Summary
Transcript
So it takes a lot for me to come out and do what I’m saying with Arg right now. But, folks, the whispers are kind of loud in my industry. They used to be on real clear politics. There’s a reason why they’re not anymore. And I’m telling you, I am absolutely accusing them of getting some kind of backdoor money or deal from that campaign to do what they’re doing because they have no incentive.
Hey, gang, it’s me. Dr. Steve and I have been so looking forward to this interview. In the weeks leading up to that amazing Iowa caucus on Monday, there was, as you know, a lot of conflicting information, a lot of conflicting predictions over what would happen. And the one polling analysis that I stayed fixed on in the weeks leading up to Iowa belonged to the one and only rich Barris of the people’s pundit.
And I am glad I did because Rich once again proved himself to be the best of the best in election forecasting. Gang, if you don’t know, Rich freaking nailed it. I mean, he predicted the margin of victory to literally a point. He predicted the dominance. He predicted the intertwining dynamics between DeSantis and Haley trying to get to be the first place loser. I mean, Rich, dude, you nailed Iowa and you nailed it at the same time.
So many others on social media absolutely blew it. Their predictive analysis was so bad, it was so far off, it was embarrassing. Well, first off, welcome back, Rich, as always. And congratulations on another gold standard election analysis. Man, thanks for having me back, and thank you for all of that. I’ve been looking forward to this because we always have such a good talk, such really way. But I call my show inside the numbers, and I love coming on here because we go way beyond some of this other stuff you will see on Twitter.
And I’ll tell you, before we get into any of that, it’s like this needs to be a lesson for people. If anybody was telling you that Donald Trump was going to lose Iowa, particularly those DeSantis influencers, either they’re really stupid or that they did this and lied to you on, you should. Even if you still support Ron DeSantis, you should unfollow them. You should stop listening to their podcasts.
I’m telling you this. And really consider this for a second. Do you want someone to tell you the truth, or do you want someone to tell you what you want to hear, only leading you down a slow but steady path to some mental illness where you’re online constantly looking for affirmations of what you believe and being in a bubble instead of hearing what is the truth. The truth was Donald Trump was never going to lose the Iowa caucuses.
The truth was Ron DeSantis never had 60,000 commitment cards that were going to come out for him. He may have gotten them, but as I told people over time, over six months, we were polling and speaking to people who told us, I signed a card for DeSantis in like, April, I’m going to vote for Donald Trump on Monday. We heard it all the time. I tried telling people the only real question was whether Nikki Haley had enough juice and I got to give it to Anne Seltzer.
She put out her poll. It was bullish on Haley. Like, we were a little bit bullish on Haley, but she did it with the correct analysis. Nikki’s got the numbers. If they get out, if they don’t, Ronald surpass her. But guess what? Nobody’s coming close to Trump. And that was the only analysis that you could honestly, objectively give people going into Monday. And now here we are. And now here we are.
And, gang, before we go any further, click on the links below. Do what I’ve done. Subscribe to Rich’s channel, subscribe to his Twitter, subscribe to his locals. You’re going to absolutely love his content, rich. Well, you’re already giving it to us, in a sense. What are some of your big takeaways from what happened on Monday? I mean, just big picture. Someone who’s so passionate about the art and science of polling, someone who tracks so accurately with what was happening in Iowa over the last several weeks.
Again, just the explanatory analysis that you give is so good. What do you think we should all take away from what happened on Monday? There are really a couple of things, one with specific to Trump’s support, and we’re seeing this in New Hampshire now as well. Trump’s voters are locked in, man. I keep saying they’re dug in like Alabama ticks. All right, so when you see these tracking polls in New Hampshire, Haley’s at 34 to 38, Trump is at 50 to 52.
I know another one that’s coming out, and Trump’s going to be at 54. So this is like 90% of Trump’s vote that just refuses to change their mind. Do some basic arithmetic and you will see how, beyond the fact that the polls were right and are right, or at least generally, what it means statistically, when someone is at 50 or above, and what it means when someone has support dug in like that, Iowa should tell you Trump’s, his dominance is the story because he could have won this, but in a couple of different ways that would have caused me to say, okay, maybe there are a few states he may lose, could drag it on more.
