Airing Our (Political) Grievances: It's Festivus Time!
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We wish you a merry primary and a happy election year.

Yes, it is the holiday season, and that means this is the holiday episode of Beyond the Polls. Today I'll be joined by Patrick Murray, chief pollster for the respected Monmouth University Poll, and Dante Scala, the New Hampshire expert of experts who will regale us on everything that's going on in the Granite State. But first, my Seinfeld theme rant of the week.

Yeah, I too have a lot of grievances, this time with politicians this year, and this Festivus edition of my rant dives into all of them. So let's start with the king griever of them all, President Joe Biden.

Okay, you can't do anything about your age. I get it. You're 81. But you can do something about the border. Polls show it's your worst issue. It's been showing it's your worst issue for years. Do you do anything about it? Are the number of migrants entering the country going down or are they going up? Does it look like it's under control or does it look like it's getting out of control? We all know the answer. They're going up.

It's out of control. And you're off doing, gosh, I don't know, maybe you're going to Delaware or something, or maybe you're worrying about Ukraine.

Your job approval rating on the border in the last Monmouth poll is 20-something percent. 20-something percent! That's kind of like impeachment Richard Nixon era low job approvals. Okay, this is a problem. Do you do anything about it? No. Then the Republican Party just steps up and says, "Okay, okay, it's so bad. It's so bad. We're going to give you a gift.

We're going to say, you want money for Ukraine, you want money for Israel, all you have to do is do something about the border that we care about, and we'll cut a deal. We'll give you $100 billion. Just let's deal with this problem. You could get away with it in your party. You could say, oh my God, I always wanted to be filling your adjectives.

But the Republican Party is so unreasonable. They forced me this. They forced me to do something that I'm not thrilled about. And then you get your cake and I eat it too. You get your foreign policy success. You get to handle your internal party dynamics. And you get to start controlling your single worst issue, the border. Do you do something about it? No. You're still negotiating. You still can't get to yes.

I don't get it. It's almost as if you don't have a political sense. It's almost like you're a politician who tried to get to be president for 30 years, losing two separate runs and being passed over by your own boss, Barack Obama, when you wanted to run in 2016. It's almost like you won after doing really badly in polls only because the alternatives were so much worse. It's almost like maybe you need to have a political implant.

So they say you cannot teach an old dog new tricks. Okay, you're a very old dog. But if you don't get a political sense implant and deal with this problem real soon, then you might very well be spending a lot more time in Delaware than you would plan to do otherwise.

Then we've got grievance number two. Grievance number two, Ron DeSantis. Okay, Ron, I know it's really hard to step up to the national stage, even if you've had national exposure for the first time. Even Ronald Reagan, the GOP's patron saint, lost twice.

Before he finally got his nomination on the third try. You know, it's just you think you're in the major leagues. But as they say in Bull Durham, they throw wicked breaking stuff in the show. And the Florida press or occasional interchanges with the New York Times in Tallahassee or in Miami is not the same as national exposure. But even accounting for this, your foray has been exceptionally inept.

Your strategy seems to be run to the hard right, which is now Trump's base. It wasn't seven years ago, but it is now. And you want to peel them off. But no one has won the Republican nomination with the support of the party's hard right since George W. Bush in 2000. That's right.

Mike Huckabee was favored by the right. Have we ever seen President Huckabee? We had Rick Santorum, who was favored by the hard right. Did he grace the stage in 2012, accepting a Grateful Party nomination? And then we've got Ted Cruz. You should know about Ted Cruz. Your campaign consultants ran Ted Cruz's campaign in 2016. He got to second place, but second place is not good enough. And so...

You tried to do the same strategy that succeeded only when George W. Bush ran against somebody who was courting the moderate wing of the party, John McCain in 2000, and not even really trying to appeal to the conservative base. That's clearly not what Donald Trump was going to do. And yet you expected that by doing the same losing strategy that's been tried for 20 years, you were going to have a different result. Insanity, definition.

Then you try to do this without actually trying to contrast yourself with Donald Trump. So you go up to people who are Donald Trump's base and you say, hey, look, I'm really great on the border. I'm really good on COVID. And this guy, he kind of like elected, you know, let Fauci do what he's going to do.

But you never make the strong case that says Donald Trump has abandoned you. Donald Trump has treated you like he's treated everybody else in his life. Once you're not going to be important to him, he thinks of number one first. And that the fact is you have been jilted. If you don't think you have been, you will be.

Rather than making that, he's been making an argument that would probably be great if Donald Trump weren't in the race. He'd probably be appealing to these people. His favorability ratings. Ron, your favorability ratings are actually really good. The problem is these people like you, they like Trump, and they're going, I prefer Trump by huge numbers.

