How Many Tickets Out of Iowa?
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Welcome back to Beyond the Polls. We're locked in on our new weekly format, and there's plenty of news to whet our experts' appetites. I'm joined this week by Real Clear Politics' Sean Trendy and the American Enterprise Institute's Carlin Bowman. And I also have a very peculiar ad of the week. Oh, and you won't want to miss this week's rant on last week's Ron DeSantis-Gavin Newsom debate. Let's dive right in.

Last week's Gavin Newsom, Ron DeSantis debate on Fox News' Hannity was billed as red state versus blue state. And that is kind of like what we got. But what was more important was we got a look at two people whose national aspirations are not hidden from anyone. One is actually running for president and the one is probably running for president but denies it profusely.

How did they do? Who were they talking to? How did they measure up to what they ought to have been looking for? That's what I want to talk about because I don't think it was a clear win for either person. Now, I know what many of you will say. You'll say, well, look,

DeSantis had all the facts on his side. Ron just pummeled him with all sorts of numbers and clever visuals. And who can forget that chart that he held up towards the end that he said represented every article of human feces found on the street of San Francisco to see the beautiful streets of San Francisco covered in a haze of brown.

But substance and style are two different things. And different audiences are looking for different things. And that's where I want to go with this. First, for DeSantis, the primary audience that he had is going to be loyal, conservative Republicans. Now, that may not have been the right choice that.

in order to win a general election, in order to be the winner he says he was in Florida. He needs to talk to base voters and swing voters simultaneously.

What he was talking about was primarily a base voter, R versus D, good versus bad, red versus blue motif. On that score, I think he did pretty well. That if you were a core conservative Republican listening to this debate, you would have found nothing out of place in what DeSantis said. He didn't run. He didn't hide. He prosecuted the case against the Biden-Harris administration.

regularly saying that what Newsom was doing in California was the testing ground for what Biden and Harris wanted to do nationwide. And one can argue about whether that's the case or not before conservative Republican audience. That is what they believe. And in that sense, the substance worked well for him. Style. DeSantis has a difficult style to like.

He is not nimble. And this is something I think has hurt him on the debate stage and is something that hurt him in the initial stages of the debate with Newsom. I don't think he expected Newsom to basically ignore the questions, which is what he did, and make it an attack on DeSantis personally or make it an attack on DeSantis' poor poll standings against Donald Trump, which is also what Newsom did.

And DeSantis didn't, I think, prepare for that. And it showed that he looked like he was on his back heels for the first 20 or so minutes.

and eventually got some steam up. But the thing is, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. In the first 20 minutes of the debate, he started off with a good opening statement and then seemed to be outmaneuvered by Newsom rhetorically over and over again. That's something that DeSantis has to work on in his debates, particularly going forward in the Republican primary. The Republican primary is fast-paced.

narrowing down to a two or three person race. It would not surprise me if a Republican debate in January had only he and Nikki Haley on the stage. And in a one-on-one format, you're going to be attacked. And if you haven't anticipated the exact line of the attack, you'd better darn well

know how to recover and deal with it, because otherwise you're going to look like a loser. Don't ever forget that the classic analysis of the first debate of the modern presidential era, the Nixon-Kennedy debate in 1960, people who listened on radio thought that Nixon won, people who watched on TV thought Kennedy won. And that was because of various visual cues. Nixon looked nervous. He had bad makeup, so he looked a little sallow.

He hadn't practiced for the visual aspect of the debate, and it arguably cost him the presidency. And then we've already touched on the audience. I think what DeSantis should have done is use this not as a talk to the base episode, but use this as a talk to the country episode.

He didn't. And that means that if what you had was independent swing voters tuning in to say, huh, I'm curious about this. I'm not crazy about Trump. I'm not crazy about Biden. I want to see who these people might be. I don't think he hit the home run that he could have hit with the swing voting constituency. And that's not going to matter necessarily in the primary. But again, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. There's going to be some swing voters who are going to think, nope,

This guy's too partisan for my taste. Now let's talk about Gavin Newsom. Gavin Newsom looks good on camera. When you talk about style, this guy exudes style. His clothes are nice. His makeup is good. His hair is good. His voice is well-suited. His manner is well-suited. On style, if what you were looking for as a Democrat is somebody who could represent your brand of Democrat, which is to say upper-class progressive,

or progressive light. I think that Gavin Newsom did extremely well.

