In today's installation of our 2024 election series, host and Penta Senior Partner Kevin Madden is joined by Penta Director Brendan Conley and special guest David Kochel, an inside participant in six presidential campaigns and current host of the HighBall Politics podcast. The group breaks down the results of the recent Iowa Republican caucus, examining the political undercurrents that contributed to Donald Trump's significant victory. The discussion delves into the debate on the media's early call of the race and the often-overlooked role of low voter turnout. Learn how these factors, coupled with groundwork laid by veteran campaigns, set the stage for the 2024 presidential race, challenging newer presidential contenders like Nikki Haley.
Amid identity shifts in the Republican Party, this episode dissects the influence of Trump's working-class appeal and the impact of the Bragg indictment on his support base. David provides a boots-on-the-ground perspective, offering valuable insights into Trump's nuanced position as both a leader and a near-victim in the eyes of his followers. With the New Hampshire primary on the horizon, the spotlight is on the strategies of candidates like Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis. Tune in for a comprehensive analysis of the race poised to redefine the GOP and the nation's political future.
Check out the HighBall Politics podcast here.
In today's installation of our 2024 election series, host and Penta Senior Partner Kevin Madden is joined by Penta Director Brendan Conley and special guest David Kochel, an inside participant in six presidential campaigns and current host of the HighBall Politics podcast. The group breaks down the results of the recent Iowa Republican caucus, examining the political undercurrents that contributed to Donald Trump's significant victory. The discussion delves into the debate on the media's early call of the race and the often-overlooked role of low voter turnout. Learn how these factors, coupled with groundwork laid by veteran campaigns, set the stage for the 2024 presidential race, challenging newer presidential contenders like Nikki Haley.
Amid identity shifts in the Republican Party, this episode dissects the influence of Trump's working-class appeal and the impact of the Bragg indictment on his support base. David provides a boots-on-the-ground perspective, offering valuable insights into Trump's nuanced position as both a leader and a near-victim in the eyes of his followers. With the New Hampshire primary on the horizon, the spotlight is on the strategies of candidates like Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis. Tune in for a comprehensive analysis of the race poised to redefine the GOP and the nation's political future.
Check out the HighBall Politics podcast here.
Welcome to another episode of what's At Stake, a PENTA podcast. I'm your host for this episode, kevin Madden, and I'm a senior partner here at PENTA. I'm here today with my colleagues, penta director Brendan Conley, and a special guest who is, first and foremost, known as the backup drummer for your third favorite band, a man with a face for podcasts and Iowa's most prominent political strategist and that would be, of course, everybody knows who I've just described David Cotchel. David, thanks for being here.
Speaker 2:Hey, thanks for having me guys Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:You like that part about being the backup drummer for your third favorite band?
Speaker 2:I mean I've heard it before. I'm okay with it.
Speaker 1:So for our listeners. David has been an inside participant in six presidential campaigns and he currently hosts the Highball Politics podcast, which I'm sure everybody has heard before. He's a part-time pundit and a full-time practitioner of campaign politics based in Iowa. Brendan and David, it's great to be here today and I want to just sort of get into the scene setting here.
Speaker 1:So one of the reasons we have you, david, is we want to talk about Iowa and, as we record this, former President Donald Trump, has just scored a record setting win in the Iowa caucuses, a victory that seemed to solidify his grip on the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, even though less than 1% of the delegates have yet to be battled over. What do we think are the implications for this win, for the general election ahead, and what should we be thinking about with one clear GOP frontrunner? So let's dive in. I want to start off, david, with your assessment on the ground, real-time. One of the main controversies that came out of this Iowa caucus and we can't have an Iowa caucus without controversy was the media's decision to call the race before caucus voting had even ended, and that caused a little bit of a stir. What's your take on that? Right call, wrong call? Why?
