The NPR Politics Podcast - New Hampshire's Got Next

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

The Iowa caucuses are over. Next up: the New Hampshire primary. The three remaining major Republican presidential candidates make their way east to petition voters. Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley is hoping for a better finish in the state — does she have a chance after the Iowa blowout? This episode: White House correspondent Asma Khalid, political correspondent Sarah McCammon, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.Our producers are Casey Morell & Kelli Wessinger. Our editor is Erica Morrison. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Fact checking by Jeongyoon Han.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Molly from Houston, Texas. Yesterday, I ran my first half marathon. NPR podcasts were the soundtrack to my training. This podcast was recorded at 1210 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, January 16th of 2024. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I'll still be incredibly sore. Enjoy the show. Kudos. You know, I will say, I find it really hard to work out to podcasts, and I am impressed that we provide that to people. I love all the fitness folks who wind up doing the timestamps. There's the, remember the one guy who was like,

I get swole on the NPR politics podcast? Made me laugh. Well, hey there, it's the NPR politics podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I, hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid, I cover the White House. I'm Sarah McCammon, I cover the presidential campaign. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And today on the show, the GOP presidential race moves from the sub-zero temperatures of Iowa to the slightly balmy freezing weather of New Hampshire.

New Hampshire is, of course, the first primary in the nation, and it'll take place a week from today, although there are a couple of asterisks attached to that, and we'll get into that later in the show. Let's start with the race on center stage, that is the Republicans. Former President Donald Trump won the Iowa caucus last night, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis came in second place. Sarah, you have actually been spending quite a bit of time covering the woman who came in third place. That's former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. She finished in third last night. And you flew from Iowa to New Hampshire as you've been covering her bid.

And really, she's been putting so much attention on New Hampshire. It seems like this is her path that she sees potentially to becoming the Republican nomination. But I want to get a reality check on that from you, Sarah. Yeah, I mean, well, New Hampshire is a kind of state where the Republican electorate has more of arguably a natural affinity for a candidate like Nikki Haley. She's kind of positioned herself as a conservative, but with kind of a moderate appeal, moderate messaging. And that's the kind of voters that you see more of in New Hampshire, whereas Iowa tends to be more dominated by religious conservatives, white evangelicals. And so Iowa was not the obvious fit for Nikki Haley the way that New Hampshire is.

And you've kind of seen that in the polling. Haley's been steadily building in the New Hampshire polls for months now, and she's invested a lot of energy and time there. Her Iowa campaign co-chair was open about the fact that she wanted Haley to finish second in Iowa. She didn't do that. You know, she came in a close third. But, you know, her message last night really kind of sounded like she had come in second. She's trying to paint this as a two-person race between her and Donald Trump as we head into the New Hampshire primary. I want to understand that a little bit more clearly. How is she painting this as a ticket out of Iowa when she finished in third place? Well, I think New Hampshire, again, has been just such a big part of her strategy. She sees it as

a place where she can do well. And so she's hoping that she will have enough momentum coming out of Iowa with this close third place finish to come to New Hampshire, tell voters that this is about change. She's been talking about generational change within the party and for the country. She's been talking about providing sort of stability versus the chaos, she says, that Trump brings. Her campaign released a digital ad this morning, basically saying that it's time to make a choice and that she offers a better choice over either Trump or Biden. You know, she didn't talk about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the person who actually came in second in Iowa.

Domenico, it seems like we are talking about both the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primaries coming up next week as if they are kind of another run of the mill election. But these races are not normal. I mean, you were reporting on this last night that the Associated Press called the race for Donald Trump so early last night, in part because they deemed it to be a blowout. And so I want to have you help us understand what Trump's dominance means in this primary. It's not a normal open primary. No, it's not. I mean, for so much of this, we've been talking about the race for second place. But, you know, politics is not grenades and horseshoes.

Close doesn't really matter, right? I mean, there's one winner. And right now, Trump is still far and away the front runner. Nikki Haley has a shot, but it's very much a long shot at this point. She has to do exceedingly well in New Hampshire, if not win, come a reasonably close second place to be able to sell her donors and her supporters on why she should keep going in this race. Because I have to tell you, as the calendar continues toward March, it's going to get more and more stacked in Trump's favor because of all of the states that start to become winner-take-all. In other words,

if you win the state's vote, you'll win all of their delegates. And that will start Trump on a steady march toward the nomination if Haley isn't able to change something. Yeah. We got to talk more about that in a bit because I really do want to dive deeper into that point. I think it's extremely important. I got one final question for you, though, before we take a break. And that is that, you know, I think at the outset of this primary, there were a lot of questions from folks like us who cover politics a lot about the viability of Donald Trump's campaign. There was a sense that he left Washington, some would say, in a position of somewhat disgrace. He is now facing countless criminal charges. And what we saw, I think, last night in Iowa was that the Republican Party seems to be Trump's party. They saw all of that and said, okay, no, we still want that. And I don't see where that leaves a path for any of

the rest of these candidates. You know, I think it's really difficult, especially when you look inside the entrance polls that were taken last night, and only three in 10 said that they believed Joe Biden was legitimately elected to be president. Two-thirds said that if Trump was convicted, he would still be fit to be president. That mirrors what we found in the NPR PBS News Aaron Marris poll from earlier this year. That really shows you how much Republican candidates have bought what Trump is selling. This idea that he's a victim, that there's a witch hunt, that there's a deep state that's after him. It's really hard to then win over enough of those Republicans to be able to win the nomination

and criticize him at the same time. It's a really delicate dance that these candidates are trying to do. And it's not one that, you know, is really working right now. All right, let's take a quick break. And we'll be back in a moment. And we're back. And as we were saying, we are just one week away from when New Hampshire voters will begin to cast their ballots in the primaries. And Sarah, you are in New Hampshire today. You are covering Nikki Haley. She has put a lot of money, a lot of resources into courting voters in New Hampshire. And you kind of touched on this a bit earlier, but I do think it's a very significant point for us to understand that New Hampshire voters really differ from Iowa voters. Explain that.