That's why you're behind by 32 points in Iowa. You've spent millions of dollars. You've done the full Grassley. You're basically living there, and you're behind by 32 points. Okay? Polls can be off. They're almost never off by that much. So maybe this isn't your fault.

Maybe this is that former consultant's fault who ran the Trues campaign and basically forced you into doing something you didn't want to do. Actually, Ronald Reagan had that happen to him. John Sears was his consultant in 1980 and forced him to run a frontrunner, sit back, don't engage the field campaign, and he almost lost. He fired John Sears, went back to being who he was, and the rest is history.

So now that your consultant is out of the way and you and your friends are actually in charge of all the super PACs and all the campaigns, maybe we're going to see the real Ron DeSantis. And maybe we're going to see the guy who can excite this crowd. Maybe we're going to see the person who can become the next president of the United States. But after the last few months, we've got doubts because Florida man, you need to become Mr. Missouri. You need to show us.

Now my third grievance. My third grievance, House ultra-conservatives or the Freedom Caucus or the Nihilist Caucus. I'm talking about the 30 to 50 members who are always the people who are saying, I'm not happy. They've got a lot of grievances. They've had grievances for years. They had grievances with House Speaker John Boehner. They had grievances with House Speaker Paul Ryan. They had lots of grievances with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Believe me,

Coming from California politics, as I do, I know a lot of people, know a lot of things about Kevin McCarthy. I get the grievances, okay? But the thing is, people like me, I can have grievances. I'm kind of like a radio or podcast host, okay? This is my job. Your job as an elected official is to solve the grievances, not simply to state them. Have you made a lot of progress on that? Are you kidding me?

Are you any closer to solving the grievances than you were last year or the year before? Or is this just kind of like rinse, recycle, and repeat? Seriously, what's your end game? Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, I know most of you who have been raised on Bill and Ted, you know about Plato, the great philosopher mentioned in Bill and Ted. But Aristotle said over 2,000 years ago that the aim of strategy is victory. Where are the wins?

You've been trying the same thing for 15 years. Again, trying the same thing and expecting different results. Insanity. Definition. It's simply not good enough to say what your end goal is. You have to devise a flexible strategy that accommodates facts on the ground. I always say every game plan in war, every war plan does not survive contact with the enemy, but you have a general sense of what you're trying to do, and you execute it.

And you need to have that to accomplish it. You need to have that to move the ball down the field. You've been critical of Joe Biden for not detailing what American endgame is in Ukraine, for not saying what the American strategy is and asking for what you're calling endless funding. Does this apply to you? Isn't it getting to the point where conservatives and the Republican Party should ask you what's your endgame, what's your strategy, why should we continue to fund you?

This game can keep going on for a while. But at some point, as Donald Trump showed, people's patience break and they're willing to try something else. So if you want to start shrinking the size of government, start thinking tactically, start thinking strategically, because otherwise we're going to be right here talking about the same things and somebody is going to be popping up calling you the rhinos.

And now, finally, we come to the person I've got the biggest grievance with them all. It's not actually a person. It's a group of people. It's ambitious Democratic progressives. Okay. We've been hearing for years, years from the Clinton administration about the corporate Democratic Party, about, you know, Howard Dean ran against people saying he represented the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. And since 2016, we've been hearing about progressive this and progressive that. Here's your chance. Okay.

The thing is, no out-and-out progressive has won the party's nomination in decades. You've got the weakest president and the oldest president in memory. You've got a guy who's losing to somebody you view as a threat to the American way of life, Donald J. Trump.

And you've got a guy who majorities of Democrats say, majorities of Democrats say is too old to run for president. You've got a guy who against nothing competition can't get better than 65% in most polls. And yet not one of you jumped in the race. Not one. I mean...

Come on. Where's your chutzpah? Where's your ambition? Bernie Sanders has aged out of leadership of the progressive wing. Elizabeth Warren has always had a strong base, but has not necessarily been universally loved by progressives. And she, too, has aged out. There's this massive market gap.

Imagine what would happen if somebody of, oh, I don't know, somewhere between 35 and 55 with unimpeachable progressive credentials had got into the race not to win.

although you could have won, but to set up yourself as the leader of the next progressive revolution to become what Bernie Sanders has challenged to Hillary Clinton in 2016, which was also considered a doomed effort when he launched it, that you, you ambitious Democratic progressive, could have become the new leader of the progressive cause, gotten 40% of the vote, pointed a different way, pushed Biden to the left,

And you, you could be the person who is getting ready to become president of the United States in 2028. Instead, you all chickened out. You decided to let Dean Phillips, who is basically a more boring version of Joe Biden, be the only person running against him with any degree of seriousness. And what's your endgame?

