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Welcome to Beyond the Polls with me, Henry Olson. Each week, I'll take you where your average pundit won't, deep behind the easy numbers to assess where the candidates are and, more importantly, where they could be.
This week, I'm joined by notable analysts and reporters Kyle Kondak of Saboteau's Crystal Ball, Skylar Croft of The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, and Harry Anton of CNN. All this in my debut ad of the week, where I'll break down Donald Trump's most recent ad responding to those important indictments. Let's get started together and look beyond the polls. Well, this week on Polling Barometer, we have one of the nation's most...
detailed and serious analyst of all things numerical, and that is Harry Anton, the senior political and data analyst, aka the numbers god at CNN. Harry, welcome to Beyond the Polls. Well, thank you for welcoming me, but I will note that while I take the numbers seriously, I hope I don't take myself too seriously, but we'll see what happens over the next few minutes. So the question I want to start with is, should people trust the polls?
I mean, there's a lot of people who say, oh, well, they were off by a couple of points or, oh, what happened in 2016? They say, we can't believe this is all made up stuff. You know, should we trust the polls? And in what manner should we look at it when we hear polls that are spread out through the media? So perhaps this won't be a surprise to you. I get this question a lot. This is, I think, the number one question I get, right? And the way that I would answer that in the way that I've generally answered that is,
Polls give you a good clue as to what's going on, but they don't tell you exactly what's going on. That is, if you were to show me a national race in which the two candidates are within a few points of each other, I'd say that the candidate who's slightly ahead would be more likely to win. But I wouldn't be surprised at all if the candidate who was behind ended up winning.
That was the case, for example, in the 2016 presidential election, right? We had a small margin between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Trump ends up winning in the swing states, though he does lose the national popular vote. Versus, let's compare that to what's going on right now in the Republican primary. You know, yes, someone is way far ahead in Donald Trump.
and he is so far ahead that that type of lead, when you're talking 35, 40 points, that's a lead that you can feel is secure. So what I would essentially say, and we were talking about this off air, is trust but verify. That is, when you see somebody who has a lead within 10 points,
That's a race that I would say is too close to call, even if there's a favorite. If there's a candidate who's up by more than 10 points, chances are that candidate will very likely win. There are only a few examples in general elections where that's not true. And in primary elections, if your lead is above 20 points, you can probably take that to the bank, at least on the eve of the election.
So is there anything that you would, if a poll came in with something, that you would kind of have your alarm lights go off saying, okay, there's a weakness here that may not get communicated across a media if you don't have a sophisticated person who's interpreting. Are there a couple of things that are classic warning signs of a poll that have under-the-hood weaknesses that our readers should be looking, or listeners should be looking for?
I mean, my general view of this is if you've never heard of the pollster, you probably should be at least a little skeptical, right? You know, if you've heard of, you know, the New York Times, for example, or CNN comes out with the poll, chances are that poll, while, you know, there are margins of error and polls aren't perfect.
you know that that poll is likely going to be in the neighborhood if, in fact, we're polling for if it's an election, if that election is happening soon. Obviously, if the election's happening down the line, two, three, four, five months, six months, a year, things can change. So I think that's the number one thing I would be on the lookout for. The other two things I would sort of be on the lookout for is I'm always skeptical of questions that say, "Are you more likely to do X because of this event happening?"
And what I mean by that is, you know, if we're talking about Donald Trump, are you more likely to vote for Trump or less likely to vote for Trump given the recent indictments? Well, what we often see is that the people who say more likely are those who are supporting Trump anyway, while those who say less likely are the ones who were not going to vote for him no matter what.
And the last thing that I will note in terms of things I'm always skeptical about, especially in this era and especially going into 2024, is when you match up a candidate against a generic alternative. And that is look.
Do not judge me against the almighty. Judge me against the mortals. And I think that is something that I definitely keep in mind when looking at the data. Yeah. And by generic alternative, you mean Joe Biden versus a Republican or a Republican who believes X, X and Y, but there's no name or person attached to it. Correct. Correct. Exactly.
Well, so the one thing we have in the general election is we don't have generic alternatives. We have very well-known alternatives so far, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. And you wrote a very interesting article, which I think, uh, uh,
surprise some people arguing why Trump can win and perhaps why his odds of winning in a general election, despite everything, are higher than many people in the punditocracy might think. Can you walk my listeners through the basic argument? I think the basic argument is look at where the polling is right now. You know, you match up the current President Joe Biden against the former President Donald Trump. And what do we see?
We see the two of them are basically even, right? There was a New York Times, Siena College poll that had them even. We have a new Quinnipiac University poll that has Biden up by a point, which, of course, is well within any margin of error. We have a new Marist College poll that has Biden up by just a point, well within the margin of error. And if we look at the polling at this point, four years ago, back in the 2020 cycle, Biden had a clear advantage.
high single digits, low double digits much of the time. In fact, I don't believe there is a single poll that met CNN standards for publication that ever had Donald Trump ahead in the national popular vote. There have been a bunch of those
this particular cycle, a number of them coming from the ABC News Washington Post poll, which is very highly regarded. I'm just looking at the polling data. And what I'll also note beyond the horse races, yes, Donald Trump, not a popular guy.
