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You're listening to Fox News Radio. I'm Ben Domenech. So the Iowa caucuses have finally come upon us. And as expected, former President Donald Trump has run away with the win in Iowa with about 50, 50 plus percent of the vote. That's with about 90 percent of the vote reporting. So it seems fair to say that it'll probably end up being around that number at this recording.
Coming in second is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who looks to have edged out Nikki Haley for that second place by a couple of points. We'll see what the ultimate numbers turn out to be. Of course, you may remember that in the very recent past, Iowa has turned out to be a state that was very difficult to control.
measure when it came to counting in an orderly fashion. We didn't really know the results when it came to 2020, for instance, when it came to the Democratic side for quite a while. How convenient for the Biden campaign. In terms of what comes out of this, I just don't think that it changes the race all that much.
As I've said before in this program, it really did seem to me that unless you had one of the two also-ran candidates dramatically underperform or dramatically overperform in DeSantis or Nikki Haley, then you could have the argument about one of them getting out.
But as it stands, it does seem to me that the rationale for both of them staying in seems to be pretty strong. Haley having more of an advantage when it comes to the next combat point in New Hampshire is, of course, something that plays in her favor. But DeSantis, arguably at this point, still has more resources and organization, and it doesn't really seem likely that he would drop out without competing in a few more states.
One question that I do think is more prescient and more interesting coming out of this Iowa result is whether Vivek Ramaswamy stays in. His 7% hovering around that level at the current count is something that clearly is probably denying the chance of Donald Trump from taking that big 60% lead or something like that along the lines of what he would certainly like to enjoy.
And so we'll see whether there is more fire directed at the vague coming out of Iowa, as we saw in the closing days of that campaign. Personally, as I've detailed for you before, I just don't think that there are a lot of lessons to take out of Iowa anymore.
We've seen it have kind of an outsized role in a number of different campaigns, elevating them or disintegrating them according to the performance there. But we've also seen them render a verdict that ultimately was rejected by the rest of the GOP in a lot of different senses.
You know, we've seen that happen time and again, most recently, of course, in the last three competitive contests where you saw Mike Huckabee beat John McCain in 2008. We saw Rick Santorum beat Mitt Romney in 2012. And you saw Ted Cruz beat Donald Trump in 2016. This time around, it seems like Iowa is more representative of the center of where the party is.
is that their rural and evangelical voters are now, as opposed to being skeptics of Donald Trump, firmly in favor of him. And also that you're likely to see a situation where the college grad demographic is going to be the one that DeSantis and Haley are fighting over in the coming contest. That's something that essentially has diminishing returns for them, given that it represents a much smaller portion of the electorate.
But one thing that I do think is really a problem here for the Republican Party is that the Iowa population, the New Hampshire population, and really the population of a lot of these early states is not necessarily the population of the kind of demographic that they need to win in order to win national elections anymore.
I pointed this out a couple of different times, but I feel like this is one of the situations where, you know, with the post-Trump, post-populism injection in the GOP, there really hasn't been any kind of reorientation of the process to take that into account.
to involve more Hispanic voters, for instance, more immigrant working class voters earlier in the process, and of course, extending beyond the normal limits of the evangelical white Christian set that was so critical in the past for the Republican Party. Not just to say that those people are going to be taken for granted, but that when it
comes to general elections, you can pretty much count on them to line up behind the Republican. It's much more about winning over those independent, swinging voters who are in the middle in a number of different senses. And I think that that's something that really should gain consideration in the wake of this 2020 primary. Things are going to move to New Hampshire now. I'll be up there next week, along with a lot of my colleagues at The Spectator and at Fox.
And I'll be curious to see what voters are saying and hear their takes on these different candidates. At the same time, again, this is going to be a state that's not particularly representative of where the Republicans will need to compete going forward in terms of the general election. They have two Democratic candidates.
They have two Democratic members of the House. The only remaining real Republican family there is the Sununus, and Chris Sununu is obviously resigning at the end of his current gubernatorial term. So it's just not necessarily the kind of state that people really ought to pay all that much attention to, necessarily.
The Republican Party is becoming more Western, becoming more Southern, becoming more working class. And it also has to care about the blue wall. Winning in a state like Pennsylvania becomes all the more important for a Republican candidate. And yet you have nothing like that on the current schedule early on in terms of the assessment of the ability of a Republican nominee to compete in such a way. More of the Ben Domenech podcast right after this.
Fox News Radio On Demand on the Fox News app. Download the app and just click listen. When you swipe left, you can listen to your favorite Fox News talk shows live. Swipe right for the latest Fox News Radio newscasts on demand. Fox News Radio on the Fox News app. Download it today. And that brings me to the number of voters that you saw this evening in caucuses in Iowa.