That's right. I mean, both Iowa and New Hampshire are very white states, which has been very controversial in having them go so early in this critical nominating process, particularly the Republican electorates in both states are very white. But New Hampshire voters have traditionally been a bit more moderate, as we have said. Iowa has a larger share of religious conservatives, white evangelicals. DeSantis went after white evangelicals pretty heavily in his campaign, tried to win some of those over from Donald Trump. But you know, all indications are, by the way, that Trump still dominates white evangelicals looking at some of the entrance polls from Iowa, more than half voted for Trump. So, you know, but that's less of a factor in a state like New Hampshire. And that's part of,

I think, why Haley sees New Hampshire as a big opportunity for her. Domenico, Donald Trump has been working to change the rules in his favor for the nominating process. How has the delegate math changed since 2016? Well, the Trump campaign has been working for months to try to tip the rules in their favor, to make more winner-take-all states, to try to get more caucuses instead of primaries so that the most activist voters show up. And they've done this in a much more professionalized way than they were able to do in 2016 after now knowing the rules of the game and trying to bend them in his favor. So with everything that you have described, does the man who came in second place last night, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, have a real path forward? I know we haven't even talked about him really. And that's because really he's got like a fifth

of the Republican electorate out of last night's Iowa caucuses, about 20% is what DeSantis got and that's not much more than what he's been polling overall anyway. And to think that he spent all of his millions of dollars and really his support in Iowa went down from the beginning of the campaign where he had topped out at something like 27% in an average of the polls, wound up with less than that. It's really hard for him to make a case for a rationale for how he's actually going to overcome Trump because he's really sold himself as Trump without the baggage or Trump light. And the Republican caucus

goers last night were saying that they prefer the original. So it's going to be tough to see what his rationale is. Now, at the same time, I could see DeSantis staying in to help his own career because he would be pulling at least some votes from Nikki Haley. And there's an argument that that could help Trump over a certain period of time and allow, you know, Trump to wind up closing this thing out more quickly. And maybe DeSantis, you know, winds up doing Trump a favor. So one quick thing, we have spent this entire show talking about the Republicans. But it is worth noting, Sarah, that Democrats are having a primary in New Hampshire, too. It's not officially sanctioned. But what exactly is going on there? This is kind of an intra-party dispute, or maybe

a national versus New Hampshire Democrats dispute. You know, President Biden wanted to elevate South Carolina in the primary process because the electorate there is much more like the country, more diverse, and especially more like the Democratic Party. New Hampshire Democrats wanted to keep being the first primary in the nation. And, you know, a New Hampshire state law requires that they do that. So Biden is essentially skipping the New Hampshire primary. He won't be on the ballot. He does have a primary challenger in the form of Congressman Dean Phillips of Minnesota. And there's also a write-in campaign to write Biden in. So if Dean Phillips had an unexpected blowout in New Hampshire, that could look bad for President Biden. But I don't think there's

any evidence that that's likely to happen. Yeah, Phillips is pulling out all the stops in New Hampshire, at least trying to. He spent about $2.3 million in ads just on New Hampshire. He's a fairly wealthy guy. He was a co-owner of Talenti Gelato, which is part of where he got so much of his money from and why he's able to spend as much as he is on this campaign. One thing that he has tried to do is even the most recent thing to try to get attention for himself is he's running an ad featuring Bigfoot, literally somebody in a Bigfoot costume who is saying that Joe Biden is more elusive than even him. But if he winds up losing the primary that isn't even a place where Biden is running because there's this write-in Biden campaign.

There's really nowhere else for Phillips to go. there speaking badly of the current president when what the party needs desperately is to unify, to try to beat if it is Donald Trump or any of the other candidates, because right now, the Democratic Party is fractured in some respects on several issues. And I want to note here that there's another name who I'm sure many of our listeners are familiar with, who will be on the ballot in New Hampshire. And that's author and former 2020 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson. All right, well, before we wrap up today's show, we need to say goodbye to one more GOP presidential hopeful. The former governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, has dropped out after finishing in a disappointing sixth place in Iowa. Disappointing, but unsurprising. This is, Hutchinson, I think, has stayed in longer than a

lot of people expected, given his lack of traction. And that's two out right now after Iowa, Ramaswamy and Hutchinson. I mean, look at the fact that Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie were the two candidates who were most vocally opposed to Trump's conduct and spoke about it and the 91 counts that the former president is facing. And what did the Republican primary electorate do with them? Essentially chewed them up and spit them out. And now they're no longer in the game. All right. Well, that is a wrap for today. We'll be back in your feeds again tomorrow. It is going to be a busy week in politics. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House.

I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover the presidential campaign. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.