Is he going to lose the nomination? No. Because of the overall, the electorate, we know nationally what it looks like in a republican primary, by the way, it’s changing, which is another big takeaway. They all, again, the DeSantis people wanted him to run this Cruz campaign, this Huckabee campaign, this Antarum campaign. Iowa has changed. And for months when we were polling that race, people were telling us Donald Trump is right in the Goldilocks zone with ideology.
Ron DeSantis made himself too conservative. When Iowa is telling you someone’s pretending to be too conservative, you have no chance in other states, Doc, you have no chance. South Carolina. Newton, New Hampshire. The Rust Belt. When you get into the Rust Belt, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis on entitlements and social programs, both are going to have major problems. You are not going to tell a worker in Michigan voting in a republican primary, you’re going to raise the retirement age.
That’s going to tell you to stick in. I’m voting for Donald Trump. So it was the dominance. A lot of people are looking at all the playbook and the old rules. If he know Iowa the way other people win Iowa, then the old rules may apply. He won by more than twice the margin of the record. Bob Dole in 19 80 88. Yeah. So twelve points is the record he also beat in a lower turnout election.
He beat Ted Cruz’s record for the most votes received in an Iowa caucus. And then the third record that night was the fastest call ever. Yeah, 30 minutes. This doesn’t happen. It’s not just that he won Iowa, it’s how much he won it by the CNN entrance. Polls are wrong, and I hate to say this because I’m normally critical of them, but the AP Fox vote cast the voter analysis that replaces exit polls and entrance polls for them.
They were actually right. Trump won every age group. He won every religious demographic. He won every racial demographic, every area demographic, every regional demographic, every ideological demographic, except for, because he did beat Haley with moderates, by the way. That’s another thing people were wrong about. It just goes on and on. There is no lane big enough here to beat Donald Trump, and it’s only going to get uglier.
She may have one small reprieve in New Hampshire, where she’s trailing right now anyway. But once you get past that, first of all, New Hampshire is probably going to end it anyway next week. They’re probably going to, those tracking polls understated Trump in 16. I mean, they understated him by anywhere between six and ten points. They’re currently giving him a lead that is about as big as the lead he had when he won it in 16.
So actually, a little bit bigger. A little bit bigger. Again, there’s a political take for people, and then there is the learn the lessons. Learn the lessons here. Going into Iowa, what you may have heard from different people, but politically, the take to me is this is over. This is, I, again, I just appreciate what you’re saying so much because it resonates with the scholars that I’m reading.
I’m thinking in particular the british scholar Matthew Goodwin talking about the new sweet spot in politics, right, where he talks about the reason why the populist right has been more successful than the populist left, both here in the states and Europe, is because the populist right has been able to pivot left on economics in a way that the populist left has not been able to pivot right on culture.
And this is absolutely crushing the left when it comes to the working class vote because the working class is culturally right. That’s Matthew’s right on the money. Yeah, but they’re more economically left than your traditional economic, your Rick Santorums, your Ted Cruz’s, the Mitt Romney’s exactly what you’re talking about, who want to cut Social Security and Medicare and the like. So is that what you’re seeing in the data that this sort of bushite, neocon ideological conservative campaign that’s currently represented more or less by DeSantis and Haley, Haley being a bit more obviously hawkish and all that sort of stuff.
Is it basically DOA from now on in the, this is, I’m glad, I’m glad you brought that up because there’s some demographics, too, that we really have to look, know, what’s the future? Any, this is what that part of the party doesn’t. It is, I mean, they’re DOA. They don’t understand. For years, folks, anyone who before, I’m sure many of you turned off Fox News, you may have been watchers many years ago, and you would have like Charles Crowdhammer and Jonah Goldberg and all these people going, I don’t understand.
This is still, even though we keep losing, this is still a center right country. The consensus candidate, I remember they would always, yes, Romney is the consensus candidate. They would look for somebody who they viewed. It would be like moderate less scary than the conservative insurgent candidate, when in fact, somebody like a Rick Santorum would have been actually far more in the mainstream than Mitt Romney, if you’re talking about the Russ belt.
