Iowa And Beyond: Three’s A (Republican) Crowd?

>> Bill Whalen: It's Thursday, January 11, 2024, and welcome back to Matters of Policy and Politics. A Hoover Institution podcast devoted to governance and balance of power here in America and around the world. I'm Bill Whelan. I'm the Virginia Hobbes Carpenter distinguished policy fellow in journalism here at the Hoover Institution.

I'm just one of many Hoover fellows who are in the podcasting game these days. I encourage you to go to our website, which is hoover.org, click on the tab at the top of the homepage it says commentary. Scroll down to where it says multimedia, then move right to where it says audio podcasts.

And up will come a whole a podcast, about a dozen and all, including this one, which is at the top of the list. And I think that's because I strive to get the best of the Hoover Institution has to offer, this podcast being no exception. My guests today are David Brady and Doug Rivers.

Dave Brady is the Hoover Institution's Davies family senior fellow emeritus and the Bow and H. And Janice Arthur McCoy, professor of political science in the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Doug Rivers is a Hoover Institution senior fellow and a Stanford University political scientist. He's also the chief scientist at UGov PLC, a global polling firm.

They're here to talk about the latest in politics and public opinion, which is timely as we're on the eve of the Iowa caucuses. Gentlemen, great to see you. Thanks for coming back on the podcast and it dawns on me that we first started doing these almost eight years ago.

Doug blamed Brady. This was a great idea to do podcasts, but here we are almost eight years later, still going strong, I trust.

>> Dave Brady: Still making mistakes.

>> Bill Whalen: Well, let's avoid making mistakes in 2024 by staying out of the prediction business. So I'm gonna avoid question number one, which is what's gonna happen on Monday night?

Who's gonna win? Let me just quickly walk you guys through the schedule, and then let's get into some of the more interesting aspects about 2024. As I mentioned, the caucuses are Monday the 15th. After that, New Hampshire votes versus the nation primary January 23. It's kind of a screwball primary in this regard.

The Democratic Party does not recognize it as they honor South Carolina as the nation's first primary. So Joe Biden will not be on the ballot there. But there's expected to be a very contentious contest between Donald Trump and Nikki Haley there. New Hampshire is interesting because independents could cross over and vote into it.

So we'll see what happens there. Following that, the calendar gets a little interesting here, a little complicated. For example, February 3, there's a democratic primary in South Carolina, but Republicans don't hold their primary until later in the month, February 24. Nevada has also managed to complicate things. It has a non binding primary on February 6, but then Republicans will hold a party held caucus on February 8.

Michigan votes on February 27. Then we get into the heart of the schedule. March the 5 super Tuesday, with 16 states voting, including California and Texas. If that's enough for you, March 12, Georgia, Mississippi, Washington, vote, March 19, Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, and Ohio all hold primaries. April 2 Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode island, and Wisconsin all vote.

Now, I mention all this because there's a chance that this thing could be over before it started. In this regard, if you look at Super Tuesday, which I remember, the 16 states on the Republican side, that 765 delegates up for grabs. And I think the last I saw, I think it takes 1235 to get the Republican nomination in 2024.

And all about two thirds Republican delegates will be selected in March. So, again, you could have a situation where the Republicans have a nominee a full four months before the national convention, eight months before the election. If you go back to act 2016, Donald Trump did not clinch the nomination until Memorial Day, but the race was effectively over in early May when Ted Cruz couldn't beat him in Indiana.

Cruz actually turned out win 11 primaries in that cycle. So here we are, guys, 2024. Having said all this, what do you think? Does this lineup very much like 2016 in terms of Trump versus the field, but also Trump with the potential to close this thing out pretty fast?

Doug, what do you think?

>> Doug Rivers: I think it'll be over in a blank. So right now, it looks like Iowa will have Trump by more than 20 points. Then New Hampshire, I think that's not gonna be terribly close. There are polls that have shown Haley within seven points, but the bulk of them are more like 20 points.

And then we get to South Carolina. And I think if Trump wins in South Carolina, which I think he will, it'll be all over on the Republican side before Super Tuesday.

>> Bill Whalen: It was about a 30 point race in South Carolina, the last I looked. So, yeah, he could sweep that habit very over.

Dave, here's kind of the big picture question, though. Is this a good way to choose presidents by having a process could potentially go this fast? And then, as I mentioned, have just what World War II, they called the Sitz Krieg, where there was not an actual war for months on end.

The idea that you have these flurry of votes, but then you have to sit around and wait for months for a convention and then months after that for an election. It seems like an awfully dragged out process.