But neither is Joe Biden. So all of a sudden, you put together two unpopular fellas. Well, now you're making a recipe for something in which I'm not quite sure we know exactly what's going to happen. Well, and that brings me to my next question, which is in 2016, we had...
the two most unpopular nominees in history facing off against one another. But if you dug down beneath the numbers, what was interesting was like 80% of Americans liked one of the two of them. You know, Republicans liked Donald Trump mainly, Democrats liked Hillary Clinton. And the election came down to 18% who didn't like either. And I call them the double doubters.
Do we have a large number of double doubters in the Trump Biden matchup? And is that one of the reasons why you've got them so close? And if so, what do we know about these people and what do we think they are weighing as they're not deciding between two people they dislike? Yes.
Yeah. So, you know, I've, I've crunched this and generally what we're talking about is levels that are probably slightly exceeding what we saw at the end of the 2016 campaign around a fifth, maybe a little bit more 21, 22% of voters who say they have an unfavorable view of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Uh,
What we know from that polling so far is a few things. Number one, at least at the Quinnipiac University polling that I looked at earlier this year, they were slightly more favorable to Joe Biden than to Donald Trump. That's why on average in the Quinnipiac polling, Joe Biden has run slightly ahead of Trump. That's very different than what we saw in 2016 with that group of voters, those double doubters.
went overwhelmingly for Donald Trump and therefore gave him the election. One other note I'll put forth about them was that to give you an understanding of where they might stand politically, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. basically ran even on his favorable, unfavorable ratio amongst this group. So they tend to be anti-politician, anti-establishment, anti-the right, anti-the left.
That, to me, seems to be their defining feature more than really anything else that I was looking at in terms of the data, at least ideologically speaking, except for saying, you know, they might be more towards the quote unquote moderate side. But of course, moderate can just mean you hold some extreme positions on one issue and some extreme positions on another.
Right. That's one of the things media in the cellar corridor, people often think, well, moderate, that means the nice upper income professional who center left on social issues and center centrist on economic issues. But no, moderate actually often means exactly what you just said, which is I'm in the middle because I've got two polarized extremes and I don't fit in either camp. Right.
One of the things when I looked at the 2016 double-doubters was that according to the only poll I could find with detailed crosstabs before the election, which was the Georgetown Battleground poll with Celinda Lake and Ed Goess, they actually had detailed crosstabs on 18% double-doubters. And it was true in September, it was true in October.
Two things that as late as mid-October after the Hawks as Hollywood take, 57 percent of them said they were either going to vote for a third party candidate or undecided. And secondly, is that there were disproportionately Republican men who liked Trump on issues but didn't like him on character. Sounds to me like the double doubters this time aren't the same people as they were a few years ago. And that means they may move in a different direction.
Yeah, I would say that they are different people from what I've generally seen. Keep in mind that Joe Biden has had a lot of trouble holding on to younger voters who are normally a part of the big Democratic base. We also saw him struggling amongst Republicans.
uh non-white voters and yet of course when we looked at what happened in the 2022 midterms younger voters went overwhelmingly democratic and while non-white voters may have been somewhat more republican than we were used to seeing depending on which polling data you look at
they still, on the whole, went overwhelmingly Democratic. So I do think that there is a difference. If you look back in 2016, there were a lot of Republicans, and even this was certainly true during the primary process, that were very skeptical of Donald Trump, but despised Hillary Clinton, and there was no way on God's green earth they were ever going to vote for her.
that is not necessarily the case this time around. And Trump's sort of fault lines within the electorate are much more now towards the middle, at least within the GOP, than they are on the right, right? If we look at the primary polling, we know that he does much better among very conservatives. That's true in his favorable rating as well among the general electorate. That was not the case back in 2016, when in fact that was one of his weakest groups within the GOP. So yeah,
the broader idea that we're going to have two candidates who are really disliked going up against each other that may hold true in both 2016 and 2024 at least at this point for 2024 but who those voters are at least in the data i'm looking at are not the same voters that we saw back in 2016. so um i often get a question
When people look at this and say, well, there's so much dislike of both parties and so forth. Does that mean there's room for a third party? And I always have a pretty pat answer to it, but I'm not going to give you mine. I'm going to ask you yours. Does all of this mean there is room for a third party?
Well, I'll tell you, if a billionaire tech business billionaire from Texas decides to run and throw up a bunch of infomercials, then maybe that might be a little bit interesting. But unless the ghost of unless the ghost of Ross Perot decides to run, the fact is, look, when you say, oh, would you be interested in a third party candidate? Sure. When you look at the actual people who have been named.
whether it be Larry Hogan or Joe Manchin or Cornel West, obviously not an independent, but running as a Green Party candidate, if he in fact follows through on all of this, they are not getting into the double digits. And when you had someone like Gary Johnson, who was a very well-respected former governor of New Mexico,
And he couldn't get to 5% back in 2016. How is somebody in this particular year in which there is, in my opinion, you know, in 2016, there were a lot of people, oh, Trump really can't win. Now they know Trump can win. Now everybody understands the stakes. The idea that there's going to be some great third party candidate, especially given that they're not hitting 10% even now, makes me very skeptical about
of the prospects of a third party candidate doing well. But given how close Biden and Trump are, I wouldn't be surprised at the end of the day if there is, in fact, a quote unquote major third party candidate to see. And that garners only four or five percent. If the swing states are close enough, it could make all the difference in the world.