I think he did very well in making the points that Democratic-based voters would like to see him make, which is taking on DeSantis on some of the things that Democrats don't like about Republicans, like about guns or about abortion or about LGBTQ and so forth. It doesn't matter if the facts don't necessarily back all of that up. This is where DeSantis' lack of nimbleness plays. He never really exploited the gap between Newsom's attacks

and the factual foundation for in a way that would resonate with people beyond the core Republican base who would naturally not be receptive to those attacks. So that's where I thought that Newsom did well. But the longer the debate went on, the more Newsom retreated into a smugness.

That rather than a aggressive, serious person, he became almost a caricature of himself. He became somebody who was too glib. He became somebody who was too disassociated or too openly ignoring the questions.

And there were plenty of times where the fact was right up on the screen. Hey, you know, the fact is California does have a higher crime rate than Florida. The fact is that Californians do pay more for gas than Floridians. The fact is Californians do have higher tax rates. And the fact is that people are leaving California in record numbers and they are moving to Florida. It would have been helpful for him to at least address some of those questions.

And the fact is, for virtually all of them, he simply did not respond. Now, he was helped by that in the fact that Sean Hannity was not a good moderator. Hannity did, as he said a couple of times, I don't want to be a traffic cop. Well, when people are intentionally going through yellow warning lights, you're going to have to be a traffic cop. And he wasn't. And Newsom took advantage of that in full. And eventually DeSantis caught on and took advantage of it as well. But

In a presidential debate where you don't have Sean Hannity, where instead you've got Lester Holt, who did a very good job in moderating the last Republican debate, that glibness, that unwillingness to even think about answering a question, you can be held to account for that, and not by a conservative movement host, but by somebody from the mainstream media. That is a...

weakness that Newsom showed that I think is really something that his team needs to get behind and say, look, if you're going to be on the national stage, you actually have to learn how to pivot more gracefully. You can't simply ignore the question in a way that is so blatant that it basically begs the question, why were you not even trying to answer the question? And then you have the question of the audience. He too was playing to the base and

And America is increasingly polarized, but elections are still determined by swing voters. There may only be 10% of Americans who are genuinely open to voting for either party.

But a number of them tuned in, and the ones who didn't are the ones who are listening to and reading about the after report. And there were a lot of people who tuned in. Five and a half million people tuned into the debate, according to the initial viewership statistics.

that's more than double what Hannity usually gets. There's people who tuned in specifically for this, not because they're loyal watchers of the show. And surely some of these people were people who were curious about the person who might be, or they're increasingly being told is the successor in waiting. So I would give both people a,

a B or a B minus. I think both had good points and both have glaring weaknesses that if they really do get the chance to make the play for the nomination, if DeSantis does emerge as the candidate against Trump or to get there, has to have a one-on-one debate with Haley or if Newsom, who's never faced a serious Republican challenge in deep blue California and deeper blue San Francisco in his life.

actually has to make a case to national voters with a real Republican on the stage, he better know how to do it. If he doesn't, he's going to go down as one of the biggest flops in presidential nomination history. And that's what I think about the debate. And that's this week's Rant on Politics.

Joining me this week on Beyond the Polls is Sean Trendy. Sean is one of the best elections analysts in America, and he is known as the senior elections analyst at the Real Clear Politics website, and he's also a visiting fellow at AEI. Sean, welcome to Beyond the Polls.

Thanks for having me. Well, there's a new poll out from Trafalgar in Iowa that's got Trump up by 23 points, 45 to 22 over DeSantis. And both DeSantis and Haley are up a couple of points from last time. But basically, this is same old, same old. Trump sitting there in near majority territory.

The DeSantis folks are telling everybody who will listen that Iowa breaks late. And there is a pattern in the last few Republican caucuses of late and very significant breaks in Iowa's voting patterns so that people who are in single or low double digits at this point can go on to win. Do you think that's likely this time or even significantly possible given what we've been seeing so far?

It's getting a little bit late, honestly, for that to happen. I mean, there is this pattern, right? And not just Republicans. In 2004, John Kerry breaks slate. I mean, at this point, we kind of thought Howard Dean was going to be the Democratic nominee. Remember that guy? Scream if you don't.

