Today, Explained - Iowa caucused
Episode Date: January 16, 2024Trump won big. DeSantis came in second, but Vox’s Zack Beauchamp says that won’t be enough to keep his campaign alive. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan and Isabel Angell, edited by Amina A...l-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard with help from Victoria Chamberlin, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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The Iowa caucuses are over and the top four vote getters are making moves.
Vivek Ramaswamy is out of the race.
We did not achieve the surprise that we wanted to deliver tonight.
Nikki Haley is on her way to New Hampshire with a third place finish yesterday.
And God is so good.
Governor Ron DeSantis and the chip on his shoulder are headed straight to South Carolina.
The media was against us.
They were writing our obituary months ago.
His real obituary may someday note he came in second in Iowa.
He got about 20% of Iowa votes to Donald Trump's 50-ish.
And the winner, Donald Trump, is back in court today
so a jury can decide how much money he has to pay
for defaming a writer he sexually abused.
Iowa has spoken. This is what we want, Iowa said loudly. so a jury can decide how much money he has to pay for defaming a writer he sexually abused.
Iowa has spoken.
This is what we want, Iowa said loudly.
It's coming up on Today Explained.
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Explained. 2024 Explained.
Jonathan Martin is a columnist for Politico.
He's been in Iowa this election season covering the primary.
That's something he's done in every presidential election since 2008.
This was by far the coldest and the least dramatic.
The coldest, the least dramatic.
What's the headline this morning?
What's the big takeaway for you?
It's still Trump's party.
Good short headline.
You spend time talking to people on the ground.
Sometimes this can be illuminating, sometimes not.
What did you hear when you talked to voters that you thought was telling or interesting?
Well, that's why it was worthwhile to be there the week before, because it was extraordinarily telling. I went to a couple of Nikki Haley events, and what it revealed was that she and Ron DeSantis are effectively competing against each other for what I call the sort of stub of the pre-Trump Republican Party that is still willing to participate
in Republican contests. Now, some of them aren't even Republicans anymore. Some of them have become
Democrats. Some of them have become independents. But they're still eager enough to try to save the
soul, if you will, of what was their party, or in some cases still tenuously is their party. But what we saw from the results
was that the majority of Republican parties still wants Donald Trump. And that's been clear in
surveys throughout 2023. But this is the first live action. This is the first time we've seen
actual Republican voters in practice. And they overwhelmingly supported the former president.
Trump finished the Republican caucuses with a historic 51% of the vote.
You're looking at it right here.
Significantly more than Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley's second and third place totals combined.
Well, I want to thank everybody.
This has been some period of time.
And most importantly, we want to thank the great
people of Iowa. Thank you. We love you all. And here's the tricky part about winning the
Republican nomination. You have to win Republican votes. And so, you know, Nikki Haley obviously
is confident about her prospects in New Hampshire. And we can talk more about that in a second. But her challenge going forward
is going to be that Trump has got a lock on what is today's Republican Party, which is much more
heavily downscale, working class. And her voters are mostly college-educated and upscale. And
that's just not a fair fight. Let's talk about the fight that was presumed to
be fair at least six months ago. Ron DeSantis. Yeah. Ron DeSantis was going up against Trump.
He was looking strong for a while. And then in Iowa, he really went all in. He visited every
county. I remember Governor Reynolds telling me early on, you got to do all 99. Like, that's the people that do that are the ones that win Iowa.
But it's also just an important tradition.
Talk to real Americans.
Listen to real Americans.
And yet last night, results show he barely broke 20 percent.
What didn't work for Ron DeSantis?
Or did Ron DeSantis just not work for Iowans?
Both. Look, he had a ton of hype
at the end of 2022. He was one of the few good news stories for the GOP. And I think for a time,
he and the people who were eager to move past Trump in the GOP thought, whoa, we've seen this
movie before. Big state governor who has a good election night on an otherwise tough cycle for our party
and can unify the wings of our party going into a presidential cycle.
This feels like George W. Bush going into 2000.
It's time for people to vote here in Iowa in less than two days.
The people of this great state are going to start the process
to determine who is going to be the nominee of the Republican Party.
It's the process that I like to say is the beginning of the end of the Clinton era in Washington, D.C.
Well, it couldn't have demonstrated, 2023 couldn't have demonstrated just how much the party has changed anymore in the two decades plus since.