Well, and that's scaring a lot of Democratic operatives that somebody gets in the race like a Joe Manchin and people who don't like either candidate plant their votes down there. And Donald Trump, who doesn't need to win the popular vote to win the Electoral College, sneaks through on yet another run up the inside straight in the swing states.
I think that's exactly right. And if we look at the polling that adds a third party candidate, whomever it is, it normally, when you add it, Trump, when it comes to the margin, does on average about a point or two better, closer to more of a point than two points. But the fact is, when you look at the last two election cycles, the states that ended up tipping the Electoral College were determined by about a point or less. So, yeah.
You know, it could definitely make the difference. And that's the other thing to keep in mind when looking at the national polling, as you pointed out. Democrat has won the national popular vote each of the last two elections. But Donald Trump, even in 2020, when he lost, came very close in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona. He may only need to get close in the popular vote in order to actually become the next president.
Let's close out with a little discussion of Joe Biden. You know, Joe Biden has been talking about Bidenomics, that he's touting low unemployment and declining inflation as a feature, not a bug of his economic plan. And he's giving a lot of speeches on this. And of course,
This is politics. It's designed to increase his job favorability. What has been happening with his favorability job approval ratings over the last couple of weeks as this offensive has begun to roll out? And what would you consider to be a success if we were to come back in two months and say, hey, this has been a great success for Joe Biden? What do you think would be a good target for his job approval?
yeah i haven't seen anything over the last few months that indicates that joe biden standing among the american public is getting any better uh you know after a few months he hasn't sniffed 45 in the national polls
since I tell you, I think I had many fewer white and gray hairs in my beard that when I actually grow it out than I do now. So, you know, I think 45% wouldn't be half bad. But at this particular point, his economic approval rating is even lower than his overall approval rating. The overall stuck in the low 40s. The economic really in the mid to high 30s. It's not a particularly pretty picture. We'll see if this tour can end it, but
I'm skeptical if you can't hear it in my voice. Well, I hope my listeners can hear it in your voice. It's coming through loud and clear to me. Besides watching CNN religiously and just trying to build their lives around the Harry Enten appearances, how can my listeners follow your work?
So you can read it on CNN.com. I also have a podcast, which we have not had any new episodes in a while, but we have plenty of episodes on there. So you have a lot of catching up to do. It's called Margins of Error. It's available wherever you get your podcasts, you know, Apple, Stitcher, what have you. You can find it there. It's a pretty good listen.
But I should warn your listeners, it's not really political, but it is numerically based. So if you're interested in the question of, you know, does money make you happy? What makes you happy?
Why is Americans' Belief in Ghosts Climbing Ever Higher? Might be an interesting podcast for you. Oh, gosh. I think you've just got a chart topper here. A lot more people interested in ghosts than interested in the ghost behind the political machine. Well, Harry, thank you for joining me and my listeners, and welcome back to Beyond the Pulse. It was my pleasure. Shalom and be well.
Well, the Republican race is heating up, and this week I have one of the nation's leading political analysts, Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Saboteau's Crystal Bowl at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. Kyle, welcome to Beyond the Polls. Good to be with you, Henry.
Well, let's start with the state where everyone's talking about, the state where I am right now. Had the state fair, which is a big deal here, and all the candidates came in to make an appearance. Who do you think came out, might have done something that mattered, and what sort of impact do you think that will have?
you know, I feel like we're in this time of the campaign where it's like, it's like a one horse race. And so we're sort of like watching Trump, but the others are just kind of in, you know, sort of doing the best they can and working, but it all sort of depends on whether he drops off or not. Um, but you know, I think, I think we've seen that, you know, DeSantis, frankly, um,
has dropped since he's entered the race. Uh, I guess it's about, it's, it's almost going on three months now since he got in the race was right before, um, you know, Memorial day. It seems like there are some, uh, candidates who have had some, you know, moments to Vivek Ramaswamy, I think is one, uh, Tim Scott is another Chris Christie, not an Iowa, but maybe a New Hampshire, but they're all just sort of jostling for this very distant, uh, you know, second or third place. Um,
So, and I don't necessarily know if anything I've seen in a campaign in recent weeks has really changed that. But, you know, we're in this position too where like,
you know, this, what could happen hypothetically, it sort of reminds me, I think it's like this old Ernest Hemingway quote, it's like, well, how did you grow broke? And it's like, well, gradually then suddenly. So like, what I'm looking for is like, does Trump start to gradually drop over the course of this calendar year before the primaries, before the Iowa caucus in mid-January? And then like, is it that sort of trajectory? But like,
People have been predicting Trump's decline forever over the course of many years. And, you know, obviously he lost the 2020 general election, but he did better than the polls suggested in that election. So it's like a dangerous thing. So, and with all the other candidates, you know,
or many of the other candidates not really going after Trump in sort of a significant way, they've sort of made themselves spectators. I understand why they're sort of not doing that, because if someone is the one to sort of wield the knife against Trump, none of these candidates want to be seen as the one who actually did that, because they can sort of fall off. You know, they might fall off too, but it does make them look kind of weak, frankly. So, you know, I...