Are you going to complain some more? Have you decided that the House Republican conservative faction is or the ultra conservative faction is kind of like your role model? So far, progressives have played a much smarter game. But I would have expected somebody to jump up simply if for no other reason to get the exposure, to get the lists, to get the money brokers, to be the kingmaker. Instead, you all wimped out. You all decided that you were going to sit home and watch politics.

Your president continued to flail away, and that simply is inexplicable. So Joe Biden, Ron DeSantis, House ultra-conservatives, Democratic progressives,

I just can't say anymore. You guys have had a very weird 2023, and if you don't get your act together in 2024, we're going to be having you on the show again in absentia during the 2024 Festivus edition of MyRant.

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sponsored by chumpa casino no purchase necessary vgw group void where prohibited by law 18 plus terms and conditions apply well this is our last polling barometer of 2023 and joining me this week is patrick murray director of the monmouth university polling institute patrick welcome to be on the polls it's good to be with you henry

Well, tell my listeners a little bit about MonMeth. I know a lot of them are probably familiar with you, but many probably are not. So how did you come into being and what sort of work do you do? How widespread is your polling? Yeah, we came about in 2005. It was actually a newspaper publisher who was a trustee of the university who

who felt that there was a need for a different take, a different way to look at these issues. And we're based in New Jersey. And at the time, there were quite a few polls in New Jersey, but there was a sense that they were much more traditional in their approaches. Let's just poll the elections. Let's just look at who's ahead, who's behind, and not dive into some of the more quality of life issues.

which is something that we started. So we actually started as a New Jersey poll. It was about right before the 2016 election cycle that we decided to go national with what we were doing and did fairly well in the initial election.

run there, particularly with the primaries in 2016. Of course, like every other pollster, we had some issues with the general election. We were off by a few points. But what we were able to do with that was really look at, because we were using a methodology where unlike a lot of media pollsters at the time that

We were looking at voter lists. We were working off the voter list like campaign pollsters do. Almost everybody does it. It wasn't that long ago, you know, in 2016, when very few of the media pollsters were actually doing that.

And, you know, we were able to look and really dive into why were people doing what they were, you know, why were they doing what they were doing? And it wasn't just, you know, the simple answer of not enough people without a college degree. There were some other things that were happening. We were able to actually pinpoint Hillary Clinton voters who did not show up as part of the equation. You know, so there was a number of things that we wanted to do. And that was just a piece of what we do at Monmouth.

We look at some other bigger issues around quality of life. For example, we did a very significant and large-scale study on the growth of authoritarianism in the country.

That has been picked up by other researchers who have looked at not only authoritarianism in the United States, but comparing it to other countries. And we led the way with that. We were the first to do a full-scale national study on this as a concept. And part of it was because as a pollster, and we'll talk about this, is that I don't think traditional approaches to polling, the political science, the political economy approaches to understanding politics

uh get anywhere near the full dynamic of it there's a lot of psychology that's involved in here there's a lot of sociology that's involved in here and i think that gets lost in the mix and and one of the things that coming out of 2016 and looking at the dynamics that we were looking in our polling for example some of the questions that we asked which were just about pure economic questions such as how you doing you know are you getting ahead are you falling behind are you stable we saw a huge spike

in partisanship in the way people answer that question. What I mean by that is that rather that if you were a Republican and there was a Republican in the White House, you were doing good. If you're a Democrat, you're doing bad and then vice versa. And while we always have seen a little bit of that,

starting with the Trump years and now into the Biden years, we saw that just spike, that correlation, that kind of tribalism. And so there has to be something more that explains that, you know, that's going on today. And it's one of the things that, you know, we're looking at specifically with the president's, President Biden's record low ratings right now.

Oh, yeah. Let's dive into that. Is that your recent poll found the president's job approval rating at only 34 percent, which is pathetic, frankly. The worst in decades at this point in the presidency. He for a while had been trailing Jimmy Carter, but the Iran hostage crisis had already occurred by December 19th.

and had consequently the rally around the flag effect had boosted Carter a little bit. And one of the reasons for that is the economy, although there are other reasons. What are some of the psychological factors or the sociological factors that you think are influencing both the perception of President Biden and

and his success, but also to answer your question, or to pose your question back to you, people's views on the economy, because it's one of those questions people say is, hey, we had a burst of inflation, but it seems to be under control. Unemployment is lower than it's been over most of the last five decades, yet people are still grumbling. Right, and we have in our most recent poll, which was just out this month, 44% of Americans say that they are struggling to remain where they are financially.

that number is higher than it was when inflation was at its peak about a year and a half ago in June of 2022. So what is actually going on there that people say they're struggling? Now, part of it is there are real things that are going on, which is while the inflation rate has gone down,

you know, your, your grocery bill is still 10, 15%, maybe even 20% higher than it was three years ago. And that hasn't changed, right. That hasn't gone down. And that's the key is that you're starting to catch up with people. And I think what was happening is that the president was getting some benefit of the doubt when we were coming out of the pandemic with an expectation that there was going to be some, some financial pain, but that, that,

That's still there. It's still lingering. But what we think, see, that's interesting, and one of the questions that I get from a lot of reporters, and this goes back to this whole political economy thing, this kind of rational choice thing, is that they're looking at...