And then 2008, you know, it's true. Mike Huckabee did break late, but he started his break in November. You know, Mitt Romney hit was up by like 14 points at the beginning of November. And Huckabee ended up just trashing, you know, winning by 10 points himself.

but he was in the lead by December. Then you go to 2012, you had this late break by Santorum, who wins the caucuses, but Santorum was... Now, Santorum broke late. Santorum didn't really start to make his move until late December. So that's something to point out. Newt Gingrich was ahead at this point. You look to 2016, you

You know, Cruz and Rubio both start to particularly Rubio breaks late. And then in 2020 in Iowa, you know, Mayor Pete had been ahead and then he kind of crashed and burned and then he came back. I still don't know who won Iowa for the Democrats in 2020. I don't know if they ever formally reported that. But, you know, so, yeah, Iowa gets movement late in the game as people start to really tune in.

So what DeSantis' team would say is, hey, we've got the ground game. And of course, what they did basically was hire Cruz's ground game, which did deliver in 2016, admittedly. We've got Bob Vander Plaats, and Bob Vander Plaats and his purported network of evangelical leaders never loses. We've got Governor Kim Reynolds, and not only has she lent her name, she's actually doing stuff for us.

So what they would say is, hey, we've got everything in place for a late break. Are they half right? Are they a little bit right? Or is there a lot more that we're not giving credit for that, you know, that these sorts of things, as opposed to a charismatic candidate or a clear issue, tend to be the things that drive late breaks?

I'd say half right. It's one of those things where, you know, we talk about candidates on paper a lot in this job and, and on paper, I would say DeSantis has the pieces in place, right? He's got the, the right endorsements. He's got the right players. Um,

The problem is if you want, there's two things that go have gone on in these late breaks. The first is kind of widespread dissatisfaction with the front runner. You know, that, that certainly happened in 2012. No one really loved Romney in the Republican party. Um,

And then, you know, same thing. There was just, you know, people weren't sure about Trump in 2020. Same thing with Sanders in 2024. And a lot of times there is kind of an issue that those candidates can latch on to. Problem is, Trump is widely liked in the Republican Party. And so...

You kind of have to ask yourself, like, what? So Trump is up in our average. You know, Trafalgar is what it is. But they're not that far off from our average, which has Trump up 29 points. What is going to cause, you know, roughly half of the attendees at these caucuses to switch their minds, either break to DeSantis or abandon someone else and go to DeSantis? It's just it's a really big ask at this point.

So that raises the next question, which is if it's

but would be unusual to see DeSantis, given the stability in the polls as far to move from where he's been, which is he's been in second place, I think, in the average for the entire time. What would constitute a defeat for Trump? You know, if on caucus night it ended up instead of being Trump 45, DeSantis 22, which is what the Trafalgar poll is, it ended up being Trump 37 and DeSantis 27.

Would that be a defeat for Trump, or would that just be a victory that happens to perhaps be underappreciated by the media? Yeah, we do have this weird thing where we like to look at second and third place. You know, Bill Clinton was the comeback kid for placing third in New Hampshire, and then Marco Rubio got all the attention in Iowa, even though he placed third in 2016.

I think ultimately Trump, you know, DeSantis, what DeSantis probably gets out of a clear second place finish is a clearing of the field, right? You get Ram Swami and Scott and some of these other players out. Maybe Haley, but she would have to place really poorly for that to happen.

So he gets more of a clear shot at Trump. If he's down in the field and no one drops out, that's another story altogether. The media will look for an anti-Trump narrative, to be sure. But, you know, he's popular in the Republican Party, and the media sure isn't going to change that.

Well, as we used to say in Dungeons and Dragons, that's a detect obvious spell, my friend. Yeah, I mean, Trump wants an anti-Trump narrative in the media, if anything, for the Republican primary, because he can do what he does best, which is roll out the they're ganging up on me just like they gang up on you. Mm-hmm. So.

So Nikki Haley seems to have been having an extended moment, meaning that starting with the September or really the August debate, she moved from being behind Tim Scott to being ahead of Tim Scott to moving up. Now Tim Scott's dropped out and she's

Second place in South Carolina in the average, second place in New Hampshire, strong third in Iowa. And you're hearing about her name and Democrats are saying, well, gee, let's give money to Nikki Haley so that we can stop Trump in the Republican primary. What are your thoughts about this?