Ron DeSantis turned out to be a dud of a candidate.
Now, he put a lot of work in, a lot of sweat equity into Iowa.
He won some key endorsements.
But ultimately, he was effectively challenging a de facto incumbent
in Donald Trump. And the other challenge was that once Nikki Haley came on in the fall with a series
of good debate performances, you know, she locked in a lot of what I was saying earlier, kind of the
pre-Trump Republicans. And so DeSantis was squeezed, right? He wasn't getting the Trump people and he was losing the kind of old guard types who had left the party. And so he didn't have much to show for it.
Nikki Haley comes in right behind DeSantis, but still right behind DeSantis is third place. Last week, we talked about how well Haley appeared to be doing in some polls.
Where do the results from Iowa leave her going into the New Hampshire primary?
Not very well. Look, she was hoping to ride the momentum from her debate showings, the buzz she had picked up, the surge of financial support, this pining among a lot of,
again, the old guard of the party for anybody but Trump. And then they see
her head-to-head numbers against Biden in a trial heat general election, and she's winning
overwhelmingly. And so for a lot of Republicans who are embarrassed by Trump and just want to
find somebody that can be the nominee and defeat Biden, wow, I mean, this is somebody who's compelling, right?
And so I think she didn't have much organization.
You smartly pointed out that DeSantis had done 99 counties in Iowa.
She hadn't done that.
And she concentrated instead on where ultimately most of her voters were, the cities and high
income suburbs in Iowa.
But ultimately, it was too little too late,
and there just weren't enough of those folks to give her a good showing, especially given that
she was competing with DeSantis for that very anti-Trump voter in a lot of cases.
Jonathan, in a state with more of those folks, though, might Nikki Haley have a much better
showing? Might she be proving something if Iowa
wasn't quite Iowa? Well, that's precisely why she's optimistic going into New Hampshire.
But it's also why New Hampshire could pose what I wrote last week is something of a false dawn.
Because New Hampshire is an outlier when it comes to the Republican nominee process.
We saw that speaking in 2000. We saw this in 2000 where John McCain won
and there was a moment where is Bush really in trouble?
My friends, a wonderful New Hampshire campaign has come to an end,
but a great national crusade has just begun.
Well, no, New Hampshire is overwhelmingly, compared to other states, high income, secular,
educated, when the rest of the party is the opposite of those things. And you add to that
the fact that as you're going to hear a zillion times in the next week, independents can vote in
New Hampshire. And when there's no major action in the other party, and there's really not that
much this year on the Democratic side, a lot of those independents go play in the Republican primary.
And so, yes, Nikki Haley is going to go to New Hampshire and she's going to find a lot more of the kind of voters that she was trying to win in Iowa.
Tonight, I will be back in the great state of New Hampshire.
And the question before Americans is now very clear.
Do you want more of the same?
Or do you want a new generation of conservative leadership?
And I expect her to be much more competitive in New Hampshire.
But to what end?
To what end?
Because where does she go from there?
Okay, so it sounds like the takeaway
is nothing guaranteed for Haley.
Anything else in New Hampshire worth looking out for?
Does the broader electorate, do the people watching,
do we need to care how Ron DeSantis does in New Hampshire?
I think DeSantis matters in New Hampshire
mostly as is he taking votes from Trump
or from Haley. And I think that's where DeSantis could be a factor here in New Hampshire. It's
totally possible that he sits on votes that Nikki Haley otherwise needs. And is she losing to Trump
there by nine or by two? That's a totally plausible scenario, especially if DeSantis is in the
race and taking votes.
And her choice as to whether or not to go on to South Carolina, I can assure you, is
going to be shaped in part by whatever the margin is there.
Now, if she wins New Hampshire, DeSantis or no DeSantis, I think she almost certainly
goes on to South Carolina.
But if she loses there to Trump, I think the margin does shape her decision going forward.
That was Politico's Jonathan Martin. Coming up, whatever happened to Teflon
Ron? The rise and fall and fall of Ron DeSantis. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura.
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We've got our ticket punched out of Iowa.