You know, and most of these reporters are younger than you and I, so they haven't been around since the last time inflation was actually an issue in the country. So they're looking at all these other economic indicators and saying, well, the president usually does well. If unemployment's at 3.7%, the president should do well. So you just don't understand, you know, when inflation hits like this and how that can impact people in their, you know,

in their lives and just carry on until it kind of abates. Either prices go down, we get some deflation, or just simply the inflation rate lowers and then over time we just get accustomed to these new prices as our wages are going up. So it takes a while for all that to catch up. So they don't understand that. But what I think is really interesting in some of the polling about President Biden that makes you scratch your heads is say, okay, let's break this down.

So how's he doing on inflation? Well, you know, only 28% say he's doing a good job. You know, over 60% say he's doing a bad job. That's to be expected. How about, how's he doing on jobs? You shouldn't be worried about your job. The unemployment rate is low. Well, we still have a majority, just over 50% say disapprove of how he's doing on jobs. Only 40 some percent approve of how he's doing on that. How about infrastructure? Here's another one where there's,

There's a pretty good case to be made that we have seen more infrastructure investments in the country in the last couple of years under Biden than we have in a lot of prior presidencies. And yet he's still not getting terrific marks for that. He did when it was first announced, he got good marks.

you know, in the first year of his term, but now it's kind of going away. It's getting subsumed. And this is the whole thing that you have to understand is that people don't kind of parse this out. They don't kind of say, I'm going to judge him on inflation over here, but I'm going to look at jobs differently and I'm going to get all the information in front of me. It's funny, a couple of,

comments on social media when we put this up among Biden defenders is you need to poll people who know what the actual statistics are. It's like, well, the point of what we do is to poll everybody who

regardless of what they know, because people make their decisions about their behaviors, such as who they're going to vote for, based on their perceptions of the reality and not on what may be the reality itself. If some folks out there in the world disagree with the way this is being interpreted, you look at your own life and you make a decision about whether my life is good or bad and whether the president has something to do with that. And that's what you make your decision on.

So one of the things that stands out to me about Biden's job approval rating is

that it seemed to dip in the summer of 2021 and then dropped pretty quickly so that it was in the low 40s by the time of the November elections in Virginia and New Jersey. And since then, it just bounces in this narrow range. It's like lows of 37, highs of 43, and it keeps going back and forth. And the news just doesn't seem to affect it significantly. I mean, even Trump would have more of...

A bounce from various news things like he goes off about John McCain's funeral. He drops five points within a week because people react to him being a bore. It just doesn't seem to be much relationship. Am I missing something? Yeah, but I think the thing we saw with Trump, though, is that if it's one of those things happen and you got to pull out that captured that moment, then it would bounce right back.

Yeah, that is true. And because it would only live in that one moment. It would only live basically in the news cycle itself. And that is one of the things that...

I think we've seen with both Trump and with Biden and started to some extent with Obama. And that's this partisan tribalism that we keep talking about. And what I mentioned about how any question we ask, even if we're asking a question that in the old days was a question that was devoid of politics, such as what's your own personal situation.

And people are, when we ask these questions, people are viewing them through this partisan tribal lens. It's basically, there's something that goes on in the synapses in the brain that says, well, first,

I know which tribe I belong to, I know who's in charge right now, which means I'm either with that tribe or against that tribe. And in order to express my tribalism, I have to then answer this question in a way that either avows or disavows the actions of that person who's in power right now in the White House. And that seems to be what a lot of people are doing, not everybody, but a significant number, which is causing this range

that we used to see with prior presidents where a president could go from, you know, a 30% approval rating to a 60% approval rating and then back down to a 50 and then up to a 60 again. We're just not seeing that anymore because of this filter that's applied is that news doesn't mean anything to us because that tribal filter is so strong. And that's what we're seeing in a lot of what we're pulling, which is making

Polling very difficult in terms of answering this what the why question. We can answer the what and how much, but we can only start getting into the why because it's it's there's more to it than than a typical poll question will allow you to get to.