>> Dave Brady: Yeah, I would disagree just a little with Doug. I think with the dropout of the New Jersey governor, I think Haley might do a little better.

She might even sneak by but I agree with Doug. After that, in Nevada and in Michigan and then South Carolina, it'll be over. But the primaries are not a very good way to, in my view, to nominate anybody, whether it's for the House seats or the Senate seats, the presidency, it's not such a good idea.

Wide open at the beginning, I favor having four regional primaries or one national primary. Set it up if you're gonna have primaries and you make them voting. Turnout is amazingly low in these primaries. Even in 2016, when Donald Trump had huge turnout in Iowa, was about 11% of the total turnout in the election in Iowa in 2016.

And the people who turn out for the Democrats are on the very liberal end. For the Democrats and for the Republicans, it's a conservative end. So I think you're getting candidates that most people don't want. And if you sort of look at average American, they're really opposed to what looks like is going to be a sure thing, Biden versus Trump.

So any process that gives you what 70% of Americans don't want, I think it'd be very hard to call that a good political process.

>> Bill Whalen: Now, Doug, I'd like to point you to a tweet that our friend Tom Bevin put out the other day. Tom Bevin is one of the co founders of Real Clear Politics or wrong with Carl Cannon there Hoover media fellows, just good fellows to work with.

Dave has written for real clear politics and many occasions. Here's what Tom pointed out, guys. He looked back at 2016. He looked at the RCP average. This is real clear politics taking average of polls and then giving you an average number of that. And what he found, Doug, was that going into the caucuses, Trump had about a five point lead over Cruze.

In the final results, Cruz actually won the caucuses by about three points. What he was getting at, Doug, was that Trump underperformed in Iowa to the tune of about four points. Ted Cruz over performed by about four points. Marco Rubio is actually the biggest over performer that night, 6.3%.

He finished a pretty close third to Trump. So what he's getting at is that the paraphrase Yogi Berry, eight over till it's over. In other words, surprises could happen in Iowa. I take it a step further, Doug. I'm really pushing here to try to put drama into this, but,

 

>> Bill Whalen: I'd point you to a column that Jim Garrity wrote in the Washington Post. Jim Garrity also writes for National Review. He pointed to one thing, which is the weather. I don't know if you guys like to go on your phones and look at the weather app or not, but I looked up Des Moines, Iowa, before he went on the air.

Projected high of minus three degrees on Monday, a low of -14 in Des Moines. Dave Brady's the southern Midwest. He's more familiar with this kind of ugly weather. The reason why this is relevant, you go back to 2016 in Iowa, and something like 25, 27% of the voters in that caucus were over 65.

In theory, it's too cold, the rose connections aren't good. Maybe they don't turn out to vote. So, Doug, is there anything there to the unexpected in Iowa, or is just this moderator grasping at Strauss?

>> Doug Rivers: I wish I could get up some enthusiasm for the unexpected to happen here.

The premise is correct, which is the polling in Iowa in particular and the primaries in general is pretty unreliable. One shouldn't believe that the margin of error on these polls is three, four, five points, either way, it's more than that. But the problem here is that the size of Trump's lead is not measured in single digit numbers.

It's 20 to 30 points in Iowa. And unless someone tries to make something out of G, he got less than 50% rather than greater than 50%. I don't think that's the kind of surprise we would get, any kind of underperformance you might expect. It's really hard with a lead like this to think that there's really a lot of uncertainty in the outcome.

I mean, what the Haley campaign is premised on is that DeSantis drops out after losing in Iowa, and she can make a contest of it in New Hampshire. But what happens then is there, even if the New Hampshire result was close, is there another state where Haley can actually be competitive against Trump?

There's this extremely narrow path for her to make it a two candidate race. In fact, I think it's more likely that she's gonna do worse in Iowa than anticipated. And that's likely to slow down any sort of enthusiasm for DeSantis to drop out or for her to pick up more in New Hampshire.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Really, you think she might underperform in Iowa because the narrative seems to be that she'll over perform in Iowa, but you think it might be the opposite?

>> Dave Brady: I think she will too.

>> Doug Rivers: Yeah.

>> Bill Whalen: Underperform, okay, why?

>> Dave Brady: I think he's gonna underperform because as the only one of us who's actually been to and voted in an Iowa caucus in that kind of weather, I can tell you that the turnout is dramatically affected by.