Speaker 2:Well, they continue to do the wrong thing, which is assume that Iowa is an election. It's not. It is a party meeting. It is basically a mini convention that happens precinct by precinct in 1700 places in Iowa. It's not like you're getting results back, it's just totally different. It was wrong to do. They should never have done it. And DeSantis was up, I think, in Ankeny, iowa, at a caucus location and was giving his speech to the delegates. This is before a single speech had happened in that precinct. It was a pretty large precinct. I think it might have been three or four co-located precincts.
Speaker 2:While that was happening, cbs and AP called the race. I mean, it was. It's just. There is absolutely no excuse. The media doesn't understand what a caucus is. It's a fluid, dynamic thing happening in real time with people on site, with people seeing, and for them to call the race then was wildly irresponsible. We're going to have to do something about that. If there's going to be another Iowa caucus, we're going to have to pass some kind of rule that all the caucuses have to have concluded before they can announce a result. Now the media will hate that, but this was the wrong way to do it. I don't know how many votes it impacted, but if it impacted any, it's too many.
Speaker 1:So the point I made to reporters that asked me about this was first, what's the real utility in calling it so soon while the caucuses are still going on? Why not wait the two hours until the caucuses are actually completed in order to do that? Who does that really serve? And then the second point is don't ever wonder to me again about why there's a gathering level of mistrust in the media from Republican audiences around the country.
Speaker 2:That's right, absolutely right. This is an undermining of the integrity of the Iowa process. The Democratic side have had their own problems, well documented, which is part of why I think the caucuses weren't back this year for the Democrats. The Republicans, we had our one time, kevin, as you'll remember, in 2012, when the race was literally so close we could not call it until one o'clock in the morning. But other than that, we've never had a problem in the Republican Party dealing with our caucus results and reporting them accurately and actually pretty quickly. If we'd have held this primary in California, we wouldn't know the result for two weeks. So we did a great job. They got way ahead of us and I you know yeah, you're right, it's going to undermine confidence and shame on them. It shouldn't have happened.
Speaker 1:And David was referencing that 2012 primary where Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are so close. But what I remember about that, David, was I was declaring to victory no matter what, even though it was still close. So got to do what I got to do?
Speaker 2:We got the victory for two weeks.
Speaker 1:We needed it Two weeks, we got it, that's right.
Speaker 3:Brendan David, you know, one of the things I've been thinking about is just how low the turnout was this go around. I think I remember hearing you expecting low turnout, but first of all, did you expect it this low? You know, second, whether I'm sure it was a factor, but is that true? And how much do you think that impacted things? And then, third, what do you think that meant? I mean, does that mean that the ones who did show up are these folks who are, you know, are likely to be the Trump caucuses or these? You know how do you think that played into things? And then the results.
Speaker 2:The lower turnout definitely benefits the campaigns that had been almost a year now, which put Nikki Haley at a disadvantage because she didn't really have any organization until you know, 45, 50 days ago, when America's for prosperity endorsed and started, you know, putting boots on the ground. They had 100 canvassers and about a dozen field people and while they did great work kind of catch up work for that short period of time, it wasn't enough to overcome the weather. We had a great friend in Plymouth County. I asked them if they went in caucus. They said no, the truck was out in the driveway and the gas gelled up. They couldn't start it. So, like I mean this was happening all over the place, I had over under turnout at about 150,000 if we were in a weather neutral event.
Speaker 2:The caucuses for, excuse me, eight years ago were 187,000, but that was by far the high water mark we never had. The difference this time is a boring campaign. It wasn't led from wire to wire. A lot of folks had dropped out. It just didn't feel like there was a ton of energy or intrigue around this. Everybody kind of knew who was going to win. So that held down turnout. But then the weather, I think, was the big factor and I still had people telling me no, it's going to be over 150. There's just too much. We've got more Republicans now in the party than we did over the last 20 years. It was actually higher than our lowest. Our lowest caucus was in 1996. It was about 96,000 people, so it's actually not the smallest. But 35 below wind shield, you guys. It's not just cold, it's almost dangerous.