Is there a battery of poll questions that has been devised or maybe you're working on to devise that can help us understand and unpack the partisanship? I mean, those of us who live, breathe, and eat politics for a living have a sense of it, but I'm not aware of a whole lot of people who've tried to say, okay, this factor or this thing is driving it more than others. We simply seem to note that

people are getting angrier and more afraid and more intense, and that consequently they're viewing things through a lens of we can never lose because the alternative is terrible to contemplate, and that seems to be driving partisanship. Do pollsters have a better grasp on it, or are you working on a way to get a better grasp on it? Yeah. The problem, Henry, is that

for most of us who do public polling is, you know, it's an expensive undertaking and you only have so much real estate on a questionnaire. And it means just the number of questions that you can ask. And, and a lot of these demand significant amounts of like, you can't just ask one or two or three or four questions and have something that's going to work. And that's what we saw. In fact, when we did our authoritarianism study in 2019, we,

A number of folks had done some work around this, but they only asked like four or five questions. And what we found was the four or five questions they asked really didn't get at every aspect of authoritarianism, only got at one piece of it. So they were missing part of the puzzle. But we were asking, you know, we had to ask a couple, one question.

A battery of questions that had 20 questions in it just to get at one single number to get an understanding of all the things that go into one factor of authoritarianism. And then another battery had 12 questions in it. And these are not the kind of questions that you release in a public, you know, in a media report. Right. Like the...

who's ahead or who's behind or disapprove or approve a job rating. But it requires a lot of work in order to do that. So, you know, we've done some of that work. Others have tried that, but what we're doing is kind of making these attempts at saying,

Let me back up and say, not everybody is. There's still some old timers out there. And old timers, they can be younger than me or you. But just stuck in their ways of thinking about politics right now in terms of the way the electorate think about politics as a rational choice. I once worked on a polling project that had some prominent political scientists whom I'm not going to name on the air.

And I looked at the battery of questions going to 2020 that they proposed to ask. And what became clear to me was that the unstated assumption was that the entire election was going to revolve around the Democratic Party's framing of which issues are important and what labels to attach to those issues. And I thought.

this is not real life, that there is another party, they do have other priorities. Now, there's a competition between these things, but the idea that to talk about only these issues and not others, and to talk about the ones where clearly there was going to be mutual engagement only in the terms that one party uses, struck me as perhaps a little bit prejudicial. Yeah, and I think that's the thing, and it's not even necessarily...

an ideological prejudice like whether the liberal conservative a lot of times it is an institutional prejudice in the sense of this is the this is the area or the field that i work on this is what i'm interested in this is why all the political economists are scratching our heads right now

because the world doesn't make sense based on all the models that they've been working on for the past 20, 30 years, right? And it's because they don't know. There are other factors that play into people's mind. The reason why your models worked in the past was because the psychology of the public went along with those models. They traveled along the parallel path with those models. Now that they've diverged from those models, your models don't work because they didn't include psychology

some other factors in it that were as important back then it just you didn't notice it because it wasn't as volatile uh back then uh and that's and you know and there's other things that that we don't understand either and I think you know a lot of pollsters aren't really getting at which is is really the messaging bit of it this is one of the things that I think that there's been a problem with um with the with the Biden administration why these numbers are so low

uh is and there's a whole host of factors let me jump in just say you know what's going on in israel a lot of people have asked me about that and they these are people who pay attention to the news so it's all over the place and they really don't understand the to the extent with from the vast majority of americans that is at best background noise

for them. It's something that, you know, you ask them, they'll think about it, but it's not something that's driving them every day and thinking about what they're concerned about. And what they're concerned about is the messages they're hearing about, you know, how they just where they fit in in the world. And I think one of the problems with the Biden administration has been in this campaign, folks, has just been continually hitting folks over the head with all this good economic news.

which is unemployment rates down, productivity's high, we've made all these infrastructure investments. This is the news. This is good stuff. And in the old days, you would put that news out and people would react to it and say either accept it or just let it go. What's happening right now is the more they do that, the more they're basically telling people, you don't feel this way. You feel uncertain and you're wrong for feeling that way.

And that is the message that a lot of people are getting. This is why I think the numbers are so low right now, is because that message just keeps getting in. You know, one of the questions that we ask is, is the president, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with him, is the president paying enough attention to the issues that are important to you? And it's only 31% who say yes. At this point in time, four years ago in Trump's presidency, it was a higher number. It was 41%. That should be a huge warning sign.

for Joe Biden is that you don't expect a majority to agree with you on any issue, but to be at just 31% who say that you even are getting what people are feeling is

That is the real kind of, that's the underlying message. That's why we ask those kinds of questions. So back to what you were asking, like, what are you trying to do? This is what we're trying to do. It's like getting at how people are in their gut and what they're thinking, because it's not like, do you approve or disapprove of the president on his handling of these issues? Which we ask because it's important to ask, but is at your gut, do you think your president really cares about you when he's talking about these issues? Does he understand what you're going through? Those are the more important things.