I mean, it's just like we watch the candidates all the time, but it's just so much about Trump and where he is and how viable he is that the other stuff, to me, just becomes less interesting. Like, if we were talking...
Four or five months ago, I think I would have described as a two horse race. And like, it really does feel like a one horse race right now with just like, does Trump fall from his from his high position? So it's not, it's like kind of not that interesting, but also like we have to allow for the possibility that it could get a lot more interesting real quickly. So I know it's kind of a meandering answer, but that's just how I'm looking at this thing right now.
If this were a horse race, we'd be waiting for the pace horse to tire. But this isn't a horse race, so people in the stands are taking aim and trying to shoot the legs out from under the horse. And Chris Christie is the person who is wielding that rifle most frequently. And at least in New Hampshire, where some polls show him
either lapping at DeSantis' heels or in some cases statistically tied with him, it might be having an impact. What do you make of Chris Christie's efforts? And what do you make of the, you know, with not great success, but a little bit of bubble that seems to be occurring in the Granite State?
I wonder if Christie is sort of taking on like a John Kasich style role that we saw in 2016 where, you know, Kasich ended up emerging in, you know, second, although fairly distant second to Donald Trump in that race. And, you know, a lot of people in hindsight are sort of critical of Kasich who, you know, went on to endorse Joe Biden for president in 2020 and sort of became, you know, was on the outs with the or is on the outs, I think, with the sort of where the modern Republican Party is.
But Kasich was someone who was offering something different. And as you know, Henry, as you've written about extensively, New Hampshire is a state that kind of does have a block of not that conservative relative to the National Party Republicans, some folks who maybe think of themselves as moderate or even liberal, probably fewer of those kinds of people than maybe there used to be. And that kind of candidate can have some success in New Hampshire. We think about John McCain having his great performance there
I guess it's more than 20 years ago now when he was running as George W. Bush. But that sort of person can have some success in that place, and Christie sort of fits the mold of that kind of candidate in that race. It's just that, you know, even if Christie does well in New Hampshire, I guess where does he go? Although probably his more important role is, as you sort of suggested, which is that he's at least going after Trump and is criticizing him in various ways and is not sort of –
pussyfooting around about it, for lack of a better way of putting it. And again, a few of the other candidates are doing that. I guess Asa Hutchinson is too, although Christie has a force of personality. Whatever you think of him, the guy is sort of aggressive in your face. He's got that sort of, he fits that sort of New Jersey, Northeast stereotype in a way that Asa Hutchinson just doesn't, even though the messages from them
can end up being kind of similar. So, you know, Christie, I think, is best known from the 2016 campaign as kind of kneecapping Marco Rubio. You know, maybe he can serve some sort of function like that against Trump, you know, when and if they appear together on a debate stage.
Well, the other thing that could bring the pace horse down is the indictments. So far, they do not seem to have impeded Trump at all. Do you think that that's likely to be the case throughout this race? Or do you think that the indictments, to continue with the racing analogy, can be kind of like a light drizzle that may not screw up the track at the outset, but kind of muddies it by the time the horses come to the finish line? Yeah.
Look, I think we can – we don't – even though the polls haven't necessarily suggested Trump has been weakened since the indictments, and in fact you could argue he's gotten stronger, I do think it's possible that as we get closer to the voting that there might be some sort of trepidation among some Republicans about renominating Trump given just the weight of his problems, although of course I think you need –
people who are reliable republicans to sort of make that argument and make it more acceptable on the republican side and there you know again there aren't that many people doing that i mean i you know again christy is one but but i think from the perspective of your average rank and file republican christy may not even christy may be sort of on the outs with his own party um or at least with the the majority of his own party you know seth maskett um
really sharp political scientist. He's been writing about the state of the GOP. He had this great piece, I think it was this Wednesday morning or fairly recently. He was talking about how like
You know, you shouldn't expect these indictments to really prevent Trump from winning the nomination, in part because Trump represents a segment of the party that felt like it was sort of ignored and underserved in the Bush and McCain and Romney nominations or when Bush was president. And like they control the party now and and they don't want to give up that control the party, even if.
So even though Trump has taken on all this water, he's still maybe a better fit for the rank and file than some of these other candidates. I thought that was an interesting kind of argument. And, you know, so it also sort of suggests to me that if someone, you know, emerges against Trump, that that person may be sort of a populist like Trump. I mean, nobody can really replicate Trump.
the way Trump is sort of on the stump and personally, and I think some like DeSantis have tried to replicate that, but they just don't have the kind of charisma to pull it off. But you'd expect maybe that it's not going to be like a return to the old days or something, whoever the next nominee is, be it in 2024 or 2028 or whatever. Yeah, no, that's one thing I see when I read the polls. It's pretty clear that if the question is,
If the question that voters are posed with is, do we want to return to the pre-Trump Republican Party, supermajority Republicans say no. That's right. Is Donald Trump the best representative of the new Republican Party? That's an open question. An open question meaning that, yes, he has a huge, huge advantage in that, you know, and that's why he's ahead in the polls. But it's not as closed of a question as I am 100 percent certain that
somebody who proceeds as an ordinary Republican won't be nominated. Go ahead. Sorry to interrupt, but there's something I've been just sort of tracking, and I'm sure you are too, that I think is interesting, and that is that
You know, we know from 2016 in both and since then in both the general and the primary sort of electorate that Trump basically draws in some extra people to the Republican Party who don't have a four-year college degree. And again, some of those people doesn't necessarily mean those people aren't affluent.