It turns out that the number is probably going to be around 130,000. That's according to the estimates from NBC News. That would be a pretty strong turnout.
in terms of just having one competitive caucus, though it's obviously dwarfed by the fact that there have been two competitive caucuses, one on each side, going back historically. In other words, it would become a much smaller number if you were using that as history. Last time around, there were more than 185,000 voters who came out to dispute between Cruz, obviously Trump, Marco Rubio, and others.
who were all up at the time on the ballot. It's easy to forget that Jeb Bush was running, you know, going into that election. But it's one of these things where you have a very small number of voters who
in a state who are showing the dedication to go out and try to convince their neighbors to vote in a certain direction. And I realize that there are a lot of people in the media who find this entertaining on some level. It's old-fashioned, it's charming, etc. And I understand that charm. As I've said before, I do think that there's some value to it. But on a certain level, do you really want 130,000 people in a state of 3.1 million people?
in the middle of the country with a demographic that doesn't line up with the rest of the country at all to end up having such a significant portion of the decision when it comes to who ends up being the nominee of your party.
I certainly don't think that makes any sense, especially considering in this modern era where you have to compete across the board in states all across the country that have very different priorities. It's very different than the stage that we had back in the day when you had favorite sons and you had different people coming out of different portions of the country, perhaps with pockets of delegates who could be swayed one way or the other once you got to a convention. If you wanted to go back to that kind of system, I might be in favor of it.
In fact, it might produce nominees who are more representative on some level. But instead, we have this process that I think is very non-representative, where there are a lot of blue states in particular who play an outsized role in choosing who the Republican nominee is. And then on the Democratic side, they've really engaged in a kind of authoritarian crackdown in order to produce the type of nominees that they want to have. They have a lot more in common with the old smoke-filled rooms.
than they might like to admit. From my perspective, one of the healthy things coming out of this is a recognition that what we thought about the Republican Party is true. It is a party dominated by Donald Trump and by his populist approach to conservatism and to Republican policies. That being said, I don't think that the national public is
has necessarily processed the fact that he's going to be, in all likelihood, the nominee of the Republican Party. In fact, there are a number of different polls that have come out over the past month that indicate that voters are still largely checked out. They aren't really convinced that he's going to be the nominee, nor are they convinced that Joe Biden is going to be the nominee of the Democratic Party.
It's going to be quite surprising, I think, for a lot of people to learn that that's the direction that both these parties are going. And of course, that includes a lot of different risks on both sides.
For Republicans, the risks are obvious. The legal battles that surround Donald Trump that are going to drain him of resources, financial and otherwise, are things that certainly help him within the process of achieving the nomination, but really don't seem likely to help him when it comes to a general election. On the flip side, the Biden administration is so incompetent, dominated by idiots, you
run by people who just can't seem to manage anything, that they have the very distinct problem, the challenge of not being able to run on their record. Instead, they have to turn around and make this about some kind of fearsome threat to democracy that Donald Trump represents. It's January 6th forever from their perspective. Now, that's something Republicans tend to laugh off.
But it's also something that they weaponized very effectively with independent voters and suburbanites last time around with a lot of candidates who were largely unknown to them or seemed to be on the fringes that they were able to demonize.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden together are in all likelihood going to end up being the two most unpopular people nominated on opposing tickets in the history of the United States of America. Think about that for a moment. Incredibly unpopular people, both with 50 plus percent of people disapproving of them nominated and opposing each other on a general election ticket.
It's something that, you know, at the very least, you have to say is historic. But it's also something that I think speaks to the lack of appetite on the part of anyone who is remotely popular or remotely consensus building in terms of their behavior as a governor or politician on a state level of aspiring to the presidency at this particular moment.
If you try to do that, you will be demonized. You will be destroyed. You will be absolutely and without any hesitation flayed by your opponents in the media with every scandal that is related to you brought up and with the whole energy of the opposing party brought to bear against you. Democrats tend to be a lot better at that than Republicans, but it's still true if you're on the Democratic side.
From my perspective, this is something that's happened historically at a lot of different moments in American history. It's not something that's necessarily all that new, but it is something that we have seen come and go before in various seasons of politically heated assault, one party on the other. It's not something that seems to be about to go away anytime soon in the current moment.
That's the more depressing aspect of this. And if you have those types of people unwilling to stand for national election, then we are likely to continue to get the kind of people that we currently see, namely those who are absolutely adored by portions of their own party.
Pushed and emphatically backed as being heroes, representative of their interests, avatars for their point of view, and people standing in the middle of the country, independents who want to say, I wish that we could do better. But we won't until something changes in a big way.
I'm Ben Domenech. You've been listening to the Ben Domenech podcast brought to you by Fox News Radio. We'll be back next week with more to dive back into the fray. Listen ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app.
Hey, it's Clay Travis. Join me for Outkick the show as we dive deep into a mix of topics. New episodes available Monday to Friday on your favorite podcast platform and watch directly on outkick.com forward slash watch.