But he came before his time and he didn’t have the support of people like influencers, social media influencers, independent data crunchers, whatever you may be. He was still working with the old model and the old vehicle’s information, so he came too early. But the truth is, it’s going to be like this from now on. And that’s going to be the long term pattern, because MAGA has this broader, and that’s certainly the populist right in America’s MAGA, and they have this much broader appeal.
Right. So Republicans, the old wing, they’re obsessed with getting back this suburban woman. And the truth is, the suburban woman isn’t the growing demographic here. They’re not growing. We hit a brief patch where a bunch of them went through generational and educational changes and they were more educated than the prior generation had been, so they turned more democratic. But still, they’re overall the same share, actually a little bit less than they had been in the prior ten year census.
And all of the non white working demographics, where the growth is, those are the groups that MAGA appeals to. So there’s no way for them to go back, because the truth is, they’re dying. And I’m going to say this again because I keep saying it, but it’s a good way to put it, looking at Iowa. And I just keep thinking, as these results are coming in, the reason that call was so fast is because we had the entrance polls, we also had pre election polling.
And then we got the first wave, which was only 3000, 4000 votes, but some of it was from the northwest and Sioux, where Ron DeSantis thought he was going to beat Trump with certain evangelicals. Some of it was in the southeast, like Des Moines county, not the metropolitan area. Then we got something in the Des Moines metropolitan area, the eastern cities where Johnson is and Lynn and Trump was just winning everywhere.
And that’s why the call was so quick. But it really is it. I’ve been thinking this for a while, but it totally hit me, watching these results, that these old guard people are like the dinosaurs who don’t know the asteroid is on its way to earth and there’s nothing they can do to stop it. And whether they like it or not is irrelevant. The age of the dinosaur is over.
Like man, the age of MAGA is inevitable and coming. There’s nothing else they can say do because they don’t have newer demographic they can appeal to. And obsessing over the independent, white, educated woman in the suburb is kind of, I don’t want to say a feudal exercise, but it’s like fighting over a shrinking slice of the pie. And also, it’s also based on a bunch of false assumptions.
Trump actually did win them the last two election cycles. Republicans, for years before Trump ever came on the scene, have been losing a share of them every year. So great states we can see it in is Arizona and in Georgia. And that had been happening. We could date it back all the way to 2000. George Bush did a little better in four, and then it’s just been declining ever since.
So again, it’s too simplistic for them. That argument is just, maybe it’s easiest for them to wrap their head around. And it also is like a way that it offers them hope, looking forward. But the truth is it’s too simplistic of an argument. And it’s not real. It’s their imagination. It’s not reflective of reality. Yeah, I mean, this is actually one of the more fascinating elements of your analysis.
You mentioned Georgia particular, talking about the importance of the urban vote for Republicans, the growing urban vote, the necessity of the Republicans to begin eating away at the Democrat margins in the urban vote, and how it’s Trump who’s unique, he uniquely seems to be able to do that to peel off a significant number, a particularly non white working class vote. Can you comment on know, we’re going to see it in know Kevin Phillips called the outer south.
You have the deep south and the black belt counties of the old south, but then you have states like the outer South, Georgia. Once upon a time, he did consider deep south, but it’s really not anymore because of this effect. And it’s like once a state gets to be around 60% urban, even if Republicans do very well in the boroughs, they’re not going to win the state. North Carolina is still around 40 45, so they’ve been able to hold on there.
But Arizona has now been crossed that urban threshold. So, by the way, Texas also is about to do that new poll from Emerson today is perfect example of what I’m talking about. Ted Cruz is only up one or two points on his democratic opponent. Donald Trump is crushing. Crushing it. Why? Because he runs double digits stronger with non whites and in urban areas. So for all of the talk about the Dallas suburbs and the Harris county suburbs and this, and Trump is doing better there, and it’s because he’s not just leaving himself open to can I get the white woman back in the suburbs and the excerpts around the metro areas? If he gets them back, he peels back some great he’s taking non whites.
It isn’t going to suffice. This model they’re talking about is not going to suffice. When the urban vote share continues to rise and it mean that’s the way it’s been forever, Trump is offering a way to break the entire model. And I saw, and I’m not going to bring them up because I don’t want to give him any more credibility. But one of the more known Iowa DeSantis sycophants was going on today in a thread which is totally wrong about the impact of the suburban vote and the importance of the suburban vote.