Speaker 1:I call it punch you in the face.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, if your car goes in the ditch, it's not coming out. I mean we're talking about frostbite and it's super uncomfortable and a lot of older caucus scores. If you're over 70, 75, you don't want to go out in that. It's dark, you don't want to drive in it. So I'm not surprised the turnout was down.
Speaker 2:But if you think about it this way, we're not talking about an election where people can show up any time during the day. They've got to be at one place at 7 pm on a Monday night and we still had, in spite of all that, 18% of Republicans. They didn't just go vote, they went to a convention, a mini-precinct convention. That's pretty impressive turnout when you put it in context like that. So I don't think it was so small turnout that it render us useless in the future. I do think the campaigns that had organization on the ground, which was to Santas and Trump probably benefited from it, and the one that got to the party late was organization. Nikki Haley ended up coming up a couple of points short of what she really needed to do.
Speaker 1:So, David, I want to talk to you about. As you know, a big part of politics and political campaigns is expectations management and one of the reasons.
Speaker 1:I ask you this is look, if you look at the Santas, he came in with a lot of hype, or at least when he introduced his campaign, and if we were to go back six months, his numbers were in the low 30s and people were really right. If you asked anybody in Iowa who do you want to hear from, they'd say I want to hear from this to Santas guy who just won with big numbers down in Florida and could potentially represent another option for our party, if not Trump but the Santas. Let's fast forward. $200 million six months later goes from the high 30s to 21%. Now turnout, with the weather related turnout, that may be a factor, but I think it's fair to say that he underwhelmed with the level of expectations he set. Would you agree? Disagree? Oh, he definitely underwhelmed.
Speaker 2:I was talking to a lot of the folks that came into Iowa for him, who were working with the campaign fundraisers that came in and all kinds of people, and I really think they all expected to be in the mid 30s and get within a single ditch as a Trump Now being on the ground.
Speaker 2:I knew that wasn't going to happen. It was. You know, he lost altitude consistently from the moment he got in the race until we took the vote on Monday night, and I think there's a bunch of reasons. And this doesn't really go to expectations. Man, this will just go to the campaign trajectory happened To me.
Speaker 2:I think he got in late. He had been attacked by Trump for almost six months straight at that time without responding at all. And then when he got on the ground, I feel like he just didn't live up to the billing. His stump is fine but he's not a natural campaigner. He doesn't have that sort of. He doesn't project the kind of charisma you know that works in an Iowa caucus. And even though he got high profile endorsements at the end, by then I think Trump had just beaten him down into those low 20s. He never really moved off of it.
Speaker 2:And then Haley comes along and sneaks up and I know a bunch of voters that had switched from him to her. They didn't want Trump, but they didn't think he could get it done. So there was a bunch of that. But also it's hard to it's hard to lower expectations when you're out there saying every day we've got the best organization that's ever been built in Iowa. We've covered more precincts, we've knocked on 800,000 doors or whatever it was, and they'd spent all this money building this. You know formidable ground game. So they obviously couldn't tamp down expectations much, having invested all that.
Speaker 2:And there's the conundrum You're expected to come within single digits of Trump. Your ballot doesn't ever show it, at least not after the first couple of debates, and you know so he ends up looking like he fell way short of expectations and he got a little thing he needed, which he finished second over Haley. If he hadn't, he'd probably be out of the rest today. But yeah, it was bad expectations management because it was a bad narrative going in for them. If you want to do that kind of campaign, where you're all the ground game and all the door knocks and everything, you try to do a little more still because, at the end of the day, if you fail and come up short of where you're supposed to, you end up where you end up, which is, in a terrible narrative, leaving Iowa.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So, david, I think one of the things you mentioned earlier and I think we're talking around it a little bit is how Trump was really the prohibitive favorite here weeks leading in to the caucus, if you agree with that.