When you said 31%, I thought, gee, that's actually a smaller share than Democrats in the electorate, which, you know, assuming partisanship means that lots of people who voted for Joe Biden, some people who say they're Democrats, and certainly lots of people who are independent but kind of lean to the Democratic Party are answering that question now, whereas we're 41%. For Trump, that's above the number of Republicans in the electorate. It's not that far below what he actually got.

and wouldn't have been that far off of what his job approval rating would have been. So clearly there are people who will say, I approve of Joe Biden's job, but they'll answer the other question, but he's not paying enough attention to what I care about. Yeah.

Yes. So I think what we, we, what's interesting is that, and this is where we need to really, you need larger samples. You need to dive into it. We also need to do, be doing some focus groups. If you really want to understand it, identify the kind of people that you're interested in that are people who have shared, you know, have some interesting set of views that are unique and,

that you think are movable and get them into a focus group and get them start talking about that. So you can understand the why a little better. I mean, one of the things that we're looking at is, you know, the Biden's numbers on, on climate change aren't particularly good, but they're not particularly good among Republicans. I mean, there are other horrible among Republicans and that's because anything he does, uh,

around climate change that they see as progressive is anathema to them. But his numbers aren't great among Democrats either on this.

And that's because you have some folks on the left who feel he hasn't gone far enough. And so that's the kind of dilemma that he's in and some of the things that we need to look at. The enthusiasm measure that we have. So we've asked separately about how enthusiastic are you about the idea of Joe Biden being the Democratic nominee? And we've asked it separately about Donald Trump on the Republican side. And we've gotten...

like incredibly small numbers, you know, a quarter to a third who are enthusiastic about that. And certainly, and then we've also asked it together, how enthusiastic are you about seeing a rematch in, you know, of these two? And it's only 27% who say that they even have some level of enthusiasm to see that. Interestingly enough, more enthusiasm on the Republican side for Trump than on the Democratic side for Biden. And I think that's another indicator of

that we need to be paying closer attention to rather than just simply looking at his job performance on the top issues that pollsters usually ask about. Well, Patrick, we could go on and on. And I look forward to having you back on Beyond the Polls when the new year comes in and father time has been put off yet again.

to wherever Father Time goes every year. I mean, I don't know. He keeps showing up, and the bearded guy goes off again. But where, in the meantime, before you come back, where can my listeners follow your and Monmouth's work? Yeah, so all of our polling is online. You can easily follow us on our website. You can get the full reports, which have our demographics and our cross-dabs at www.monmouth.edu slash polling.

Or you can follow, right now we're on X, so we'll be expanding at Monmouth Pole. So you can follow us on social media as well. Well, Patrick, I hope you have a wonderful holiday season. I hope that you avoid Father Time's speeding car as he heads down the street to the Never Never Land. And love to have you back in 2024. It'll be my pleasure, Henry. Thank you.

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Well, in our last state of play for 2023, we have a repeat player, Dante Scala, professor of political science at University of New Hampshire, and the co-author with me of the book Four Faces of the Republican Party, which was our look at the factions within the party in the run-up to the 2016 presidential race. Dante, welcome back to Beyond the Polls. Thank you, Henry.

Well, you are Mr. Granite Prof, as you go by, the expert of experts of all things New Hampshire. So tell us what's going on in the GOP side. You know, what we've been hearing is Governor Sununu has endorsed Nikki Haley, and they've been doing a lot of joint appearances. Any sense of whether this matters to New Hampshire voters?

I think it does. And, you know, typically endorsements don't matter a whole lot in the New Hampshire primary. Voters just get so much information. But this is the governor, popular Republican governor, and there's an overlap. There's an overlap of Sununu fans and

Haley supporters and Chris Christie supporters. These are your moderate Republicans, your independents. And for weeks and weeks now, we've seen Haley and Christie

consolidating jointly that faction of the New Hampshire Republican electorate, which is better represented here than in a lot of other Republican electorates around the country. So the fact that Sununu, as expected, weighed in with Nikki Haley, we might expect to see some sort of melt of Chris Christie support.

As Christie supporters say, well, I love Chris. He is the anti-Trumper par excellence. He is pure, unadulterated. But I need to make a pragmatic choice. If I'm going to stop Trump, how do I do it? I don't think my man Chris is going to do it.

Governor Sununu is saying Nikki Haley can do it. So I'm going to give her a second look or I'm finally going to make a decision to move over to Haley. And that CBS poll that just came out on Sunday at least suggests a bit that this might be happening. I mean, right now we've got

You know, Nikki Haley at 29% in that poll, Chris Christie at just 10%. And Christie's support, it's interesting how that 10% is weighted almost entirely toward independents and hardly at all from Republicans. Whereas Haley is kind of a robust 34% among independents, but also 24% among Republicans.