And it’s sad listening to him because he doesn’t seem to really grasp why he was wrong before and why he’s really wrong not only this year, but four years from now, eight years from now, it’ll be even worse. The suburbs aren’t going to cut it. So Trump is coming along and saying, well, whether he’s saying it or not is irrelevant. His appeal is saying it. I will break this mold.
We will squeeze so much blood from the stone in rural areas, we’re going to outperform our normal shares and we’re going to chop 5810 points off the democratic margin in urban areas. Urban areas are hundreds of thousands of votes in each state. It does enormous damage when Herschel Walker underperforms Donald Trump in the Atlanta metro area by 512 points because it’s both times he had a runoff. It’s incredibly damaging to the statewide margin.
If Herschel Walker just did as well as Donald Trump did the first round, he would have cracked 50 and he never would have been forced into a runoff. But he didn’t. And by the way, you’re never going to get that urban share without what Matthew is talking about. There’s that remaining urban vote that Trump gets, Republicans don’t get is what Matthew Goodwin is actually talking about. It’s like the Bernie voter who was a rural coalition in 16 that quit on Bernie and quit on the populist left.
They’re now for Trump, but they will never vote for Republicans. And that’s how Trump gets 80 in a county and Republicans get 71 or 69, right. That’s the difference. So when you put the urban and the rural together, you don’t forsake the suburbs, but you don’t need to run up 1215 point margins in the suburbs. Anymore. You fight it to a tie, right? That’s all you need. Yeah.
You fight it to maintain those margins, and that’s it. And you overwhelm them with the urban non white male and the rural everyone. And that’s the math. That’s what the math says to do. That’s the sweet spot. That’s the political sweet spot. And that’s the sweet spot. This is what drives us crazy, I think, rich. It’s there for the GOP’s taking. It’s there. They can have it anytime they want, and they are still stuck in it.
Just sociology point of view, too. And you don’t understand this. I normally don’t talk about this with other people, but you will get this. It’s better for society, too. It’s more unifying. We’re not talking about the urban rural divide anymore. Right. The suburbs are in the middle, and they’re kind of going along. Some agree with the minority in the cities, but most of the people agree with the majority from rural to a certain part of urban America.
And the suburbs are just like where we all meet together and sing Kumbaya. I mean, this would be so much more unifying and stabilizing for self governance in the society. And instead they want to keep up with the division. The division. And that’s the key. I was just talking about this with someone else, how populism reconfigures the electorate. Whereas the old model is horizontal antipathy. It’s a horizontal adversary, left versus right, Republicans versus Democrat, conservative versus liberal.
Whereas populism turns it into a vertical antipathy. It’s the people versus the political. That and the potential coalition for the people just simply defined as over and against a rightfully resented political class is enormous. We’re talking a possible supermajority. And I think Victor Orbond tapped know a number of others have. Putin has tapped into Modi. Narendra Modi in. Yes. Yeah. They’re going to cruise to their third straight landslide win.
I was actually just talking to a fellow from India last week, and he was just mentioning, he’s like, you just go to the people on the streets, particularly in northern India. Just go to the people on the streets. It’s just like, of course we’re voting for Modi because he’s for the people, he’s for us. He’s not for the old british colonial establishment. It’s just that the potential for a supermaja.
Well, I think about FDR, the new Deal was kind of a populist coalition, and that’s lasted how long? My heavens. Or did last for so long? Decades. Yeah, that’s right. He drug over people that never. The democratic party was quite fractured back then, actually. He drug over people who would never have voted for somebody like him. And then enjoyed as well, some of the northern. Not some, a lot of support from northern migrants who thought that he was on their side.
It was just. Plus he was a silk stocking class of person. Yeah. If you’ve got the right leader and then the right unifying message, look out. Well, it’s 2016 all over. It’s the only way forward, not just for the Republican Party, but for the country. We can’t survive like this with divide. We can’t. No, it’s going to end badly. Right. The divide and conquer strategy of the permanent political class is just destroying resentment.
