The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump Sweeps Iowa Caucuses

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

Former president Donald Trump won the Iowa Republican caucuses with over 50 percent of the votes Monday night. Florida governor Ron DeSantis placed second and former U.N. ambassador & South Carolina governor Nikki Haley third. We look at what to expect as they all now head to New Hampshire. This episode: White House correspondent Asma Khalid, political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson.Our producers are Casey Morell & Kelli Wessinger. Our editor is Erica Morrison. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.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

Howdy, this is David from San Antonio, Texas. I'm currently working on an idea for a fusion restaurant serving Armenian, Georgian, and Azerbaijani cuisine combined with Midwest staples. I call it Iowa Caucasus. This podcast was recorded at... Very good. I was really wondering where that was going. 11.35 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday, January 15th, Iowa Caucus Day. Things may have changed since then, but I think I'll be serving kofta, lavash, and seven-layer dip. Enjoy the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House.

I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the presidential campaign. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And tonight on the show, the 2024 election season is officially underway. At 7 p.m. Central Time on Monday evening, Iowa Republicans began caucusing. 31 minutes later, before many caucus sites had even finished up their processes, there was a decisive winner. And as expected, it was former President Donald Trump. I want to congratulate Ron and Nikki for having a good time together. We're all having a good time together. And I think they both actually did very well. I really do. I think they both did very well. We don't even know what the outcome of second place is.

And I also want to congratulate Vivek because he did a hell of a job. He came from zero and he's got a big percent, probably 8%, almost 8%. And that's an amazing job. They all did. They're all very smart, very smart people, very capable people. That was Donald Trump there speaking just after he won the Iowa Republican caucuses, according to a call made by the Associated Press. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis came in second place,

followed closely by former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who came in third place. And one candidate suspended his campaign tonight. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy ended well behind Haley, DeSantis and Trump, and he decided to call it quits. Danielle, I want to start with you because you are there in Iowa at the Trump Iowa caucus watch party. What has the atmosphere been like? Well, as you might expect, it's been celebratory. The evening started with that call and there was no reaction here because no supporters were here at that time.

The call was so early that a lot of the supporters were still out at their caucus sites. So it was pretty quiet then, but it has, of course, picked up. People have been drinking, cheering, hanging out. Also, there are plenty of Trump's allies here. Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz showed up. Carrie Lake, who ran for governor of Arizona and now is running for Senate in Arizona, is also here. And you've seen those people embracing others, really living it up, really celebrating the victory. Mara, we heard Donald Trump speak tonight. And I think what was striking, though perhaps not so surprising, is how much his remarks

sounded like a general election message. That's right. He was very magnanimous, turned his attention to Joe Biden. One of the many advantages of having the kind of lead he does and being as dominant as he is, is that he can start running a general election very early. Because I don't know if we've ever had a Republican nominating battle that looks like it's going to be wrapped up as early as this one might. So yes, he can turn his attention to Joe Biden. That's what he wants to do. And quite frankly, Biden campaign is happy about that because they'd like to start making the contrast. Yeah. And Trump has been doing this. I mean, besides, you know, he'll take a shot at DeSantis, Haley, whoever in his speeches, but he focuses on Biden so much anyway.

This has been a general election message from him for a while. Danielle, I wanted to ask you about this. I mean, because this was such a decisive win. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, you know, famously talked often about how he was visiting all of Iowa's 99 counties. Well, he didn't manage to win any of those counties. And so, you know, there's this question of the fact that Donald Trump did not really spend a whole lot of time in Iowa campaigning on the ground compared to some of his opponents. Ultimately, that didn't seem to matter. Yeah, totally true. And I think that the easy takeaway and I think a reasonable takeaway is that, you know, Trump was essentially running as an incumbent among the Republicans here. He, the last Republican to hold the presidency, and they still think that he has four more years left

in which to finish the job. And look, you can see this in the entrance polls from tonight and also from the voters I talked to. The entrance polls, as reported by CNN, showed that among people who decided more than a month ago, that's two-thirds of Republican voters who said they decided who to support more than a month ago, and two-thirds of those people picked Trump.

So overwhelmingly, the people who decided long ago picked Trump. People who decided more recently generally picked Haley or DeSantis. A majority of them picked them. And when I talk to Trump voters, I ask pretty much every voter this cycle, hey, who do you support? How long have you supported them? How did you decide? And Trump voters, the answer was almost always, how did I decide? I mean, I've supported him since 2016. I mean, so many of them have been locked in

for so long that deciding isn't even part of the equation. So even if you have DeSantis, Ramaswamy, Haley rolling through your town, you might have just picked Trump well before then. So I want to ask you both about the second and third place finishers tonight in Iowa. Let's start with the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis. He came in second place, but by a pretty big margin. Samara, what does it mean for him? Does he really have a ticket out of Iowa? I think he has a technical ticket out of Iowa. He did come in second. But DeSantis just never lived up to his hype. His theory of the case is that Republican voters wanted Trump without the chaos. And that's how he presented himself. Well, they