So I do think that endorsement matters. It's not like the governor has a lot of troops on the ground to throw in door to door. I think Haley's hoping for more from Americans for prosperity for that kind of help. But.

As we know, Sununu is very mediagenic, very savvy, and I think he is sincere about wanting to move the party away from Trump. So I think we'll see a lot of joint appearances over the next five weeks.

Yeah, I've noticed already that he plays a bit in one of her ads that's airing up there. They don't call him out as much by name, although they do mention the endorsement, but the ad ends with them together on stage. And just like

Ron DeSantis in Iowa is taking Kim Reynolds everywhere. You know, it seems like he's one of every three or four events that he has in Iowa now has Reynolds on the stage with him. I would be surprised if Haley doesn't do that with Sununu, especially given that Sununu, you know, you still have two year elections for governor terms in New Hampshire.

regularly has won re-election in a state that Republicans have not won for president or for Senate in quite some time, which means he's polling a significant number of people who say, you know, when it comes to the national Republicans, even people more

moderate in tone like Kelly Ayotte in 2016. I'm not going to vote for her. I'm not going to vote for Trump. I'm not going to vote for Don Bolduc. But I am going to vote for Chris Sununu, which means that you could see a turnout bump among registered independents, the sort of people who may not think of themselves as Republicans, but say, hey, I don't like the National Republican Party. This guy says that Nikki Haley is different. Maybe I should

take a ballot this time and see and take a chance on her. Yeah. And those those independent or undeclared voters, technically speaking, can take a ballot in either the Republican primary or the Democratic primary and then revert back to their independent status on their way out the door after casting their ballot. So they are they are the free agents in all of this.

Well, Trump came to New Hampshire over the weekend, seemed to draw a few thousand people in his rally. He, of course, has been doing more airdrops in most of these places, comes in, gets a few thousand people in a small rally.

or moderate-sized arena, and then leaves again. What's the sense of his enduring presence in New Hampshire? Are you seeing TV presence? Are you seeing surrogates? Or is it really Trump shows up every couple of weeks, waves the flag, and then goes home? Well, there is that, but what I've noticed lately, Henry, and, you know, like watching...

the news at five o'clock on WMUR, which is the only statewide television station in New Hampshire, is you do see a lot of Haley ads, but you also see Trump ads. And what's interesting is Trump's ad kind of reminds me a bit of kind of almost Reagan mourning in America. It's not so poetic as all that, but it's very positive. It's all about the troops and

Uh, it's Trump sitting down, uh, eating with the troops, uh, putting a hat back on that had blown off in the wind off of, uh, one of the guards, uh, you know, very kind of feel good. There's a, there's a dig at Biden, uh, showing him tripping up the stairs of air force one, uh, and allegedly looking at his watch, uh, during a, uh, ceremony for a gold star, uh, uh,

military person, but by and large, positive at. And it's not, it doesn't even mention any other candidates in the race. It's almost as if it feels a bit like a general election ad.

So you do get some of that right now. And I would say it's Trump and Haley who are appearing the most right now on, say, the local news really far beyond. You get a little bit of the vague here and there, but it's really those two who are playing things up. And again, you know, Haley, the good news is she's a lot closer to a two person race in New Hampshire than she was a month ago.

The bad news is, you know, that two-person race, if it's the case that Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy start to fall off the wayside, you know, getting, you know, certainly Vivek's voters that hardcore, they're not going to Haley. Not after all the debates and all of the back and forth.

Perhaps Ron DeSantis will be more favorable ground for her if DeSantis fails miserably in Iowa. But that's the dilemma with Trump. You've got that very solid floor, and there's that possibility of more. It seems as if the Trump campaign has...

is miles ahead of where they were eight years ago in terms of the nuts and bolts sort of thing.

So who else is on the Republican side is making any sort of effort in New Hampshire? You know, apparently Chris Christie has an ad up now. You just mentioned Vivek. Is Ron DeSantis, you know, is his picture starting to show up as a missing child on the side of milk cartons at Republican events? What's going on with the rest of the field? Yeah, I would put them exactly in that order, Henry. I'd say Chris Christie,

uh with ads but also a lot you know he really doesn't appear anywhere else except new hampshire so he comes in does his town halls and so forth recently he was out at my university university of new hampshire uh which was part of his college tour which one wouldn't suspect would be

A bit unusual for a Republican presidential candidate to be touring college campuses. A bit unusual for a Republican candidate to go to speak to the state workers. But this is Christie trying to say, hey, I'm not your traditional Republican candidate.