Yeah. This politics of resentment is just horrific. Now, let’s just talk a bit about New Hampshire. I’m just curious what you expect to see out of there, I am going to throw out to you. I saw you just having a temper tantrum yesterday over the ARG poll. I felt you typing with your fists against this absurdity makes me very angry when a pollster is clearly been co opted the way that they do.
You want to explain? What can I give the whole month long background so people understand? Okay. So in New Hampshire, there was polling, everyone focused on Iowa, so it got scarce there for a little bit. But Governor Sununu had come out and endorsed Nikki Haley, trying to give her some astroturfed momentum. It wasn’t really real, but they had made this push and he’s got a lot of friends.
Everyone knew the UMass Lowell poll was coming out. It was very bad news for her. It was Trump plus 30. In the headline from the pollster at the university was cold water. This poll throws cold water on any talk that Haley may have momentum, but they were trying to, again, Astroturf, like, fake the momentum for her. So arg, who hadn’t pulled a single race all cycle, just miraculously appeared out of nowhere and had it.
Trump plus four. A very close race. The day that not only credible, but the most accurate pollster in the 2016 Republican primary was the University of Massachusetts Lowell. They were a tracking poll and they were the most accurate. Everyone understated Trump’s support by almost rough, while an aggregate of about almost ten points. UMass Lowell said he would win by 21. He won by 20. Everyone else was like, Trump plus seven to 1413.
Anyway, it looked to me suspiciously like he used his friends and influence to get somebody to publish a poll that was favorable to Nikki Haley. And it bothered me, but I let it go and I said, you know what? It’s outside the consensus. This is why we have what we call polling tranches. We’ll put it in the Trump bearish tranche for now and we’ll see what happens. Two weeks later, we’re headed into Iowa.
Trump has a big lead and there are a round of new polls showing because people had been dropping out and thinking the support was consolidating anywhere between like a 15 to 20 point lead for Trump, which was at least still solid. The University of New Hampshire CNN poll is always pretty bad in New Hampshire, right? I’m just telling people, and they’re always under stating Trump’s support. So they had Haley by seven at some point, but everyone else was generally in the Suffolk University.
I mean, everybody was generally between Trump plus 15 to 20. Even the two weeks later after that initial one, an Americans for prosperity internal poll to pack the Koch brothers that support Nikki Ailey also put out about, I think it was a Trump plus 14. And then all of a sudden, this ARG poll comes out again. When there is favorable poll polls for Trump, this ARG poll pops out again.
The folks, the timing on Tuesday, right? Yeah, this is actually even before this, there were three rounds of very conveniently timed releases for Nikki Haley that were way outside the consensus and that showed that Haley was gaining on Trump. And now it was only Trump plus three. And by now, the averages are still saying Trump plus 20 something. Right? Then the day after Nikki Haley misses expectations. She fails to meet expectations in Iowa.
She thought she was going to come in second. Her speech that she delivered was written for second place. That’s why she said, I know it’s a two person race. Everyone was like, this is delusional. She didn’t even edit her speech. This is what people were like. Rich, why did she say, is this great? I’m like, guys, that’s a speech written for second place. They believed that she was going to get these Democrats and independents out.
Insufficient numbers to surpass Ron DeSantis, which we told people she was trying to do. And if she did do it, she would surpass him. But she didn’t and she came in third. That’s very bad. In this game, we call it the physics of the primary physics. There’s like forces that act upon candidates and their trends and the momentum is clearly on your side. When you win, you win, you win.
You gain momentum like a snowball heading down a mountain. And it’s picking up more and more snow and the ball gets bigger and bigger. That’s how it works in a primary momentum is very real and the physics are just as real as know as newton observed the natural world. They are very real. Anyway, it’s bad for Nikki Haley. It’s worst case scenario. She comes in third place. We know the tracking poll from Suffolk University.
Everybody knows, okay? Governor Sununu knows. It’s a staple in New Hampshire politics. Right after Iowa, the Suffolk University Boston Globe tracking poll begins. So they know this poll is coming out and they know the momentum is going to be blunted from her poor performance in Iowa. Arg just happens to drop again the next day. The day after she literally 12 hours later. Come on, guys. Never with cross tabs, never with even the basic standards of disclosure that apore expects every pollster to release, whether you’re in the transparency initiative or not.