Speaker 3:And I find that fascinating just how the Republican Party in the state has evolved since, say, 2016,. Obviously with Cruz winning the last competitive Republican caucus, and I'm curious what you think on this. But I think a couple of factors have come into play. One, it seems like there's been a rallying around Trump since, say, the first indictments last year and that's really changed things. And then two, with somebody like DeSantis or Haley, they had a case to make that they were a more electable candidate going up against Biden. But the polls that we're seeing now at the national level, that's a coin toss at best between Biden and Trump. Do you think that both those factors the electability of Trump and kind of the rallying around him in response and kind of the hardening of the party in Iowa have kind of led to him really having this commanding lead and performing so well earlier this week?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a whole bunch of ways to look at this. Number one he changed the makeup of the party quite a bit. You have more counties in Iowa that flipped from Obama to Trump than any other state. The county that flipped the most is in Iowa, Howard County, and that's basically Trump changing the Republican Party to a working class party. So that's one thing that changes kind of who comes out, who feels comfortable in the party. We don't have as many of the affluent, college educated folks in our party that we used to. So that's one thing. Number two yeah, the Bragg indictment in particular, which is, I think, the flimsiest indictment. That's where his number started to really spike. Now he was already driving DeSantis' number down, but as soon as that indictment came across, people who have been defending Trump over the last eight or nine years because they think he's been untapped to unfairly, just reflexively came back to him and jumped on board.
Speaker 2:He brought his number went up probably 10 points over that first indictment and kind of been the weeks that ensued it, because he had the same feeding friends that you always have with the media and they just are ready to go to battle for him when they see him under attack. And then I think the last thing that we can't understate is he's really running as a quasi-encomment. Maybe three-fourths of that caucus universe that came out on Monday night think he's still president or should be. So you know it's tough yeah, 63%. We've never had an incumbent president.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 63% of the caucus number.
Speaker 2:And so, yeah, so he starts with all these advantages and then and Kevin probably knows more about this than anybody in a big multi-candidate primary and you start running attack ads. That's kind of cross. You know this crossfire where Desantis and Haley are attacking each other and you had other people in the race before that doing the same thing and nobody's attacking Trump except with these very subtle digs. You know chaos follows him, or you know we've got to have a new generation or whatever. You know he just he was unscathed throughout this entire process. You know. So these candidates all attacking each other, all they managed to do is kind of depress each other's numbers without touching Trump. He continued to ascend throughout the entire process and we end up where we end up. So you know, credit to them. They built a great organization.
Speaker 2:Trump didn't do that at all in 16. You know I'm not a fan of Trump Most people know. But I'll tell you what he ran as good a campaign with a strong organization and as detailed an organization as you can. You get to these nights where it's 35 below wind chill. You know they delivered. They were out calling precinct chairs over the weekend before the caucus, identifying who in their precinct organization had four wheel drives. I mean, that's organization and you know so. They're offering rides that hour, hour and a half before the caucus, getting people out who otherwise maybe didn't want to get in a car. That was 15 below zero Just a really impressive win. But there's so many reasons for it, and not the least of which is he's running as an incumbent and he's changed the party enough that the base of the party really looks more like the Trump coalition than anybody else.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you hit on something that is probably not as properly valued right now as it should be, but when you look at like the 16 campaign and all the criticism for the 16 campaign of Trump, you know because there was a parade of different campaign managers at the top. But Chris Lasavida and Susie Wiles are formidable operas who know exactly what they're doing and have really centralized that kind of control and built a much more professional operation. That is worth a number of points on the ground.
Speaker 2:Yeah, particularly in a caucus when it's a small universe. I mean, I think I've heard Jeff Rose say many times a greater organization is worth 10 points. Well, it sure was, and maybe even more than that, particularly when you take that you put the extreme weather as a huge obstacle to turnout, and if you can use an organization to kind of blow through that, which they did effectively. Yeah, there was never a doubt that he was gonna have a good night, you know. But also, look, I mean he was two points from being under 50, which creates the argument that even in a MAGA state like Iowa, over half of the people who attended the caucus said no, thank you. So he kind of escaped with a good narrative by just a couple of points.