independence democrats come out and vote for me but he's a presence no question bevake you know still there um you see an ad occasionally and so forth one right most recently the one i saw is uh one spotlighting his uh childhood piano teacher who apparently also taught him about the constitution when uh

She wasn't teaching him scales and so forth. But then there's DeSantis, who did appear here recently in the state. But in terms of advertising and so forth, what began on such a robust note, I remember seeing mail pieces from DeSantis' super PAC. I guess it must have been March, maybe April. A lot of that has just faded away. Whereas I see Haley mail pieces all the time. We're getting...

you know, several per month, even, you know, a couple per week. But DeSantis is just, you know, it's striking, Henry, how much they're playing out of the Ted Cruz playbook, including the, you know, the

the focus on Iowa and the relative lack of attention to, uh, New Hampshire. And you can kind of see why I'm sure Sununu was happy that it was Haley and not DeSantis who turned out to be, uh,

the one who's bandwagoned to get on board with, because ideologically, the two of them make a lot more sense than than Sununu and DeSantis together, though I bet he might have considered DeSantis if he really was seen as the alternative to Donald Trump.

So you mentioned before WMUR and that you see a lot of Haley ads, you see a lot of Trump ads. What else would voters who aren't going out to the rallies, who aren't searching the Internet for news, work, come home, watch television and get a lot of their information that way? What sense would they be getting from about the race? I think they're getting a sense of.

expectations of the race to come. I mean, WMUR does a good job of, you know, like this is our beat. This is our primary and we're going to play it up every day. So you see a lot of television ads just highlighting the WMUR news crew saying, you know, we're going to fact check this and we're going to do that. We are the place to come for coverage of WMUR.

the primary. And in today's media landscape, Henry, in New Hampshire, MUR really is kind of head and shoulders above just about all the rest because newspapers have really fallen a good bit in terms of readership and so forth. So you've got MUR, and they will play up

you know, news appearances and so forth quite often in their coverage. So even your casual viewer is getting the sense at least that something is coming.

Well, what about the Democrats? You know that Dean Phillips says he's running for president. He's getting on ballots elsewhere. I saw the draw for the Arizona primary, which is the third or second or third week in March, and he's on the ballot there. If you were watching as a Democrat, would you be seeing any activity by Dean Phillips, either television ads or rallies or something?

Well, if you're an especially astute, especially a political junkie of a Democrat, you would have seen Dean Phillips giving an interview to Adam Sexton, the head politics reporter for WMUR on their Sunday morning program. Other than that, you know, in terms of just like that casual viewer on the five o'clock news that you mentioned, watching the news that you mentioned earlier,

Not so much. I mean, there isn't as much as I was expecting. I mean, Phillips is here, but on television, you see the Super PAC ads, one running that basically shows a lot of grim statistics of Biden numbers versus Trump numbers. So I've seen that ad, but not, you know, he doesn't appear to be that kind of presence that you see, say, Haley or Trump ads.

on the Republican side. And it's, it's strange, Henry, because, you know, on the other hand, you've got this alleged Biden write in campaign. And that seems to be rather slow. It pops up occasionally, they have a press conference and so forth. There was talk about a super PAC. But right now with again, with, you know, five weeks to go, it's a bit

quiet on both sides. I was expecting a little more escalation by this point, but it hasn't happened so far that I'm seeing maybe that's going to take place in the new year. But one thing that bugs me in the back of my mind is just like this idea of Democrats writing in their candidate. I mean, they say they will do it.

when they're polled about it. Like the UNH, my colleagues at the UNH Survey Center, you know, record this pretty regularly. But it does make me wonder a bit

about turnout. There doesn't seem to be much indication that, you know, those independent voters we're talking about, I don't think they're getting a lot of excitement out of looking at Phillips versus Biden compared to the prospect of can Haley pull off a John McCain circa 2000 versus Donald Trump.

Well, Dante, I'd love to have you back on right before the primary when everything has heated up and we'll be having a lot more stuff that presumably will have unfolded after Iowa. In the meantime, where can my listeners follow your work?

Well, let's see. You can go to, well, I'm now on threads and blue sky. So I'm kind of dipping my toe into new forms of social media. And hopefully I'll be working on an article or two in the run-up to the primary to give people some deep background on the geography of the New Hampshire electorate. Well, that's fabulous. Do you have an ex-presence that people can follow? I am still up on Granite Prof.

Okay. Well, Dante, I hope you have a wonderful holiday season, and thank you for joining me on Beyond the Polls. Same to you, Henry. Happy New Year. That's it for this, the last episode in 2023 of Beyond the Polls. I'm taking next week off to celebrate, but I'll be back right after New Year's Day. I hope you'll join me then so that we can continue to reach together for the stars and venture beyond the polls.