Basic standards of disclosure, none of that. No transcripts, nothing. Just a crappy little website that looks like it was built in 1998, putting out these corny little HTML tables without explanations. It’s very clear what’s going on. Hours later, the Suffolk University tracking poll drops and Trump is just above 50 and she’s at 34%. And then, by the way, and some college came out yesterday and it was Trump, 52, Haley at 38, which I thought was actually probably more close to the reality.
But both pollster saying Trump is dominating this primary. She needs a lot of independence to come out. And it’s not just independence. We need to stop that because people need to understand what’s going on. Democratic donors are giving Nikki Haley tens of millions of dollars to text and digital target behavioral their independents, but they’re behavioral democrats and they want them to come out and basically vote for Nikki Haley and try to stop Donald Trump in New Hampshire.
Because once we get past this point, she’s done Nevada, the caucus is going to be a 50 point win. Her own state, she’s going to be humiliated in. It takes a lot for me, doc, to get to the point where I call out another pollster because I know what it’s like to have a scumbag like Nate Silver call you fake, you know what I’m saying? While you work so hard on something.
So it takes a lot for me to come out and do what I’m saying with Arg right now. But folks, the whispers are kind of loud in my industry. They used to be on real clear politics. There’s a reason why they’re not anymore. And I’m telling you, I am absolutely accusing them of getting some kind of backdoor money or deal from that campaign to do what they’re doing, because they have no incentive to do this.
Pollster’s incentive is to be correct. It is not to be way out of the consensus and released, conveniently, like you’re a campaign poll. It’s like a campaign released an internal poll to try to shut up critics or to try to blunt negative momentum. Right. This is very clear what I see. Very clear. Yeah. Right. In linguistics, we call it a performative truth. Something is true just because I say it’s true.
And it can have tremendous impact on people’s perception of things. But, yeah, you work so hard at the correspondence theory of truth, you want your results to correspond to this objective data. Hence your cross tabs. Hence you’re putting forward your methodology and like, yeah, this is clearly performative truth. Which is another way of saying she’s lying, doc. It did. Dr. Terrelly, she was behind 30 points before they started that little campaign.
It at least closed the gap ten points before people started to realize what was going on. Something like that. And also, I think it’s important for people to hear that this is another reason why Iowa was so insightful, because they did this in Iowa as well. DeSantis was crying and whining about it. But he’s right. They did do it. By the way. They controlled the party in Iowa.
I don’t know what they were whining over. Kim Reynolds could have made the party change those rules at any time, but instead they were too busy attacking people on Twitter every day like a bunch of children. So they didn’t care about what was important. And they got cream, they got smoked because they’re amateurs. But moving forward, he was right. And Iowa tells me she was able to get a lot out.
Was it enough? No, but it will be easier in New Hampshire because it is a primary instead of a right. Finally, just in your view, when all said and done, when we write out the obituary of the DeSantis campaign, what do you think was the fatal flaw? What do you see as really, in the end, kind of the one thing that sunk him? I would love to say failed assumptions that they made, but all of it.
I would like to say that they were amateurs who hyped expectations too much, breaking the number one campaign rule. You don’t overhype. I would like to say that they were bridge burners who refused to listen to anyone. Everything is attacks instead of constructive criticism. People who believe things that weren’t true, that he was a champion of COVID that never worked because he was not a champion of COVID He was better than other governors, but he was a lockdown agent.
And when Trump was saying the cure is worse than the disease, he was still threatening businesses with being fined if they opened their doors. None of that was true. But you know what? All of those are just symptoms of everything that leads. Everything leads back to this arrogance. Yeah, arrogance. Wow. That’s it. He was arrogant. His wife was arrogant. The people who worked for them were arrogant. I know people who supported DeSantis that weren’t like me because I very clearly didn’t want to show for him, but I wasn’t going to go to their stupid little influencer dinners and everything else.
I know people who tried to tell them that your polling is wrong. Your arrogance is unfounded. You need a little humility. These are people that supported him. And at every corner, whether it was Genera Peck or Jeff Row or Ron or his wife, they thought they knew better than everyone else. And sadly, I may have lost a good friend over this, because I tried to save his career and tell him that they were all blowing smoke up, as you know what.