Speaker 2:And at the same time, nikki Haley, who was far late to come to the party with the organization, only finished two points behind DeSantis. If that had flipped and DeSantis was two points behind, the psychological narrative coming out of the caucuses would have been Trump fails to hit 50, haley dispatches with DeSantis let's go to New Hampshire and get it on. So we were really close to having the caucus that I would have thought was the most productive to create a real race between two people, but we fell just short of it. Two points on the Trump side and two points on the Haley side, or we could. We'd be having a very different conversation today, and that plays right into expectations. Everybody Trump did what he needed, desantis just did what he needed and Nikki just came short.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it is a game of inches, particularly right now when you look at the razor thin margins that we have in this sort of particularly in this era of partisanship. But hey, I wanna get your take on this because I think it sort of dovetails into how you manage expectations going forward. But what did you see in the exit polling? Anything interesting stand out? Because it felt to me that there was a very strong level of support for Trump across the party, even among those that didn't vote for him. So they may have registered some support for DeSantis or Haley, but there seemed to be, from the exits to be, an era of inevitability, which is that even folks who didn't vote for Trump still think he's gonna win. Anything that you read, anything from the tea leaves that you picked up, yeah, he led Haley among self-described independence.
Speaker 2:Did not expect that at all. He led Haley in the suburbs. He led Haley among college educated Republicans, which was not even close to a majority of who turned out that night. So places where you thought she might actually run the score a little bit on him, she wasn't able to do it, and even DeSantis. I looked at a bunch of the counties that Rubio won. He won five counties. He came very close in Lynn County, which is the second largest county. She won one Johnson County by one vote, by the way.
Speaker 2:And I looked at those counties kind of precinct by precinct, when the caucuses were over and she really underperformed what everyone expected her ballot to be among suburban Republicans. That should be her sweet spot. And she ended up beating DeSantis in all those suburban precincts, but by five points instead of 20 points. So that was the thing that I think prevented her from getting past him. She just didn't have the muscle.
Speaker 2:In these suburbs, in Dallas County and Mary and Iowa, betendorf, iowa, all these places where you've got upscale, affluent, college educated women. They didn't show up and it's not like they were voting for DeSantis, they just didn't show up for her. So you can credit that to organization. Maybe just Trump looks inevitable. Maybe they just don't like to be around caucus voting Republicans anymore because they've kind of left the party or they're definitely on the fence about it. So I don't know. The biggest thing to me was that underperformance by Nikki Haley among suburbs. If she could have done what we expected her to do and what the polling showed she could do, if you dug into the Seltzer poll, she should have ended up in the mid-20s and just didn't materialize.
Speaker 1:So one of the other things that I looked at too is the issue of the economy. It's always baked into the cake, I think on every single election. That was. The number one issue was the economy. Second issue, and it was a very big issue for many of the caucus goers immigration. How do you think that plays in Iowa and people's thinking, and do you think that has some staying power, that, given the border controversies that Biden continues to have, that that's an issue that plays not only in states that have a rural profile like Iowa, but also in some of these bigger battleground states that have a more suburban population? That's gonna make or break whether or not that one of these candidates whatever candidate wins in the general election in 2024.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know it's gonna be huge. There's no question. People think back to when Trump was president. We didn't have a border crisis. We had a lot of reporting from the mainstream media that Trump was bigot and kids in cages and all these things. But the fact is the news they see now, it just looks completely out of control. People don't like it, the pictures they see coming across.
Speaker 2:All the candidates have focused on the problems that come from this surge of migrants, whether it's fentanyl or crime or whatever. And Trump it is right in the bullseye of Trump's message and, yeah, it worked even in our suburbs. And I don't think it's good for Biden if he doesn't figure out how to come further than the Republicans are willing to come to try to find a compromise in this next budget deal, if he doesn't really give a lot of ground on this to the Republicans. First of all, it's political, I mean, it's malpractice if he doesn't. But we can't go into this general election. If you're Joe Biden, you can't go into it with the immigration narrative we have now. You need to have done something dramatic and you need to have some results starting to show up. We can't have these pictures from the border or he's going to lose to Trump.