Not a tsunami, but kind of like the growing wave of Haley, even though it hasn't. Do you think there's a there there? Or is this kind of like, you know, she's moving in a way that's kind of understandable, but that there's a clear ceiling on her ability to continue to grow support? You know, I think she's another case. This is a lot like.

This is a lot like 2016, I think, with DeSantis playing the role of Cruz and Haley playing the role of Rubio and maybe Christie being Kasich. Where, you know, Trump's below 50% in these states, which isn't that great for an incumbent universally known and well-liked in the Republican Party. But her problem...

Is DeSantis' problem is Christie's problem, which is while these other candidates are in, the anti-Trump vote, such as it is, gets split. And so no one really takes a good look at Haley. Look, I think there is a lane for her to get to that one-on-one with Trump, and then who knows. But

It's blocked by Christie in a lot of ways, and even DeSantis is taking votes from her. She's young. She's charismatic. She's something different. She checks off a lot of the boxes. She would be a fantastic matchup against Biden in terms of intangibles, but

And I think she captures certainly like the AEI Republican view of what a Republican presidential candidate should look like, the kind of old suburban Republican coalition. But again, toppling Trump is tricky.

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that... And I like Nikki Haley. I like her as a candidate. I like her viewpoints. Nobody ever agrees with anybody 100%. I like DeSantis as well.

But one of the things that gets me about Haley and makes me really question is I have yet to see a poll that says that she would get the lion's share of DeSantis' supporters if he drops out. Whereas the reverse is true. Virtually every poll that asks these questions, he would get the lion's share of Haley's supporters eventually. They might prefer Christie first because they really tend not to be

populist oriented and DeSantis has that element to him. But eventually they put a big clothespin over their nose and say he's not orange man. And so is there something Haley can do to try and get DeSantis voters who don't dislike Trump, but who may want somebody who is not the AEI Republican view of the world, as you said, to

Is there something that she can do in the next two months to make them look at her differently? Or is she kind of just locked into this, that the same thing that moves her up is the thing that limits her?

Yeah, I think she's in a tough spot because she has Christie running kind of to her. I mean, Christie is doing his own thing, but, you know, he soaks up, I think, a lot of her voters. And so if she moves too much into the populist realm, she starts, I think, to hemorrhage New Hampshire voters, independent voters to Christie. She

She's in a really, really rough position. I do think if DeSantis were to drop out, eventually a lot of her voters would come around to her. But she's being pushed so much into the old kind of Paul Ryan Mitt Romney mold that I think it does make it tough down the stretch for her to pick those voters up if she were to get to a one on one with Trump. So what are you looking for? Obviously, Trump's.

had a lead in these places it's not close what would be the known unknown to borrow from donald rumsfeld in this race that you're that you know is out there but you don't know how it's going to play that will help us determine where the these races go in the next eight weeks

Well, I want to start with a caveat to that, which is, you know, the no known is Donald Trump is leading, as he might say, bigly in these polls and is well liked by the Republican base. OK, so so my expectation, overwhelming expectation is that he's the Republican nominee. I think I think we in the media tend to have a kind of a fun parlor game of gaming out what ifs and we sometimes get caught up in them. I want to leave that out there.

The big thing to me, the one thing that can really upset that apple cart is if the field were to consolidate. So if Haley were to get second in Iowa and then it will consolidate sooner or later, but if Haley were to get second in Iowa and then get

get closer in New Hampshire than we expect, I think the field would consolidate quickly and then we'd actually have an interesting battle. If that consolidation happens like it did in 2016, which is to say after Super Tuesday or... And then...

Cruz finally drops out in case it drops out like 24 hours later, you know, that it's just not going to matter because this won't be interesting if the anti-Trump vote is split, you know, eight ways.

Or even three ways, given the rules of some of these, you know, like if California, 169 delegates, something like 20% needed to nominate. If somebody gets 50% of the vote on Super Tuesday, they get all of the delegates. And if it's split three ways, you know, maybe it very well could go that way.