I'm Zach Beecham. I am a senior correspondent at Vox, where I cover democracy in the United States and abroad and the far right. And I have a
forthcoming book titled The Reactionary Spirit, which covers the rise of right-wing anti-democratic
politics around the world. So, Zach, Ron DeSantis came in second in Iowa. You remember the old
line, second place is the first loser. Is this the end of the line for Ron DeSantis?
Unequivocally, yes. Yes. DeSantis invested huge amounts of resources in Iowa.
He moved something like a third of his campaign staff there, invested a tremendous amount of money.
The candidate visited all 99 counties inside Iowa.
The basic idea was that DeSantis was going to win the conservative lane, right?
That he was the true conservative in the race.
That's the person who tends to do well in Iowa, typically social conservatives, which is DeSantis' shtick of a kind. And so he thought
that maybe a surprise win here, or at least a strong performance, could get him within striking
distance of Donald Trump and turn it into a two-person race. Except that's not what happened.
He got blown out by like 30-something points, barely ahead of Nikki Haley, who was never
considered a serious candidate in Iowa. And DeSantis is negligible in New Hampshire. He
doesn't look like a force in South Carolina. There's just no other way to say it, right?
His donors are fleeing. He's done. DeSantis is done. He's not quitting yet, but there's no chance
that he wins. What on earth happened?
So, I mean, look, it's important to start the story really in November 2022.
That's when Ron DeSantis was riding really high because Trump-backed candidates had performed
really, really poorly in the 2022 midterms. It probably cost Republicans the Senate.
Democrat John Fetterman claimed victory in a tight race
over celebrity Dr. Mehmet Oz,
who was backed by former President Donald Trump.
New Hampshire Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan
fought off a challenge from Trump-backed Don Bolton.
These really, really strange and off-putting candidates
that Trump had endorsed,
they lost Republicans to the Senate.
So that looked bad for him.
And DeSantis had just won Florida,
which, as we all know, has been a purple state until recently,
by a really decisive margin.
We usually see very tight races for governor here in Florida.
You remember back in 2018 against Andrew Gillum
just how close it was.
But look at the spread here tonight,
57 to 42 to Democratic challenger Charlie Crist. So the core of his argument for the next few
months, sort of implicit, he didn't really take shots at Trump, which is part of the problem,
but implicit was, I'm a winner and Trump is a loser. I'll carry on his kind of politics,
but I'll do it while I beat Democrats at the same time.
And a lot of people in the Republican elite thought that would be persuasive.
They really did. The problem is they underestimated, once again, I don't know how people keep doing this. They underestimated Donald Trump's hold on the Republican base.
It boggles my mind that professional politicians and political operatives keep doing
this after all the evidence we have for eight years. But that, like, in a nutshell, that's what
happened. Let's actually talk about this numerically first. What were the numbers showing us when Ron
DeSantis was really doing well? How close was he to Trump? It was closer, but not actually close.
Right.
DeSantis' peak was sometime around January, February 2023, like a year ago.
And he peaked at 13 points below Trump in the RealClearPolitics average.
Like, in a normal primary, if the runner-up is down 13 points,
nobody considers that an especially competitive race, right?
But that's sort of the wishful thinking
was that everyone else would melt away
and you'd have a DeSantis-Trump race
where DeSantis managed to consolidate
all of the people who didn't want to vote for Trump.
That's not what happened, though. And really, you can trace the beginning of the people who didn't want to vote for Trump. That's not what happened, though.
And really, you can trace the beginning of the end for DeSantis to the start of Trump's
indictments.
DeSantis himself has suggested this, by the way.
I've criticized the cases, but I also think it distorted the primary.
And I think it's been, it's been, those have kind of been the main issues that have
happened.
Because it's helped him, is that what you're saying? And so therefore-
It's both that, but then it also has just crowded out, I think, so much other stuff.
Remind me, remind me, because it's been a long year and a half. When did Trump's indictments
start? And why did that signal the end for DeSantis?
So the first Trump indictment was on March 30th. And in the next week or so, DeSantis' deficit with Trump roughly doubled from around the 13-ish, 13, maybe 15, to that the event really did matter, right, the indictment.
And it wasn't just like something else was going on.
So why did this matter, right?
It mattered because it exposed the flawed premise at the heart of the DeSantis campaign, which is basically this.
Ron DeSantis was campaigning on the idea that he was basically Trump but smarter, Trump but more effective Trump, but more competent Trump, but a winner, right? The problem is why would any voter opt for Trump?