You may remember in 1992 or 1988 when George Bush finished third next to Pat Roberts because it was a cold, nasty day. And people, the Bush people were home having a martini going, well, it's cold, we'll stay home. So if you look at Trump and DeSantis and Nikki Haley, her big state is New Hampshire because they're independents, and independents are the least interested in politics in America.

So she'll get a boost from independence, but they're not independents in Iowa, and the people who are for her are less for her. So if you look at MAGA Republicans and DeSantis, who's built a nice organization to get the vote out. I just think Doug's right, that the turnout is gonna be MAGA Republicans and some DeSantis.

And that on a cold day, her supporters, who tend to be more moderate, less involved in politics, they're not gonna be there.

>> Bill Whalen: Part of the narrative in 88, Dave, was that a lot of cars out of state license plate showed up on caucus night in Iowa. Kinda has me curious, were you teaching in Manhattan, Kansas, at the time?

And, Dave Brady, did you cross state lines and come and vote in Iowa?

>> Dave Brady: No, no, I was at the University of Iowa from 1964 on. I was in Houston at that point by 88.

>> Bill Whalen: Doug, I was trying to break a little news here with voter fraud on our podcast.

 

>> Doug Rivers: I'll agree to it, but it helps.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, all right, Doug, let me throw yet another scenario at you. And this is 1984, since we're not gonna play along with 2016, let's go to 1984 in this regard, what happens in Iowa in 1984, it's not a competitive depth.

The republican side's not that interesting because Ronald Reagan's running for reelection. It's the Democrats who have all the drama. What happens that night? Walter Mondale partner gets 50% of the vote, and 50%, as Doug mentioned, is kinda a magic number. I think W Bush surpassed it in 2000, but rarely does a caucus candidate crack that.

Walter Mondale got close, 48.9%, so who is the winner in the caucus that night? Gary Hart.

>> Dave Brady: Yeah.

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> Dave Brady: I was gonna say it wasn't Mondale, Gary Hart got that, because of expectations.

>> Bill Whalen: Only in American story politics, Gary Hart gets one third of what Mondale did, 48, 9, Hart, 16.5, McGovern, 10.3%.

Some chap named uncommitted got 9.4%, which was better than Alan Cranston, John Glenn, and Jesse Jackson. But Doug, this gets back to what you're talking about. Gary Hart, quote unquote, won the night because he outperformed with 16.5%. We then go a week later from that into New Hampshire, and Hart actually takes it to Mondale.

He beats him by nine points, New Hampshire but, here's where 1984 maybe doesn't hold up a 2024. In this regard, the democratic race that year is pretty friggin competitive. If you look in the first half of March, Gary Hart did very well, the second half belonged to Mondale.

Hart actually ended up winning more contests in that election, 26 to 22 for Mondale. You see, though, Mondale pulled away in April, but here's, I think, where the parallel doesn't match up. Doug, I wanna get your thoughts on this. Mondale was, in many regards, a weak primary candidate.

In this regard, Hart was chipping away at Mondale. Support among union voters, elderly, economically, worse off, what the New York Times called at the time, quote, regular white democrats. I'm not sure what that means, I'm not sure you could even say that in this woke day and age.

The point was, you saw kind of early signs for what would trouble Mondale come the fall. But this begs the question of, is Donald Trump dug in any kind of similar position to Walter Mondale, or is he just a much more formidable front runner?

>> Doug Rivers: The enthusiasm for Trump among the republican base is incredible, but remember, the 80s were the high point of the sort of momentum view of presidential primaries.

That is, it didn't matter whether you won or lost dependent on whether you did better than expectations. So famously after the 1980 election, where George H.W Bush won in Iowa caucuses, he had the Big Mo, and then he lost in New Hampshire, and he had the Little Mo.

And, those days are, there hasn't been a candidate that's done well because of momentum in a very long time. There have been plenty of candidates losing Iowa and New Hampshire, but essentially everyone ending up voting the way you would have expected at the beginning.

>> Dave Brady: You guys must be missing the point.

The question was, what's this was a little different, do you remember when presidential candidate Hart lost the 1984 election? Hart did not win the nomination, Mondale won the nomination.

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> Doug Rivers: Yes.

>> Dave Brady: And the point is that he was ahead, he did better. Momentum, made some little adjustments, but the fact is Mondale won, and it looks like the same thing's true for Trump.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah.

>> Dave Brady: Very hard.

>> Bill Whalen: The point I'm getting at is that 84 Hart punched him in the mouth early, and then there was a genuine race. And that race dragged out past California in June, even. But the problem there, as I was getting to Doug with, was that Mondale was just the end of day, he was a weak frontrunner.