want Trump with the chaos. They want the whole package. And I think that he lives on to fight another day. But basically his showing was pretty poor after the amount of time and effort he spent in Iowa. Shows you how little good it did to get the endorsement of the governor, to get the endorsement of some major evangelical figures. But, you know, he beat Haley by a tiny little bit. I think that he's pretty much finished. I think he can go on to more primaries. For Haley, she didn't live up to her hype either. But she was staking everything, it seemed, on New Hampshire. Yes, but she had the momentum and she was moving up in the polls. And she had to show that she

could do well among voters that represent the modern Republican Party, not the libertarian, college-educated voters in New Hampshire. She's doing fine with them, but they're a minority in the party now. White, working-class evangelicals, that's who votes in Iowa, that's who votes in South Carolina. She didn't do very well tonight. All right. Let's take a quick break on that note and we'll be back in a moment. And we're back. And Mara, the state of Iowa always gets a lot of attention politically because it's the first caucus site here for Republicans. But it only offers up 40 delegates in total. And, you know, I will say that there's going to be, what, a total of some 2,500 delegates that are going to be awarded. And I think we have this question every election cycle needs because all he has to do is win these states by 25, 30, 40 points as long as Haley and DeSantis are splitting the opposition to him, and he's going to get what he needs. So, you know, Iowa's important because it sets a tone. It basically

reinforced what we saw in polling, which is that he has, Trump has an insurmountable lead at this point over his opponents. I mean, I would add to what Mara just said that, I mean, the first state, of course, is going to matter because the first state is the first contest. It's a question of, OK, how organized were you? How well did you get your people together to get your votes out in this first contest? But I will also say that whether Iowa in particular matters, I mean, as our politics become more nationalized, we just see the way that people campaign changing. For example, 10, 15, 20 years ago, you would hear candidates talk a lot more about, say, ethanol, about farming, about any land conservation, the Iowa's education system, any number of things that Iowans in particular care about. You don't hear that as much anymore. You just hear the candidates' stump speeches as you would hear them in many other places. I mean, we heard Donald Trump talk

so much tonight about immigration and crime. Right. Those are national issues. You're absolutely right. And so you hear the national stump speech here in this very particular state. You know, this is a different election. I don't think we've ever had an Iowa caucus that had this little suspense. And also, as Danielle pointed out earlier, Donald Trump is a functional incumbent, which is really different than most caucuses. And the other thing that's interesting is, historically, the guy who wins the Iowa Republican caucus doesn't go on to be the nominee very often. Yeah. And that, I think, is probably going to be different this time.

I want to drill down deeper on that note, Mara, because I've been thinking a lot about this, that, you know, all of us who cover elections, we're so used to covering this playbook of debates and caucuses. These are like key benchmarks in the election season. And it doesn't feel like this is a normal election cycle, both because Donald Trump is essentially a functional incumbent, but also because he has had such a large, almost insurmountable lead for many, many months of this campaign. And he hasn't debated. So the debates have not been significant. And so it just makes me wonder, like, are we looking at these things the right way? Because we're covering all these key moments electorally, right? We cover the set pieces because that's what we've always done.

We can't not cover the Iowa Congresses. I understand. Yeah, of course, of course. But we have to explain to our listeners that they're not the make-or-break events that they might have been in the past. Like I said, there was very little suspense in tonight. We wanted to know what his margin was. We wanted to know who'd come in second. But the winner was not in doubt. I agree with everything Mara just said. I would add to that in terms of whether things have substantially or totally changed in terms of the Iowa caucuses and how we cover these things. I think the related question to this is how much has the Republican Party and have Republican politics changed because of Trump?

I've asked quite a few Trump voters after Trump, after 2024, who do you see as the next Trump? Who would you want to support next? And some Republicans have an answer and some don't. Some Trump supporters say, honestly, I don't know. Some say it's Trump or no one. So, I mean, what I'm saying here is, is Trump the only candidate who can skip the debates and still ride easily to a caucus win, to other nomination wins? Or has he set some sort of a new standard? Has he broken the norms? We don't really know that yet. Yeah. And to me, whether or not we all anticipated these results,

I think it is still incredibly noteworthy to see officially that despite criminal charges, despite accusations of trying to subvert the election results in 2020, Republican voters saw all of that, at least the first clear test here in Iowa, and they said, we want that. Not in spite of, because of. Feature, not a bug. All right. Well, on that note, Danielle, I am going to let you go

because I know you have a very late night plane to catch out to New Hampshire, and I am sure we will talk to you again very soon out in New England. Yeah, I hope I'm verbal by then. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Take care. Safe travels. I'm Asma Khalid.

I cover the White House. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the presidential campaign. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And a heads up, we will be back in your feeds later today with the latest on the nominating contest in New Hampshire. And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.