That's right. In some of these states, you can win all the delegates with the plurality. So it's just really going to matter, like I said, when people drop out. I think the old line that there were three tickets out of Iowa and two tickets out of New Hampshire is a pre-Super PAC line. But if it doesn't hold this time, then there's really no doubt Trump's going to be the nominee. Someone's got to go.

I have a last out-of-left-field question. If Trump is the nominee, who do you think will he pick as his VP, and who do you think should he pick as his VP? That's a really good question.

You know, he did it. So here's the thing. I never would have said Mike Pence in 2016 because I didn't think he would ask someone like Pence. And I didn't think Pence would go along. In retrospect, like that was the smartest move he made in all of 2016. I don't think he wins without it. I don't know about 2024. Yeah.

You know, someone like Haley, I think would be a great pick for him, but I don't know that she'd do it at this point. And if she's in the one-on-one with him there, you know, his pride is such that there's no way he does it. At least Steph, at least a Stefanik or I don't watch enough TV to get the pronunciation, but you know, I think she'd be a good pick for him. You know, she reliably toes the party line. She's a good attack dog, but she's, you know, she's smart and,

and can do it well. But beyond that, and we've got to remember, too, this is going to be Trump's big showdown, but also his chance to be him. He knows he's picking a successor now if he were to win, because he's only got one term. So I don't know what he's going to do, and I don't know what a second Trump term is going to look like when he doesn't owe anything to anybody. And on that cheery...

Rom-com note, how can my listeners follow your work? Certainly on Twitter, at Sean Trendy, and you can find everything I write and much more at RealClearPolitics.

Well, I think you can do a lot worse and you can rarely do better than following Sean on a regular basis. His work is always insightful. And as the debate after 2012 about the missing white voters, I was probably the single best candidate.

analysis that proved to be outside the box and absolutely spot on that you wrote back in 2012 or 2013 after the demographic doom loop started to become the common wisdom and you can always get more interesting stuff from Sean on RCP. Sean, thank you for joining me on Beyond the Polls. I look forward to having you back in the new year. Thanks for having me.

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Well, this week on Polling Barometer, we have the polling expert, Karlyn Bowman, the senior fellow emerita of the American Enterprise Institute, who is the doyen and guru of all things polling in Washington. Karlyn, welcome back to Beyond the Polls. I'm delighted to be back. Thank you, Henry. Well, when I was a young man,

after beating off the pterodactyls to get on the way to school, I was under the president of Jim Ray Carter. And Jimmy Carter was unpopular. He was laughed at. He was considered to be overwhelmed by events. And today, Joe Biden is the most disliked president since Obama.

the man of my youth, President James Earl Carter. And he's now below 40 percent again in the real clear politics job approval rating, four points lower than Trump at this point. Is it possible that a man that reviled or at least that unthought well of, you know, it's hard to say unpopular, but, you know, I guess unpopular. Is it is it possible that this guy can beat Donald Trump? I think so. Yes.

In part because I think the choices right now are hypothetical choices.

There's a lot of discussion about whether DeSantis or Haley can overtake Trump at this point. It doesn't look likely to me. I suppose anything is possible. You never say never when you're looking at public opinion polls. But pretty soon we'll have a real race. We'll have, if Donald Trump is the nominee, we'll have Donald Trump versus Joe Biden. And I think when the race becomes a real race, Americans may start thinking about it differently. I thought it was very interesting this week that Trump

talked about Biden as the destroyer of democracy. We haven't heard that line from Trump until this point. That's a theme that Biden used, I think, fairly successfully. I wonder if you'd agree. In the latter part of the 2022 campaign, he gave a number of speeches about the importance of defending democracy, and he's been using that line quite a bit.

When you care deeply about something, as Americans do about democracy, of course you really worry about its erosion. And if Biden can convince Americans that Trump is going to erode what they care so deeply about, I think he has a good shot. Obviously, the numbers for Biden are very grim right now. There's no issue there.

where you can say that he's above 50% in terms of handling the issue overall. Even Stan Greenberg, the Democratic pollster, released new data this week with James Carville, just talking about how much of a climb there needs to be for Joe Biden to be successful overall, because Trump and the Republicans are leading Joe Biden and the Democrats on most of the important issues in this campaign.