And you could saw, even in polls at that time, you saw democrats already saying openly they probably would vote for Reagan in it. I just, I don't think that's where the parallel, matches up 40 years later.

>> Doug Rivers: Yeah, and Trump is a strong front runner, both in the Republican base and doing well in the trial heats against Biden.

 

>> Dave Brady: Well, I wanna disagree with that when three quarters of Americans don't want either one of them to run, when you ask a question that says, who are you gonna vote for, Trump or Biden, you'll get a response. But I would not call either one of them strong candidates.

 

>> Doug Rivers: I don't disagree with that, Doug.

>> Dave Brady: There was a vote tomorrow morning saying yes or no these guys, it'd be no.

>> Bill Whalen: But I think what Doug would say is he's a strong candidate within the small sliver Republicans are gonna turn out to vote in these early primary states.

 

>> Dave Brady: That's, that's a different thing than saying they're a strong candidate across the country, they're not.

>> Doug Rivers: Yeah, I don't disagree with you on that, Dave, the strength that Trump has is among half of the Republic and primary voters, and there doesn't appear to be anything he can do that will lose that.

We've seen much of anything like that in a very long time.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah.

>> Dave Brady: By the way, at likely Republican primary voters, and among them, Trump has an even larger lead than we've been talking about among people likely to turn out in those things. And Haley is, actually falls a little bit below DeSantis because I think her strength is not really among conservative Republicans.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Let me throw a couple theories at you guys, and that if you look at the struggles of Ron DeSantis and then you look at Nikki Haley and this kind of long shot gamble she has at trying to get the nomination, you have your questions of strategy that maybe just don't work out.

I mean, DeSantis strategy going in, this was pretty simple, that he made the assumption that he was the heir apparent to Donald Trump he would have portray himself that way. There's a problem here, though Donald Trump's on the ballot so how can you be the heir apparent when the guy you're trying to be the heir apparent to, you're running against?

But then in Haley's case, let's talk about this maybe a little more in depth, she's gambling that Republicans want an alternative. But as we're seeing in these votes across the country, Republicans are not moving off from Trump.

>> Doug Rivers: Yeah I think it potentially might have been different if Biden was leading Trump in the polls by five or ten points.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah.

>> Doug Rivers: The fact that Trump is actually even or slightly ahead of Biden in the polls doesn't give most Republicans any sort of reason to look elsewhere.

>> Dave Brady: And Republicans are more likely to think that Trump will win versus Biden than Democrats think that Biden is likely to win.

 

>> Doug Rivers: Yeah, there's a big gap in that.

>> Bill Whalen: That's one of the oddities of selection seems to me that in some regards, Joe Biden is Donald Trump's insurance policy. In this regard, I can beat this guy, and certainly Donald Trump is Joe Biden's insurance policy, that I can beat this guy as well and so that's part of the trap the American people have managed to find themselves into.

So we've talked about Trump's hold on the party I wanna get your thoughts for a minute, Doug, on some numbers that you put out via your CB's you got poll the other day. This is the third anniversary of the January riots and what you found in your poll, 51% of respondents expect the losing side to accept the loss peacefully, 49% expect violence.

 

>> Doug Rivers: That's quite a striking statistic, isn't it?

>> Bill Whalen: It is, meanwhile, I think in the same poll, 70% believe democracy is under threat, 30% believe democracy is secure, I wanna point you guys to that 70% number because this seems to be Joe Biden's ticket to ride now. He has given two campaign speeches so far he hasn't talked about the economy, he hasn't talked about foreign, foreign policy, he hasn't talked about a robust second term agenda.

He's talked about one thing, and that is democracy hanging by a loose thread and Donald Trump standing next to it with a big pair of scissors.

>> Dave Brady: I think that's what gets the Democratic vote out.

>> Doug Rivers: Yeah.

>> Dave Brady: If you look at young people, African American voters, Hispanics aren't happy with the border policy so on you go down the list.

The one thing that Democrats seem to agree on is what you said earlier Donald Trump is Biden's insurance policy.

>> Doug Rivers: Yeah, I mean, a third of the Democrats don't want Biden to run for re-election, those are terrible numbers for an incumbent president. The enthusiasm for Biden among Democrats is, let's say, muted, and particularly among younger voters, where he doesn't get very good approval numbers for how he's handling the situation in Gaza, he would normally be in a very weak position.

But the thing that unites Democrats is they do not want another term of Donald Trump.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, is that one-third number historic, Doug? Do you know offhand if Jimmy Carter polled the same or Lyndon Johnson polled the same in 1968.