Speaker 2:I mean, even in these states that Trump struggled in last time the flippers from 2016 to 2020, they're still paying attention to this in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania and Georgia and Arizona in particular I mean he's going to come back and win those counties. If this is the number two issue and the economy hasn't rebounded to the extent that people are ready to accept that it's better, because they aren't accepting it now, even with all of the macroeconomic indications that maybe things are going better than we thought. We're getting the soft landing mortgage payments still twice as much as it was, car payments are still way higher than they were and the groceries have come down and so, as a portion of your income, you're not living as well. And if they can't change that narrative, which is kind of the number one narrative, and then if the border looks like it does today, I don't see how even a trial damaged Trump who gets a conviction could still win the election if these big things that matter to people haven't been solved.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, those two issues create a bit of a toxic brew for the Biden White House. So, brendan, we've talked about Iowa. This is a good segue. We've talked about Iowa. We should probably talk about the national implications. Where do we go from here?
Speaker 3:Yeah, david, I mean I think you know great segue into kind of a little bit more of a national focus and you know it sounded like you already answered the question on who the presumptive nominee will be come into the year. But let's start with the next contest in New Hampshire. Do you have a feeling of how that's? Going to pan out? Is the Niki momentum real and is that going to help her?
Speaker 2:I think she'd have been in a little better shape if we'd had the scenario I described, which is she edges to Santis and Trump falls under 50. It just would have put a lift under her campaign. I think she still has a shot at New Hampshire. It's an outside shot, there's no doubt about it, and she's going to need to rely on independence and Democrats to do it, so Trump will point that out all the way. The only path really that she has, though, is to win New Hampshire and then count on that next 32 days between New Hampshire and South Carolina, because there won't be a Haley Trump contest in Nevada, but she needs that next 32 days for something to happen that we can't now foresee. Maybe Trump goes too far and attacks her in a way that South Carolina just says, yeah, we love you, mr President, but, like you know, she's a South Carolina, she's a native daughter of South Carolina. You can't go that far. What do you do that? I don't know. Who knows what losing New Hampshire might trigger in him, but without her being able to win New Hampshire and win South Carolina, those contests come real fast after that March 5th, super Tuesday, and Trump has done a lot to actually accelerate the delegate calendar, not by moving states up, but by moving winner take all up and getting places to switch from proportional to winner take all, for instance, like California, if he hits 51 in California, he gets every single delegate. It used to be a contest until this cycle where each contest in California was by Congressional District, so they assigned all their delegates by CD. So he's made a lot of changes by by working these pro Trump Arizona State Party committees to really advantage himself.
Speaker 2:For, for for the wheels to come off of Trump, he has to. He has to lose a couple contests which shatters the. You know the inevitability, you know aura around him, and I just think it's really hard to do. It could happen, there could be some sort of revelation coming out of these trials, although so far nothing has mattered. Yeah, so it just really looks like he's on the way, unless New Hampshire does what they sometimes do, which is say to Iowa all right, you guys pick corn, we pick presidents. We're gonna do something completely different. Brandon, you love that, don't you? I haven't worked for Joni Ernst. Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Smartest voters in the nation. But that's the. I think that's the thing that probably frustrates me from having worked on a campaign that, you see, sort of drive. The conventional wisdom is that what people forget is this is a delegate hunt. At the end of the day, 1,238 delegates and 12, I think, on March 5th to March 19th contest between those two dates across all the different contests, that's the only. That's about 1,200 delegates that will be at stake there.