And of course, inflation is still very, very painful. I'm undercutting my case here, but I think it is possible that Biden could win next November. And I agree with you that, you know, what Biden basically did, aside from throwing everything that he could to motivate key Democratic groups like the what I'm sure he knew was a

likely to be ruled on constitutional student loan forgiveness plan, massively releasing oil stocks to try and drive the price of gas down. But he made it a try to make it a partisan choice between you've got democracy, you know, ultra MAGA, uh, as, as he said, or, uh,

or them. And I think that's one of the big reasons why he and the Democrats won the support in the midterm of people who somewhat disapprove of the president, that historically the people who somewhat disapprove of the president always voted by at least 20 and usually more points against the incumbent party. Uh,

And this time, the Democrats won it by four points. And had it been historical, on the average, that would have been a three-point shift to the Republicans. They would have won by six instead of three. They would have probably won the Senate. They definitely would have won Nevada. They probably would have won Georgia. And they would have at least ten more House seats. And I think that...

As much as, if not more than, abortion is why the Democrats overperformed expectations in the midterms. Yes, I think I agree with that. What's interesting looking at the groups that Biden absolutely needs to turn out in very significant numbers is how much ground he's lost with those groups in the last year. I mean, maybe they'll come back to the Democratic Party. We know people generally return to their loyal allies.

their loyal party overall, the party they're most loyal to overall. And we will see what young people do, what black males do, what Hispanics do. I mean, you just need to move the needle a little with some of those groups, of course, for an election. And he's, again, he's got to do better with those groups. And he's certainly not doing better right now.

One of the things when you see the elite media and the Washington bubble is the growing pressure on Biden, that he's had four months or five months of talking about Bidenomics. His numbers have dropped during that period. People are saying, well, why should Americans feel bad? You know, everything's great. Inflation is down and unemployment is low and so forth. But

But, you know, as one of my friends says, I'd like to argue with you, but you've got all the facts on your side. The fact is Americans don't think that it's all that great. And five months has not changed them at all. Is there a point where it may not be practically beyond hope, but where Democrats look and say Biden hasn't turned it around by X?

We really need to convince him to drop out and get somebody who can beat the man who we believe, as the Democrats regularly tell us, will destroy democracy in one term.

I'm not sure what point that would be, but obviously being on the ballot in a lot of places is extremely important for some alternate candidate. And those deadlines are going to start approaching very fast everywhere. And so we'll have to pay attention to that. But he doesn't seem inclined to move anywhere, though I was surprised this week at his statement.

that he suggested if it hadn't been for Donald Trump, he might not have considered running this time. That indicates someone who I think the elites are getting to him and what they're telling him about whether or not he can run, he should run. Well, what do you think about the scenario that would have been common or somewhat common

70 years ago, but today would be a made-for-TV movie, which is the president who drops out after the primaries and has, if not an open convention, a convention-selected rather than voter-selected nominee. Is that a plausible thing, or are we really looking at when

the primary filing deadlines close sometime in the next 45 days, that Biden's the nominee absent a serious health reverse. Yeah, I doubt very much that they could have a convention as we did 70 years ago. I mean, it'd certainly be wonderful for all of us who cover things like that, but I'm not so sure that it's a realistic scenario. Well, one of the things that plays into this analysis is the legal cases. That, of course, one of the things that are...

meant to support the idea that Trump has it in for democracy. It's his actions on January 6th, which, of course, is the focal point of two of the four indictments that he is facing. And all the questions that I see in the media are, what would you do if Trump goes to jail? What would you do if Trump's convicted? My question is, what do you think would happen if it was a mistrial?

What would happen? All it takes is one juror to just dig in their heels and say, I'm not convicting, I'm not convicting, I'm not convicting. It's 11 to 1. And then it gets declared a mistrial. What do you think would happen if that happened? Well, I think he's certainly the candidate in that case.

That would probably make Biden a lot weaker because they've been saying all along that he's bound to be convicted in some of these cases. But if it's a mixed verdict, I don't think it helps him very much if, let's say, a couple of the cases go one way and the others go the other way.

That, I think, is just a muddy scenario. And as you see, I mean, Biden is talking about mega Republicans day in, day out. Now he's gone back to the democracy theme day in, day out. So they must think that those things are working for them. And I think there's a lot of evidence that they may be working for him. And so but again, we won't know until Trump is the real candidate. And that could come pretty early.