And, you know, just it just is what it is. And then he sort of repels some people who do have a four year college degree. And so to the extent that Trump is weak, particularly with the Republican Party, you do see the sort of college versus non-college divide. And what is so striking about right now is that Trump not only dominates with the white non-college bloc, but he's also very competitive with college bloc. Like I've got the crosstabs for New York Times, Upshot did their polls from a couple of weeks ago.
And, you know, Trump is up 55-17 in Iowa with the white non-college bloc, but basically tied with DeSantis among white college. And in the national poll where Trump is doing even better, he's up 62-13 amongst the non-college bloc, and he's up 40-23 amongst the college bloc. So, like, you know, the bare minimum for any true Trump alternative is to, like, consolidate that college bloc.
And nobody's even doing that right now. And it just sort of gets back to this point of like, you have to keep open the idea in your mind that things could change. But like, it's it's pretty grim right now for these for these candidates not named Trump in this race, I think.
Yeah, no, I definitely agree. You know, if you force me to make a bet right now, you know, I'd definitely say Donald Trump's going to be the nominee. I've been around politics long enough to know it's too early to make that bet. But, you know, he starts in an incredibly strong position. So that brings me. Oh, go ahead, Kyle. I'm just going to say, you know, I I'm such a question for you and I don't know if I
have a good answer to it one way or the other but there's some people who feel like trump has basically kind of like lost a step on the stump um i you know to me maybe i'm just not a good judge of it i guess i don't necessarily see that one way or the other um just in you know seeing seeing clips of him here and there i don't do you do you have a feeling on that um because you know what i mean i maybe if if that ends up being part of the story and he's like at the debates and he just doesn't have the same kind of
vigor and verve that he had before. Maybe that's part of an eventual downfall, but I don't necessarily, I don't, I just can't say strongly one way or the other on it. You know, so I've only watched Trump all the way through twice in the last year. Once when he announced and once with the town hall with Caitlin Collins, the announcement definitely was a downfall.
downbeat, nothing new here, Trump. This was the sort of thing that you would expect from an old rock band that is doing its greatest hits. Caitlin Collins, I thought he was kind of a new Trump.
which is say he was combative, but also contained, which I thought made him more effective. You know, again, you either like Trump and his thing or he doesn't, but he was not stepping all over himself and he wasn't raising his voice as much. So it came across better in what could have been a more difficult or more contentious interview had he not been contained. So, so that's, so on the one hand,
maybe he is choosing to lose a step to make himself a little more effective. But I think, again, he will have to expose himself a little bit more as we get closer to the primary, and I will spend more time watching him in part also to see, is there anything new that he's saying? One thing in 2022 that was very clear was there is nothing new that he's saying. It's all the same old issues, which now have become
de rigueur for the most part in Republican politics, with the added plus of whining about the 2020 election. It'd be an interesting question whether he'll be able to evolve. Certainly he's with policy proposals. His team is rolling out a little bit more that's different. But it'll be interesting to see whether he makes that as a selling pitch as opposed to something that's just existing on the website.
Yeah, that all makes sense to me. So let me give you a last question, which is, let's assume that Trump sticks to his pledge or his statement that he's not going to be at the debate on August 23rd. Who do you think needs to do, what do you think each of the leading contenders, and, you know,
what I mean is let's not talk about Doug Burgum or some, you know, Asa Hutchinson, if he does make the, what are each of the other ones need to do, you know, in a short synopsis.
I would say for DeSantis, the alarming thing for him is that there are people who are starting to get close to him in certain places and in certain polls. Christie in New Hampshire, Tim Scott and or Nikki Haley in South Carolina. Iowa, I think, is more of a mixed bag. But the thing is, he had a very solid...
he had a very solid hold on second place and was kind of close to Trump before. And now it's like his, his hold on second place though, he still has it is sort of questionable. And so I just think he needs, you know, just a, just a, a strong performance. And also if you look at it just through, you know, if, if DeSantis, if no Trump is there, DeSantis is kind of the leading candidate there. He's the one whose podium is going to be in the middle of the middle of the stage. You know,
you know, who is able to pick at him and who is able to sort of like surpass him. And so, you know, he may end up being, I mean, you know, Trump clearly has still focused all of his fire, mostly on DeSantis. The others on the stage also are going to be focusing all their fire on him too. And so I kind of think it makes sense to interpret whatever happens through his lens, because if, if he has a bad debate, that naturally means that somebody else will have had a good debate and might even start to pass him. And,
And so again, you know, the logical people to think about are, you know, I guess, I guess Tim Scott, um, sort of stands out. Um, but even like, even like Rama Swami, maybe, I mean, he could, he could have his moment just like, you know, I mean, he's a political outsider as a run before, but we've seen like, you know, Herman Cain had his moment in 2012, Ben Carson had his moment in 2016. Like maybe that's coming. Um, although there's also, there's a lot of debate about, um,
Steve Shepard of Politico wrote recently, maybe you saw this, that he, Ramos-Swami performs a lot better in online polls than he does in traditional telephone polls. It's sort of a weird thing, so it's hard to know exactly how real it is for him. But yeah, I really kind of look at it through the lens of what happens with DeSantis. He either rises above, keeps his hold on second, or somebody else starts to knock him off of that. And that's what I'll be sort of looking for.