Speaker 1:And even if Trump were to sort of lose New Hampshire, you know a wounded Trump is very different than a wounded conventional candidate, right. I think other conventional candidates begin to spiral and they begin to sort of have problems with donors and they begin to have problems with their activist base and they also lose their bearings. They don't know what to do, who to attack, what their message to drive With Trump. I think if a New Hampshire loss there would absolutely 100% focus him and the intensity of the barrage of negativity that would be directed towards Nikki Haley, you know, going on to those March 5th and March 19th contest would be severe, right, it would be pretty harsh.
Speaker 2:Yeah right, no, she will be under fire in a way that would disorient any candidate. They'd be scrambling to figure out. How do I respond to this? And that I mean you see he's already doing stuff. He used her traditional Indian name yesterday and you know he retweeted some retrued someone who said that Nikki was an eligible run because her parents were immigrants, which is obviously not true. I mean all kinds of stuff already that she's that I think are presenting challenges for them to respond to. Well, you take a New Hampshire loss for Trump, you put all that on steroids and he is gonna be focused. Now he may go too far. That's kind of my wild scenario as I try to see some shred of hope that the party can move on from Trump. But it's a shred. You know he could go too far, but, boy, when he's focused and when he is on the attack, he's really good. I mean, you know, I mean he took DeSantis and basically deconstructed that campaign over the last six months or a year, just to. I mean he's just really good at that.
Speaker 1:So DeSantis, the camped right to South Carolina because he doesn't have much of a trajectory towards any sort of placement, I think, in New Hampshire. How viable is that strategy to go to? To wait for everybody in New Hampshire? I mean, we all know that things aren't gonna just stop and stay static for the DeSantis campaign While he goes to South Carolina, while all eyes, the political media and both other candidates are then in competing for New Hampshire. Does he have a chance to really sort of live to fight another day while the rest of the campaign takes place in New Hampshire?
Speaker 2:No, he doesn't. He needed much more out of Iowa to get any kind of money to come in. We haven't seen their reports. They haven't announced what they're gonna announce for the fourth quarter of 23,. But I can guarantee you they are running on fumes. You know they don't have any hard dollars. The Super PAC depleted, you know, a huge share of its resources over the last year, mostly in Iowa.
Speaker 2:I don't think what he did isn't gonna raise any money for him and then he disappears for the next week while we have New Hampshire and then after that it'll be. You know, if Haley and Trump are really close and they both kind of get what they need out of New Hampshire, he disappears even more. Who's gonna put Ron DeSantis on TV for an interview when he's 25, 30 points behind Nikki and 32 points or more behind Trump? I mean there's just no place for him to go. We saw Rudy Giuliani try this in Florida back in 08. I mean it's just no, I don't know.
Speaker 2:I think he kind of had to stay in because he finished two points ahead of Nikki. My guess is, if you really got the truth out of that campaign, they'd hope they finished third so they could just pack up and go back to Tallahassee because I don't see any path. I don't see any way to raise enough money to get him moved around. You know it. Just it looks like it's the end of the road, but he's gotta kind of continue on because he did the barest minimum of what he needed to do in Iowa and it just he doesn't have an exit strategy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it looks pretty bleak, but there's gonna be a lot of twists and turns between now and New Hampshire and hopefully we can have you back and we can talk about where everything went or where things are still going in those March 5th, March 19th contest, because that's gonna be where all the delegates, the big delegates, I mean, we'll probably right, you agree that after March 19th we'll know who the nominee is.
Speaker 2:Oh, 100%, yeah, absolutely. In fact, we very well could know after March 5th, because if Nikki doesn't do what she needs to do in South Carolina, you know it'll probably be over then.
Speaker 1:Well, it's gonna be fun. Hey, david, thanks. We really appreciate having you on the show today. We really appreciate your insights. We hope you'll come back. Certainly will. Hey, thanks, guys. So to our listeners, remember to like and subscribe, wherever you listen to your podcast, and follow us on Twitter, or now known as X, at at Penta Group P-E-N-T-A-G-R-P, I'm your host, kevin Madden, and, as always, thank you for listening to what's At Stake. Thank you.