And even in the midterms, there was the late break in most of the polls. And no, there's comments that, oh, it was all Republicans, Republican-friendly polls in the field that were flooding the averages. No, they weren't. You know, they were things like Emerson, which is not a Republican poll that was showing the late break. And then we had the unexpected results. So it may very well be that

It takes a year for them to make this point, and people on the margin, just like in 2016, where literally Trump won the election between Friday night and Tuesday night, as people who didn't want him just said, I can't stand Hillary Clinton, and changed their mind, often in the polling booth. I know people who actually did that. Oh, yeah. Interesting. I know at least three people who went from

changing their mind on Saturday, changing their mind on Sunday, changing their mind in the way to the polling booth and one person who actually did it in the polling booth. And that's, I think, why Trump won is that. And it could very well be that that's why the polls were a little bit off in the midterm and could very well be that that's what happens with Biden is people wait until literally the last weekend and say, oh, my God, I don't want this. I mean, so many things can happen between now and, let's say, late spring and

I mean, Biden has not looked strong on the campaign trail, and Americans are clearly aware of that. And Trump just looks so much more vigorous.

So a lot of things can happen. I mean, the White House has made all sorts of adjustments in terms of steps to the plane and other things like that to try to make sure that Biden doesn't trip or doesn't do something that could remind Americans of how old this man is. But I think that's a real drawback, particularly for people my age and older. You know what your frailties are by this point.

Well, one of the things people are looking at is the Hispanic vote, which has moved away from Democrats in the last six years, despite all the things we were told six or seven years ago was going to happen. The opposite has happened, but yet it remains a Democratic voting bloc. But rather than treat Hispanics as a uniform group, you are looking at different aspects of the Hispanic community and

And we were talking about this right before we started recording. Tell us about the Hispanic subgroup that you are looking at that you think bears a lot of close attention going into this election year. Well, as we both know, the patterns of assimilation of Hispanics in Florida, Hispanics from Venezuela, from Cuba, are very, very different from the assimilation patterns of Mexicans. But I mean,

I remember the first time that I was struck by this goes back quite a number of years when the Castro brothers, we were thinking about whether the Castro brothers in Texas might be running for president. And I think I remember reading that one of them did not speak Spanish. And that was interesting to me at that particular point. I mean, I think they're twin brothers. And it got me to thinking about how many Hispanics there are that, let's say, are second generation or third generation.

may not embrace a lot of Hispanic culture, and they may not speak Spanish, and they may have very different ideas. And I'm beginning to think that if pollsters could look at third-generation Hispanics, and again, that's not an easy thing to do because you have to spend a lot of money to poll to get those kinds of answers. Pew has done it.

And Pew has found that they've moved away from a lot of Spanish cultural things. Far fewer of them speak English. They just look like ordinary Americans at this point. They don't look like immigrants. And that may change their voting patterns. So different from the African-American vote.

which is a monolithic democratic vote by virtue of historical experience. But the Hispanic vote is very different, whereas you're seeing upward mobility in the group in many, many places overall. And I think that third generation of Hispanics could be very important. And Patrick Graffini, whom you and I both know, has written a new book about the GOP, doesn't make that argument specifically, but he does talk, as does Rui Teixeira in his new book about, um,

In fact, the Hispanic vote is not monolithic in the way the African-American vote seems to be, even though there's some erosion among Democrats, among black males, for example. But still, the Hispanic vote, I think, is really up for grabs. The Republicans have done well, as you say, in recent elections.

Do you think that if Donald Trump is the nominee, that he should pick a person of color as his vice president? People have talked about Byron Donalds, a black man from Florida who became a congressman with the support of the Club for Growth. And obviously there are a number of other non-whites who you could look at in the Republican Party. Do you think that would be a smart thing for him?

Well, you need to move the needle a little. I don't think vice presidents usually are very important, but if you're just talking about moving that needle a little, a woman, somebody who's African-American, those things could be important in the final analysis. And it has to be someone for Trump who's going to be loyal, so it's probably not going to be Nikki Haley. It could be Tim Scott. It could be, though, that would surprise me. And there are a lot of attractive women who could conceivably run with Donald Trump. Mm-hmm.