Well, Kyle, where can my listeners follow your work? So I'm at the Sabato's Crystal Ball. We come out usually twice a week, centerforpolitics.org backslash crystal ball. I also am the co-host of the Politics Is Everything podcast that I record with my colleague, Kara Ong-Whaley. We come out at least once a week with me, and Kara does some interviews herself.
So, yeah, that's the primary spot you can find all of us. And what's your handle on X? At KKondik. And I've had kind of a resurgence there because I'm from Ohio, and I was tweeting a lot about the Issue 1 vote that recently happened there. So I've enjoyed, you know,
x slash twitter has a lot of problems but man it is still the best for election night um it is just a fabulous resource and i mean that's why i keep coming back just because um you know for all the other problems it's just so it's so uh great for tracking results and being able to put out observations and also see observations from a whole lot of other people well thank you and i look forward to having you back on beyond the polls anytime thanks henry
This week on State and Play, I am joined by Skylar Croft, political editor at The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, where he'll be talking all things Palmetto State and explain to us why this is the state that really matters. Skylar, welcome to Beyond the Polls. Thanks for having me.
Well, explain for my listeners the historic importance of the South Carolina Republican primary and the contours of the contest. It tends to have outsized importance, even though it is neither the first nor the second race. Well, it really has become the state that punches above its weight. You go back in time, and the primary is pretty much a product of Lee Atwater and our former governor, Carol Campbell.
who got together and realized, "Look, the country is moving south. The Republican Party is dominating the south. Let's get a piece of this before everybody else." And so they moved and made friends and talked to the party. And they were good friends with George Bush and Ronald Reagan back in those days and just moved South Carolina to the first in the south in the Republican nominating contest.
Since then, it's been the decider. Donald Trump won here. Newt Gingrich won here, oddly enough. So it does tend to go lean to the right when everyone else is pulling in the other direction. But it is the first contest, and it also is a place where a lot of the campaigns are going to come to end. Sure.
So how are they coming right now? You know, that you hear a lot about people here. I am in Iowa right now. And of course, everyone who's running was in over the weekend to the Iowa State Fair. You hear about people going to New Hampshire. But given the outsized role South Carolina plays, are the candidates paying a lot of attention there, either individually?
In person or on the media? Not really at all. There's been no TV, no radio. There's been some things put on doors and in the mail. If they make a swing here, it's widely covered. But this is not the intensity of a New Hampshire or an Iowa. If you don't survive those places, you won't end up here. So they're making their big stake there. And I think they're saving their ammunition to come down here to see if they can make it through those contests first.
So when historically does South Carolina start to heat up in terms of money and time? Is it after New Hampshire or is it a little bit before as people prime the pump? Right around that time, you know, it doesn't do you any good to come down here with no money or
or no viability. So you're going to see a lot of their time up that way. Those who survive will come down here, and there will be, I think it's 16 to 18 days between the Nevada vote and when South Carolina kicks in. So that's when you're really going to see the intensity of it. We will have no competitors during that time.
Wow. Up here in Iowa, everyone's talking about, yeah, people see the candidates four or five times, but until they get to make up their mind, it sounds like you don't get that luxury, but you do get two weeks of pretty intense in-person activity. Yeah, that's when you'll see a couple different televised debates here during those weeks. You'll see lots of campaign stops, barbecue stops especially. You'll see a lot of that. Right now, it's more if they make a swing, it's widely followed, and they're just driving their early voters out here.
Surprisingly, I can't really point to anyone who's been here a lot. Governor DeSantis has made a couple swings. Mike Pence was very popular here before he even got in the race. He's completely dipped off then, haven't seen much of him at all. Chris Christie was here once. And then this is the home base of Governor Haley and Senator Scott. So they flare up every couple weeks.
So, you know, with respect to Haley and Scott, it's pretty unusual for a state the size of South Carolina to have two top-tier candidates who are going for the presidency.
What would it take for them to be willing to risk coming down here if they haven't won one of the first three? Or do you think they won't risk a defeat in their home state and that even if they might do better than you'd expect, they will drop out before they get home? Well, that's a really interesting question, but I kind of paraphrase it like this or to say it like this is.
If you're running for president and you have money, it's very cheap and it costs you nothing. It's not your money, it's somebody else's. Do you want to come down here and be embarrassed or do you want to come out down here and spend what you can? So, and again, there's a lot more time between here and then as well. It seems like Senator Scott has a lot of
money. And so we'll have to see. Again, the way they're running now, even in the state, they're not running against Donald Trump. No one's really mentioning him. It's still a campaign against Joe Biden. And that's what you're seeing in all the advertising. So the poll, the few polls I've seen have Trump in the lead, maybe a little bit of a clumping between the other candidates. Does that surprise you at all?