And the arrogance on the other end of that line, I’ll never forget it, because he was calling me, trusting me. This is what they’re saying. What say you? I like him, but I don’t want to end up on the wrong side of this thing. And I told him with all my heart what I believe to be the truth, which is borne out now. And the arrogance from these people.
I mean, Steve, you should. It’s sad. You should have heard them. Dang. And then to listen from, whether it was Roe or the governor himself, whatever. And then to now fast forward, where we are sad it is because he was a superstar of 2022. He was a mixed tragedy. Yeah, a shakespearean tragedy. And then you just have all of these social media influences going, that’s it. That’s our presidential candidate.
And you’re. Well, wait a minute. Scott Walker, Chris Christen. Just because they’re doing awesome in their state, it doesn’t translate into a national campaign. Be careful, guys. And then, actually, rich, I think you were talking about it. I’m looking back at a fixed point when Tucker was asking all the candidates their position on. Remember? Right. I think you brought this up. I think you brought this up, maybe on your live stream yesterday.
Do you think that was it? Or at least I think you’re right. It goes all the way back to arrogance, but this flip flop on Ukraine, because at first he gave a relatively decent answer. And then he just, well, the donors called. Yeah, exactly. In fact, one donor in specific, as I understand it, and they didn’t want to lose. That’s exactly. Tucker said that. Tucker said one donor in particular called him and as far as he was concerned, that was it.
I mean, he’s not going to support this guy if he could be bought by one dude. And this is what had occurred. We were polling at the time. And this is the thing. I mean, people are already trying to write his obituary and they’re blaming the indictments, which certainly had something to do with it. But it wasn’t just that. There was an immediate rally around the flag effect.
He screwed, he botched. How he dealt with those indictments when people were already looking. And that was the real impact of the Ukraine, whatever you want to call the Ukraine flip flop. With Tucker, when he did that, republican primary voters were, hmm, wait, what? Let me look at this guy a little closer. And as they said that. Let me look at him a little closer. I don’t like what he just did on Ukraine.
Let me look at him a little closer. That’s when he dropped the ball on the indictments and everything else. So it was like the worst possible time because voters aren’t paying a lot. Well, I think the information age is different. Voters are paying attention much quicker now. All right, so that’s why the state of the race has been pretty static for months and months. It’s not the way it used to be.
Where in Iowa, everything’s going to break in the last five days. In New Hampshire, everything’s going to break in the last two days. Independents decide in the voting booth. We’re not in that age anymore, folks, in case you’re not paying attention, and voters, an event happened that not only said, all right, now I’m going to pay attention. It was more than that. It was, I know him only as the governor of Florida.
And by the way, Trump made him the governor of Florida. Maybe I need to look at this guy a little closer. Maybe everything’s not what it appears to be here. And just as, like the majority of the primary electorates said that to themselves, the indictments started to roll out. All these things started to happen. And it was that moment, I would say it was the first dent in his armor.
The Tucker, the moment with Tucker, that was the first dent in his armor. And then the mail just started coming apart. It was one of those Looney tune cars just breaking up as he’s going along, left with a skeleton. It fell apart and no amount of social media propaganda was going to change it at all. We’re talking some pretty major influencers out there pushing for him big time.
Big no avail. They couldn’t even come near the persuasive power they needed. Rich, you’re amazing, man. We got all the links down below. But what’s the best place for people to subscribe and keep up with your work? Yeah, the best place is peoplespundant locals. com. That is the best place. Locals is a central hub. I appreciate that. I love coming on. Wish we had more time. We’ll do it again.
Anytime you want me, I’m coming. I enjoy it. It’s a great conversation, gang, I can’t recommend what Rich just said more. I’m a member of his locals platform. It is awesome. His weekly data and analysis is absolute gold. Click on it, join it. You’re going to love it. And you will learn today what pundits eventually will be talking about weeks from now because that’s what rich is able to do.
Rich, dude, congrats, man. Awesome. You nailed it. 2024 is going to be amazing and I’m just glad I’m along for the ride with you, man. This is great. I’m looking forward to it. Thanks for having me as always, brother. I’ll see you soon. All right. God bless. .