Well, Colin, where can my listeners follow your work? I write a column for Forbes, and all of my work is published on the AEI website, and they can find my work there. Wonderful. It's wonderful having you back on the program, and I look forward to having you back again in the new year. It's good to talk to you, Henry. Bye. Bye.

This week, I am bringing back the Ad of the Week segment because I saw an ad that I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Usually when I have an ad on this segment, it's an ad that I definitely like. It's one that I can explain why they're doing it, who they're targeting, blah, blah, blah. If you've listened to this program, you know of which I speak. But this ad is an ad that I definitely like.

is one that I think is taking one of the biggest risks of any ad that I've ever seen on the air. This is Donald Trump's campaign ad airing in Iowa. Let's listen. I want to say thank you for cutting taxes for hard, senseless regulations that...

What I love about this president and this administration is it is an administration of action and outcomes. And the list is long. Lower taxes, lower labor borders. First state to the farmers, thank you. Promises made, promises kept. The Midwest has a partner in the White House with President Donald Trump. A president who puts America first.

I'm Donald J. Trump, and I approve this message. Now you'll note that except for the ending legally required phrase, I'm Donald Trump, and I approve this message, the only voice you hear is that of a woman. Well, that woman is Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds. And what the ad shows is, as you can hear...

She's talking at various rallies and saying wonderful things about Donald Trump. And all the things she says are things that are good things, according to the polls, for Republican voters. Lower taxes, less regulation, safer border, conservative justices, and then the throwaway for Iowa. Good for the farmers. He's a fighter. He's a doer. Promises made, promises kept.

All of the specific things that she mentions are good things to associate yourself with in a Republican electorate, particularly a caucus electorate, which is likelier to be even more conservative and even more Republican than a primary electorate. So,

That's the good. And you've also got one point where with the visuals, he will sometimes put up on the screen lower taxes or put up on the screen something else. At one point while she's speaking, there's a thing on the screen, the visual that says Trump maintains lead in Iowa caucus. So the message is winner, not just fighter conservative. It's also the message is winner. So what's not to like? Well, that's just one little problem.

Kim Reynolds has endorsed Ron DeSantis. So what's the point of this ad if the person who is talking in it is a person who supports your opponent? Well, there's a couple of things. One is confusion.

Which is to say, yes, she has endorsed, but most voters don't necessarily read all of the different things in political cheat sheets or in newspapers. Many voters may not know of the endorsement. So if they see this, they will think, oh, well, Reynolds likes Trump.

And then you've got the hypocrisy question, which is that Trump can say, well, she said all of these good things about me. Why isn't she backing me? And that would be a way of discrediting the endorsement. So that's the rational reason to do this. But.

The reason I think this is taking a risk is because what it does is open up the possibility of a DeSantis-sponsored ad featuring Kim Reynolds, where she would talk directly to the camera and acknowledge that she said all of those things and say that despite that, here's why Ron DeSantis is the better choice today. So what you run the risk of, since you know where Reynolds stands...

And she has been appearing with DeSantis across the state in rally after rally. This is not one of those endorsements that she just gives and then doesn't do anything. She's putting everything behind it. So if she's got her credibility on the line, it stands to reason that she might then say Donald Trump is misleading you.

Donald Trump. I said all of those things. Donald Trump was a good president for the time, but we need somebody better. We need somebody who can serve two terms. We need somebody who doesn't alienate people. You can figure out a 30-second ad yourself. And I don't know whether or not that would work. But the fact is, Trump didn't need to do this. He's got a 20 to 30-point lead in the poll. He's got lots of ways to make this choice without Trump.

tweaking the sitting Iowa governor who's endorsed his opponent. And then the question is, by doing this, does he amplify a weakness of his? In other words, is this a case of the empire, Grand Moff Tarkin, overlooking that little weakness that has been discovered and he doesn't want to leave Iowa in his moment of triumph? Well, all of us Star Wars fans know how that ends. And so this is to be continued. Understand why he's doing it,

and understand how it could blow up in his face. And that's why this unusual ad is the ad of the week. That's it for this week's Beyond the Polls. Join me next week as I welcome Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report to the show, where he'll run down the state of play in the House and the Senate as we head into the new year. Until then, let's reach together for the stars as we journey beyond the polls.

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