yeah. It was intense. You could hear a pin drop. And to Gabby's point, she responded in a way, what do you want me to say about slavery? It was as if she was reading this person, I don't want to upset you, but I don't want to
And Nikki Haley is what Chris Christie would say, is Nikki Haley is almost, she says anything to everybody. She wants to say the right message to the right person. She tiptoes her message. And so with her candid response, she wanted to know what that voter wanted her to say. After the event, voters...
kind of brushed off that whole moment. In fact, two voters that I spoke to decided that they, she spoke in Berlin, New Hampshire, which is a Trump stronghold. And two voters that I talked to were like, oh, I'm curious about her now. I, you know, was with Donald Trump, but
She mentioned a line that chaos follows Donald Trump everywhere. And I feel that. And so now maybe I am with Nikki Haley. And then the day after when we followed her through North Country, where she cleaned up her remarks at her first town hall in North Conway, voters that I talked to there said,
felt that she was caught off guard, flustered. Her comments didn't offend them, didn't offend New Hampshire voters or the support that Nikki Haley has here. In fact, most of them are sticking with her no matter what. However, the person that I did offend
is those independents that lean Democrat here in New Hampshire that now heard her say that and are like, maybe I am going to write in Joe Biden's name. Or maybe I am now going to vote on the Democratic side. I was leaning towards Nikki Haley, but I'm not sure that's my person after that comment. So that...
you know, independent, which makes up 40% here of New Hampshire, undeclared voter. Nikki Haley did offend with those remarks. Yeah, as we wrap up here, there is a chance that this Republican primary election
is over, you know, within a month. And so I do want to ask you, Gabriella, as you sit outside a church where Biden is about to speak, what kind of preview of his campaign are we getting from his event today?
Biden was in Pennsylvania Friday talking about MAGA extremism and how this is a fight for democracy, democracy and freedom. And I think coming up in for this next speech, it's the same thing. His campaign released a statement that this is a speech just going to touch on defeating the hate-fueled rhetoric by taking action. We're going to see him talk about political violence, about racism,
A Donald Trump presidency, which this will likely be, according to the polls, a Trump versus Biden election. And he's saying that these MAGA extremists are bringing our country backwards instead of forwards. They're threatening our very way of life and that we need to, as Americans, stand up, unite and fight against this.
And that was a lot of what he was saying on Friday. He chose Valley Forge. And it wasn't actually at Valley Forge. He spoke actually about 16 miles away or 30 minutes away from Valley Forge in Bluebell, Pennsylvania. But yeah,
You know, he chose that location because it was where George Washington united militias from other colonies and was able to go on and defeat the British, you know, Americans uniting against tyranny. And I think that's what he's trying to get at today at this church, you know.
the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where there was this horrific white supremacist shooting. He also, back in 2020 when he was running, he also used imagery of Charlottesville. It's something that's very, it's a theme that he's continuously showcasing during his campaigns, that he's fighting against extremism, against hate-fueled speech. He's trying to unite America to move forward. So I think we're going to see a lot of that here today. ♪
All right. Well, we are going to leave things there for today. I just want to say thank you to all of your work coming out of these states and following these candidates around the early states and also earlier in the cycle all across the country, frankly. You've all done a really great job and I've enjoyed tracking you and hope you'll come back and join me again once some of this is clarified. But Kendall, Kelsey and Gabriella, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
My name is Galen Drew. 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 podcast.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. ♪