>> Doug Rivers: We weren't doing any national polling back then in the pre-Internet age.

That's a good question we should dig it out but the odd thing was, we didn't ask in 2020 whether people wanted Trump to run for reelection. We didn't think it was an issue and didn't ask about it.

>> Bill Whalen: Well, Dave, this raises an interesting question to me, if Doug is right and one third of Democrats don't want Joe Biden to run again, why is there not a more robust challenge to him?

There is one rather gadfly congressman running, Robert F Kennedy, Jr, did it for a while he's now running as an independent. But, I can point you to a lot of big name Democrats who certainly seem to wanna run in 2028, but nobody is stepping up and doing it in 2024.

 

>> Dave Brady: I think there's a couple of reasons for it, first imagine even four months ago, the field would start to get crowded. And if you think about the democratic field, what was it like? They're all to the left so you remember in 2020 when they asked at the debate, should we shut down ice, let the border open, and everybody but Biden said yes.

So I think the first thing that happened in a primary, the candidates who could win, a guy like Shapiro of Pennsylvania or the governor of Michigan, who are sort of more centrist, but the bottom line is, I don't see how they get through a democratic primary which is dominated by the left.

That's one and two given that, what it might look like, I think people say, well, who's the better candidate? Who's the one person we could pull out now who would definitely do better? I think there's talent on the bench, but I don't think there is you could name somebody who would definitely do better.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah.

>> Doug Rivers: And it would be suicidal for most of those people to run.

>> Bill Whalen: As history tells us, you don't kill the king.

>> Doug Rivers: Yes.

>> Bill Whalen: Regicide just doesn't work presidential politics.

>> Doug Rivers: There's no obvious Democratic alternative I think there are a set of candidates that could run pretty well, but individually, it's not like 1980, if we're rehearsing the past when it was Jimmy Carter versus Ted Kennedy and Ted Kennedy was the obvious alternative to Carter.

There are a handful of democratic candidates that I think could probably beat Trump, but beating Biden, I think, would be difficult for any one of them individually. You have an incumbent president who has delivered on quite a few things that he promised and has a reasonably good economy, normally, this is not the situation where the incumbent president would be challenged.

The dissatisfaction with Biden, I think, is almost entirely his age.

>> Dave Brady: By the way, Carter, I did look it up in the American presidency because my suspicion was that Carter was lower, he was at 32%.

>> Bill Whalen: And, Doug, what number have you described to Biden right now I know it bounces between the high 30s and into the 40s, where would you ballpark him?

 

>> Doug Rivers: And his approval rating averages around 40%.

>> Dave Brady: Not bad.

>> Doug Rivers: That's not a good number for incoming president, particularly when the economy is reasonably good. I think the Biden campaign is counting on the public eventually coming around to saying the economy is not terrible. It's not the worst economy ever.

It's actually a relatively decent economy. I don't think the economy moves as many voters as it used to. You're not going to take the Trump base and they're gonna wake up one morning and saying, well, inflation is 2, 3%, the unemployment rate is low. Gee, I'm thinking about voting for Joe Biden.

That's not going to happen.

>> Bill Whalen: It seems to me the economy is hard to explain to voters right now. One of the White House economic advisors went in front of the cameras the other day and she started explaining how well the economy is and started getting the stats about purchasing power and so forth.

And it strikes me, it's just a rather difficult message to tell the voters at a base level. But, you know, Dave, I went back and I looked up what Barack Obama, what his approach was to running for reelection in 2011 and 2012. And this is interesting, worth noting.

April 2011, Obama announces that he's running for reelection and his campaign puts out a two minute video. And the video's title was called It Begins With Us. And here's what's striking about the video. It does not feature Barack Obama at all. He doesn't say a word in it.

It stars Democrats saying they voted for him in 2008. They believe in him and they plan to vote for him again. So the Obama campaign didn't go after Democrat. Granted, they didn't know who the nominee was at that point. They didn't have Trump staring at them, but they talked about bucking up their own guy.

And the Biden approach seems to be different. Rather than bucking up their guy, they're going after the likely opponent.

>> Dave Brady: Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's why Biden's recent speeches have been about democracy and trying to firm up black voters with a speech in South Carolina.

By the way, I just looked up LBJ. Well, there's a nice project called The American Presidential Project at University of California, Santa Barbara. Nice website. And LBJ was about 40% in 1968 when he decided he wouldn't run again. And remember, he did win-

>> Doug Rivers: But it's 40% approval.