No, I think that's going to be the norm. You know, no one's punching at him, and his numbers are the same. Governor Haley and Senator Scott do much better in South Carolina than they do these other states in terms of polling. You know, some of them are hitting double digits. But, you know, if someone is up at the 50% range, that's kind of a nicety. I think they're getting those numbers because a lot of those know these people, and they've seen them in office for the last dozen years or so.
So DeSantis seems to be doing well in South Carolina, even though there are two natives in the race. And, you know, the few polls I've seen suggest is either running even or maybe even slightly ahead of them, depending on when it was taken. Why is DeSantis doing well when people who don't like Trump could pick one of their own homegrown candidates?
I think it's largely because they're overexposed. You either like these, Governor Haley or Senator Scott, a lot, or you just don't care and are looking for something different that's not Trump. And I think that's why he's doing as well as he is. The question is, is he really doing that well? I know that his campaign has almost been mostly singular. I mean, every stop is about what is woke and overcoming woke and that kind of stuff, too. So it's really almost seemingly nonpartisan.
one-dimensional on that issue as opposed to, you know, a front across multiple issues at a time.
So historically, what types of things move Republican voters? You know, that South Carolina, because it's in the South, has a reputation of kind of being an evangelical state. But yet the evangelical favorite that tends to win in Alabama or the Iowa caucus tends not to do as well in South Carolina. Why is that? And what is it that the average Republican voter is actually looking for?
Well, I think there's been a mashing of the evangelical and the main street and the easy street Republican and the Wall Street Republican. So, you know, they've got so many choices right now. They're kind of, you know, picking many different things. And I'd also include that the military voter and the military retiree voter, they seem to be flocking towards Trump as well. And there's 400 and some odd thousand of those folks here, too. So that's a very large chunk of what will be the Republican primary.
So South Carolina does not have partisan voter registration. So you can show up and pick a ballot. We know that in the Georgia primary, when Trump was taking on Kemp and Raffensperger, that one of the reasons the polls were so far off in underestimating how well Kemp was going to do and not catching Raffensperger winning without going to a runoff at all was because of an influx of people who don't normally vote in Republican primaries.
You know, is there a chance of that happening in South Carolina, given the dearth of serious? Well, first, I think the South Carolina Democrats have it on a different day because this is a party run primary, if I remember correctly. Yeah, the Democrats will be voting on February 3rd. So their brief period of intensity will be late. Right.
And then that opens the door for the Republican voters, which is going to be the dominant part of February down here. So is there any indication or is there any opportunity that you think that...
You might have people who normally wouldn't be Republicans coming into the South Carolina primary to vent anger at President Trump, or perhaps, as we saw in some of the primaries last time, to vote for the MAGA candidate, or in this case, vote for Trump, because they want to see, as Democrats, the weaker candidate in the general election.
Doubtful. I mean, that's all part of the South Carolina mystique of where the corruption and the dirty politics is. You know, Robert Kennedy, they were speaking here, is coming here to campaign across the state, and he's getting no traction and no endorsement from the Democratic Party. So whatever the Democrats do will be for Joe Biden, and it will be horribly low numbers. There's just going to be a lot of excitement there.
The excitement will be in the Republican primary. And, you know, I don't think people will be moving in here and taking up arms against Donald Trump. They might go to option here, option there. A lot of it, too, you don't know who's going to be on the ballot.
I think it's going to be just so weeded out by that time. Mm-hmm. So traditionally, the South Carolina primary has had an opt-out from the rules that the RNC imposes that can the races early on have to be proportional. It has historically been a race where whoever wins one of the congressional districts gets all three delegates, and then whoever wins the state gets all of the remainder. Is that still expected to be the rule, in which case,
anyone who wins South Carolina gets an outsized bump in terms of the delegate count. Yeah, again, too, that's the delegates. I don't know if that's important so much now as just the headline and who the favorite is and going from there. Because, you know, you turn around, you go right into Super Tuesday, which the contest will be over by then. So I think you more want that headline. You know, Trump will probably stay here and savor his victory, which is likely, as the tea leaves are now, why
Everybody else leaves the state early and goes try to set up a shop somewhere else.
Trump's endorsed candidate in the Myrtle Beach Congressional District won handily in the primary last time. His endorsed candidate in the Charleston District against Nancy Mays lost, but did quite well. Is that a sign of the sort of hold he has on a significant number of South Carolinians? And if it is, what can somebody who's challenging him do now
to knock him down in Pankhurst. You probably need to begin by campaigning against him, and no one is doing that. I mean, you're seeing clone after clone after clone. I mean, again, you know, Governor Haley and Tim Scott's campaigns are almost mirrors of themselves. You know, they're campaigning against wokeism.
Governor Haley went down to the border with Mexico in April. Senator Scott went down to the border with Mexico just a few weeks back and filmed a commercial. He made it seem like it was his first trip there, but it wasn't. He'd been there before as a senator. So they're not separating themselves from each other, let alone taking on Trump. So it's becoming more and more of a packaging vote than anything else. There's just not much difference between the rest of them.