But when they could have actual Donald Trump, the things that were appealing about like real
on-brand Trump were not just that he beat Democrats. It's that he had this whole set
of grievances that he was able to mobilize and tap into and a sense of identity that he could speak to in a really deep way in his voters that DeSantis couldn't replicate.
And he knew that Trump was very favorably regarded by most people in the Republican base.
He knew that the majority of Republican voters in poll after poll believed Trump's lies about
the 2020 election. So DeSantis didn't challenge the premise of Trump's in poll after poll believe Trump's lies about the 2020 election.
So DeSantis didn't challenge the premise of Trump's candidacy, which was,
you need me to win to avenge the defeat in 2020, or rather the stolen election in 2020.
He couldn't attack that, right? He couldn't. And he couldn't deal, he had to like go along with this Trump script of the deep state being biased against him and so on.
So when the indictments hit,
right, the rubber hits the road. DeSantis, if he had like a real challenge to Trump,
would need to say, look, he just got indicted. This guy can't be our standard bearer. He might
be in jail by the time the general election rolls around. But instead of being able to say that
outright, he defended Trump against the indictment in a competitive primary.
That is when you know that the law has been weaponized for political purposes.
That is when you know that the left is using that to target their political opponents.
And again, that was true against all the indictments. Like the first indictment in New York
is legally the most iffy. So I can sort of see questioning that indictment. But on down the road,
some of them are really ironclad and some of them are really serious, right? And DeSantis is
throughout the entire indictment period, just defending Trump, defending Trump, defending Trump
and saying the deep state is biased against him, doing this kind of weird performative thing where
he says, Florida, quote, Florida will not assist in an extradition request given the questionable circumstances at
issue with this Soros-backed Manhattan prosecutor and his political agenda.
Which, like, come on, man, right? Like, none of that is going to happen. And all of this is just
saying, you're just confirming Trump's narrative. You're saying he's right about everything. He's
the real victim. He's the big centerpiece of American politics and everything
revolves around Donald Trump and his grievances with the American political and legal system.
And once you concede that premise, right, what's even the point of campaigning?
Right? Why? Like you're going, you're not going to beat the guy who you're basically saying I'm his sidekick.
So DeSantis made a bet that he could separate Trumpism from Donald Trump.
He could be Trumpy but without Trump's problems.
And it didn't work.
What does that tell us about the rest of this primary season? Well, at one point,
I described the contrast between Trump and DeSantis as being between the id of conservative populism
and the ego of conservative populism, right?
One is just wild, willing to cause chaos,
to assail institutions willy-nilly
in the most dramatic ways,
whereas DeSantis-style far-right politics was methodical.
It was comparatively less bombastic.
It was legalistic.
And what's clear is that the majority of the Republican base preferred the bombast.
They prefer the conflict.
They don't have the patience for this kind of quiet stuff or the appreciation for it.
Let's bring it back at the end to Ron DeSantis.
He is still the governor of Florida.
It's still a big job.
He wanted to be bigger, and that didn't work.
So what happens to Ron DeSantis' national political career now?
Does he have one? Is it over?
That's really hard to say.
I think DeSantis has done immense damage to his national aspirations.
Immense.
The question is whether it's recoverable.
And that depends a lot on events that are really outside anyone's ability to predict.
For example, first and foremost, how long does Donald Trump live?
Does Donald Trump's criminal trial seriously affect his ability to compete in the 2024 presidential election? With the Trump show, there's so many unpredictable events that could
take place that some of them could end up rehabilitating DeSantis down the line or
vindicating certain elements of his critique. What we can say with real confidence is that
Ron DeSantis has done tremendous damage to himself. And if he
wants to be a national political figure going forward, he needs to do something that can
rehabilitate his image and that can address the flaws, the sort of media narrative of him being
a kind of incompetent campaigner who doesn't mesh well with actual voters. Like he needs to do
something to fix that. And I just don't know what it is that he will do or what he can do.
Vox's Zach Beecham.
Zach, thank you so much for taking the time for us.
We really appreciate it.
Thanks a lot.
Today's show was produced by Miles Bryan and Isabel Angel.
Amina El-Sadi is our editor.
Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers engineered.
And Laura Bullard fact-checked with an assist from Victoria Chamberlain.
I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you. you