 

>> Dave Brady: Yeah, 40%.

>> Bill Whalen: He did win the New Hampshire part.

>> Dave Brady: It's better than Carter.

>> Bill Whalen: Right, he did win New Hampshire. People seem to think he lost to McCarthy, but he won the primary.

>> Dave Brady: Yeah.

>> Doug Rivers: Yes.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah.

>> Dave Brady: And he won it-

>> Doug Rivers: That was that was, again, back in the era where McCarthy did better than expected.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Yes.

>> Dave Brady: Well, Doug, Bill, you too, wouldn't you think that if, whatever it is, DeSantis, loses 46:43 or 46:40, that would make a difference?

>> Doug Rivers: Absolutely.

>> Dave Brady: Okay, so then expectations still matter. I agree, they probably matter.

>> Doug Rivers: Well, it matters in the following sense, that in multi candidate elections, the candidates that are third or lower essentially have their votes are thrown away, they're wasted.

And so the big game is, how do you make it a race in which you are one of the top two candidates? And if you are among the top two candidates, then it essentially, by the end of the primary season, is a straight up vote between two candidates.

We've never had a situation where at the very end, you had three equally strong candidates. And the situation here is, yes, at some point, DeSantis or Haley is going to emerge as the second Republican candidate, but it is gonna be way too late, and they will still be 30 points behind Trump.

So it's not gonna do you any good ending up as a one-on-one race with Trump if you're 30 points down against him.

>> Bill Whalen: That's well put.

>> Dave Brady: I agree with that.

>> Bill Whalen: So we have something of an anomaly in American politics if this pans out, if it is a repeat of 2020 and Trump versus Biden.

And that I've heard it described as a two incumbents election, in that you have an incumbent president and then a former president with name recognition and presence, like Trump is, in fact, also an incumbent, if you will. I guess you could say maybe 1912 was similar to this when you had both Taft and Roosevelt on the ballot, though TR was running as an independent.

So a different kind of election then. Before that, you'd have to go to 1892 and the rematch between Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison. But here's a question for you, Dave. You have a very well known entity in Joe Biden with people having very strong positions about him, pro and con.

Donald Trump would be an understatement to say that people have strong feelings about him, pro and con. Here's the question for you two to ponder. Who's persuadable in this matchup between these two?

>> Dave Brady: Well, the persuadables generally are the people who are a little out of line with the party.

So that means if you ask people in the Republican Party that they say they're conservative or moderate or liberal, about 80% say they're conservative, and so there's 20% moderates. And for the Democrats, it's a bigger number. The Democrats are more. It's about 35% to 40% of Democrats aren't liberal, mostly moderate.

And over time, it's those people who vote for the other party. Now, the problem is, in 1972, when Nixon won, a third of Nixon's vote came from Democrats. And in 1964, about 20% of the vote for LBJ came from Republicans. The trouble is, once the parties have sorted, there are very few liberals and moderates in the Republican Party, and a much smaller number of moderates and conservatives in the Democratic Party.

So the number of persuadables is, I don't know, Doug, maximum 10% of the party members. That'd be max, I think.

>> Doug Rivers: Yeah, I think the number of swing voters is in the order of 10% at the moment, which is smaller than it was in the past. There are, I think, three groups that you look for.

You know, I think the first is suburban voters as a group have moved in the democratic direction in recent years. So that's a group that Democrats have been doing much better in than they used to do. But they aren't hardcore Democrats that are part of the democratic base.

They can be peeled off. And I think it looks like Biden is losing a bit of those on economic issues. If the alternative were any Republican other than Trump, I think you would see a whole bunch of them moving back towards the Republicans.

>> Bill Whalen: But that is, I'm sorry, Doug, but does the economy really move these persuadables, or are we looking at some other issues, such as with Biden age and with Trump temperament?

 

>> Doug Rivers: Well, I think with Trump, you got what you've got, that everybody knows who he is. And Biden can't do much about his age, though I think it's less explicitly aged than the vibe that he gives. He does give a quite old vibe.

>> Bill Whalen: It is an old vibe because, for the record, he is actually younger than Harrison Ford.

He's younger than Barbra Streisand. He's younger than Martin Scorsese. But it's, my apologies to any octogenarian-

>> Doug Rivers: I don't think he's being cast as the next Indiana Jones.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, it's an old 81.

>> Doug Rivers: The point at which Biden's support seemed to fall was when we had a increase in inflation.