Tell me what you might be looking for over the next couple of months to try and gauge if anybody is making any headway. Well, we've asked a lot about the charges against Trump. They don't seem to be mattering that much.
And again, a lot of them, I think that most of the Republican Party or people who will be Republicans, you're either with Trump or you're in reserve and watching because no one knows what that's going to look like. Again, six months from now is a lifetime in politics. We haven't even written or seen what those headlines are yet.
You know, again, Iowa, New Hampshire will be the great decider. And we know that because the candidates are up there. I think we did a story just this weekend just looking at Governor Haley's appearances. You know, 40 days in New Hampshire, 30 some days in Iowa, 70 days total in the campaign where she got into just during the spring. You know, that still tells us that's where people are.
So, Skylar, where can my listeners follow your work so that they can be on the know or in the know about what's going on in South Carolina politics? CharlestonPostsAndCurrier.com. So, I
I think our lead story today, one of them was on Robert Kennedy coming. We had a reaction to the Trump charges. I'll quote Lindsey Graham fairly often. You know, we follow Nancy Mace. We try to bring, we've offered all the campaigns to come in. We have a feature called Pints and Politics that we put online where we go to a local pub and just talk politics with the candidates and try to get them to relax. So we're going to have a schedule of that too. So go ahead to the Post and Courier website and stay tuned.
Well, heck, pints in politics. It almost makes me want to get into the race. Yeah, we may have you when you're here. Let us know and we'll set something up. Okay. And that's a legitimate offer. I'd love to have you. Okay, well, thank you. And thank you very much for joining me and my listeners on Beyond the Polls. Sure, anytime.
One of my favorite features is the ad of the week, where I take a look at a political ad and I dissect it for you. I go through what it says, what it does, what its aim is, and why it is an effective piece of political advertising, not from an aesthetic viewpoint, but from a political viewpoint, that it does its job in trying to attract or keep an audience. And with that in mind, I'd like to take a look at Donald J. Trump's recent ad,
responding to the indictments. How far will the most corrupt president in history go to keep Republicans from winning back the White House? Meet the cast of unscrupulous accomplices he's assembled to get Trump. Alvin Brandt.
The radical liberal New York prosecutor who refuses to prosecute violent criminals. Jack Smith, who's made a career persecuting innocent Republican officials. Letitia James, the socialist who ran on the promise, I'll go after Trump.
And Biden's newest lackey, Atlanta DA, Fannie Willis. So incompetent, on her watch, violent crimes have exploded. So tainted, Willis was thrown off one case for trying to prosecute a political opponent. So corrupt, Willis got caught hiding a relationship with a gang member she was prosecuting. So dishonest, Willis was accused of creating a fake subpoena. Welcome to the Fraud Squad.
I'm Donald J. Trump, and I approve this message. Well, as you can see, Donald Trump is responding to the indictments in a typical Donald Trump way. He's going after the other guys. And that's why this is an effective ad. Let's take a look at where Trump is in the polls.
Donald Trump is basically statistically tied with Joe Biden in general election polls. He's holding the vast majority of people who voted for him in 2016. And in the all-important Republican primary, he's leading with between 40 and 55 percent in the key state polls and close to 50 percent in national polls.
So what he has to do is keep the indictments from hurting him. He's not trying to attract people with this ad. He's trying to keep people loyal to him. And this ad does it great. First, he points out their bet in law, Joe Biden. And what you couldn't hear, but you could see in the ad, is they have lots of pictures of Joe Biden tripping and falling and so forth. In other words, the auditors,
Audios talks about corruption.
And the video talks about age without actually mentioning the word. That is exactly what his target audience already believes. Then we get into the prosecutors who are bringing these cases. They are not prosecutors. They're Biden's accomplices. Oh, what a wonderful use of language there. Again, they're bringing an idea that people in this group already have and giving them a name to it. This is ridiculous.
If you want to say it's a crime family, this is the Don and his soldiers. This is a conspirator and his accomplices. It's a very well done ad that also ties these people to issues and themes that conservative Republicans already agree with. Two of them are tied allegedly to crime outbreaks or incidents.
non-failures to prosecute violent criminals. They're targeted, as Jack Smith is, to going after Republicans. In other words, these people are motivated by ill intent.
And then he ties it all together with this fabulous mnemonic device that helps people remember what these people are, the fraud squad. What a great way for people to begin to think about it. You can imagine that taking off as a viral meme, Joe Biden, the fraud squad, all across MAGA world. Remember, the target audience isn't the swing voter here. The target audience is the person who likes Donald Trump,
might be susceptible to an argument from somebody else, and they want to bring up grand and tribal loyalty. Stay with him. He's under attack. These people are corrupt. These people are liberal. These people are this. These people are that. You're part of the merry band of virtuous people, and Donald Trump is your leader. This is a well-crafted ad that succinctly argues why Donald Trump voters shouldn't abandon their man, and that's why it's the ad of the week.
That's it for this episode. Join me again in two weeks when I will be joined by Politico's lead analyst, Steve Shepard, National Review's Ramesh Pannu to talk all things Republican, and the leading political reporter for the Des Moines Register, Rhiann Funenstile, who will talk about all things Iowa. Thanks for listening, and I hope you'll be back in two weeks when we reach for the stars and venture beyond the polls.