And the Biden numbers are much worse on handling the economy than anything else. I think that is an issue as much as anything that hits some swing voters.

>> Dave Brady: Mike, I want to point out, I think Doug's right. And when people say, inflation is down. Well, if you think about it like this, if a year ago you bought an item before inflation went up 100%, you bought an item for a dollar.

And now it's $2, and then they say, inflation only went up 2% this year. Great, it's still $2.02 and that's what people see when they go in the grocery stores, thing cost more. So I agree with Doug, Pat. That's a problem.

>> Bill Whalen: This is the challenge I noticed going back to that White House economic spokesperson the other day.

She went on and on about buying power and how Americans now have more money at their disposal, but it doesn't change the fact that people see stuff is too expensive and I can tell he's a single guy who goes to the grocery store and shops and implements. There are two kinds of shoppers, people who go out and buy two or three days worth of stuff and people will go out and buy two weeks worth of stuff and have two group, two cartons.

What used to be 30 or $40 worth of stuff is now worth $50 worth of stuff. And you look at, you think, how did this happen? I think that's part of the bind that Biden people have to find a way to talk around. You can talk-

>> Dave Brady: The slogan bidenomics didn't do it.

Well, whoever suggests he attaches name to that plan, probably.

>> Bill Whalen: They probably segued out of the White House went to work for Claudine Gay at Harvard after that. So in terms of good policies.

>> Doug Rivers: I'll stay away from that.

>> Bill Whalen: No comment by the crowd.

>> Dave Brady: Me, too.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Yes, former product of the Stanford political science department. Correct.

>> Dave Brady: She was a fellow faculty member for a while and she's a very nice person. Very unsmart, actually.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, so let's get back to persuadables for a minute in this regard, the pool of persuadables. Because one thing which you're going to have here, perhaps the first time since 1992 is a significant third party presence.

And I think we should all probably write down on a piece of paper what we think the third party votes gonna turn out with and look at it come November rather than actually say out loud. But you have right now Robert Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, Jill Stein, Green Party candidate.

They're all in, we still don't know what the no labels movement is going to produce. They could put a Democrat as the presidential pick or a Republican. So that's kind of a big what if. I follow this is a great fascination, because one of the many scars I carry is that I worked on the 1992 Bush reelect campaign where we had to deal with a fellow named Ross Perot.

And what did Ross Perot do in 1992? He got about 18.9% of the national vote. He didn't win a single electoral vote. But boy, he scrambled the map. He scrambled Dave Brady's map. He got about 20% of the vote in California, Dave, he got 26% of the vote in Montana.

And Bill Clinton carried Montana and carried California as well. So I want your guys thoughts on two things. Number one, the potency of third parties and then the great parlor game right now, the great parlor guessing game. Who benefits more from this, Trump or Biden?

>> Dave Brady: My view is that parole costs Bush reelection.

These guys, I think Cornel West and jealousy are gonna hurt Biden whatever extent they get votes. But Robert Kennedy, I think given some of his theories about vaccinations and so on. I think he may and a little bit of the poll I saw, Doug, you had him in the poll.

He was getting more votes from looked like Trump supporters than or Republicans than he was getting from Democrats.

>> Doug Rivers: Yeah, it's hard to predict exactly how that's going to evolve. I'm willing to take the under on any number that you put for what the third party vote will be.

 

>> Dave Brady: 1%.

>> Doug Rivers: Well, you know, I do think the Cornel west, Jill Stein sort of thing is going to be very low. You know, they could easily not break 1%. RFK Jr. is a little different. The appeal is different and the name is better known. But again, I think his support will shrink.

And in the end, I don't think he's going to be much of a factor in terms of what's the impact. If we have an election as close as 2020 or 2016, any of these candidates is enough to make the difference. The vote that Ralph Nader took in 2000 in Florida was enough to swing that election and cost of New Hampshire, too.

All these candidates are gonna get more than 10,000 votes in the big state which is what the margin was in 2020, Georgia and Arizona. I think I agree with Dave that the RFK Jr. thing is he's evolved much more to an anti-vax candidate. So if that's something you really care about, you know, he may suck some votes there that would otherwise go to Trump.

But Stein and west are, you know, appealing to people who would otherwise be democratic voters.

>> Bill Whalen: What about the no labels ticket? Because here in theory, you would have a centrist, balanced democratic Republican appealing not to your hearts, but your minds.

>> Dave Brady: I think they're gonna have a very hard time picking.

First of all, if you pick a Democrat to run on top and then Republican is vice president, they switch after two years. Because otherwise, in other words, if it's a Democrat on top of the ticket, why wouldn't that hurt Biden? If it's a Republican, why wouldn't that hurt Trump?

They may be moderate, but I don't see much of a way for them to get into the race without affecting it in probably a negative way. What do I mean by that? If you look at 2020, where Biden gets more than 7 million more votes than Trump, but it's really decided by 44,000 votes in three states, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia.

So if it's decided by that few votes, what Doug says about the candidates, Jill Stein, the other, that could affect things. 5,000 votes in Arizona could determine who's the next president of the United States. That is not a good political system.

>> Doug Rivers: So you want approval voting?

>> Dave Brady: No, I don't.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Well, so let me ask you to let me appeal to the political scientists and both of you. How do we build a better mousetrap here? How do we come up with a better system? Dave, at the beginning of the show, you mentioned national, National Primary Day.

>> Dave Brady: Well, I think national primaries or for regional primaries would be better than what we have and the other thing is that's decidable by the parties.

You don't have to have all these other reforms like increase the size of the House of Representatives of 600. There are people saying get rid of the Senate, all those sorts of things. That's nonsense, there's no way. As closely divided as American politics are, we're not gonna have a constitutional amendment.

Reforming the primary system is something the parties can do for themselves. They've done it before, they did it in 1972. And Ben Ginsberg tells me after 2000, there was a serious move in the Republican Party party to do it again. So I'm looking at primaries as the most feasible way to try and change things.

 

>> Doug Rivers: I don't think there's any easy institutional fix that deals with the polarization problem which is why the primaries are leading to relatively extreme outcomes at the state level like in California, having these top two primaries is a situation that does cure a whole. A lot of the problems, but there's no way to do that at the presidential level.

 

>> Bill Whalen: No, that's a good point. Doug, maybe you need to ask a poll question, some variation of the Shakespeare line that the fault lies none of the stars, but ourselves and maybe try to get from voters a sense. Is the problem here that you don't like the process or is the problem here that you just don't like the principles?

Because in the time we've been doing this podcast, we had a not so pleasant choice of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016. I don't think people were doing jumping jacks and somersaults over Trump and Biden in 2020. And as Dave mentioned earlier, two-thirds of three-fourths of voters do not like the choice of Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

So as much as we could rag on the system, maybe it's just the fact that we're kind of it's sort of what they call the dance of lemons in education. We just putting rather unsavory choices before voters.

>> Doug Rivers: Yeah, the thing to remember is the statistic that two-thirds of the public doesn't want the choice between Trump and Biden ignores the fact that two thirds of Republicans do want Trump to run and half of the Democrats do want Biden to run.

The dissatisfaction with this choice is among a minority in each party and among independents. And the nomination process, specifically excludes or at least discourages independents from participating if a positive reform would be a way to allow independents to participate in the process. If Democrats are unhappy with the choice of Biden, in theory, they could participate, for example, in the New Hampshire Republican primary and contribute to a more desirable republican alternative.

That doesn't happen under the rules in most states and has never really happened in practice, the amount of crossover voting in primaries is quite low.

>> Dave Brady: Well, the party leaders don't want it.

>> Doug Rivers: Yes, well, the system is designed by first. I mean, this year's system was rigged by Biden and Trump.

Both of them have changed the rules to benefit their campaigns. In the Biden case, it was getting rid of Iowa and New Hampshire as the first two primaries and going to South Carolina, not otherwise known as a democratic stronghold or a swing state and Trump has done a variety of things to make the delegate allocations be winner take all.

So you've got the design of the system in the hands of people with a particular interest in an outcome and it's nothing getting centrist candidates.

>> Dave Brady: So I actually think that if you went back and thought about what if you had four regional or one national primary? I don't think Jimmy Carter would have gotten the nomination.

I don't think Bill Clinton would have gotten the nomination. If you remember, he lost Iowa and New Hampshire with a third place finish. He was talking about the comeback kid and went after that.

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> Dave Brady: But maybe Clinton would have won, but I don't think Carter would have won.

And in 2016-

>> Doug Rivers: In 76, you mean.

>> Dave Brady: What? Yes, sorry.

>> Doug Rivers: In 76. 1976, I don't think Carter went on. And in 2016, I don't think Donald Trump if it had been one national or four regional, I don't think he would have won.

>> Bill Whalen: Well, such thing about the regional approach is this, and I can relate to this, having worked for Pete Wilson in the 1990s when he ran for president, and he based a large part of his strategy on the inability to go to New Hampshire and campaign in person.

But his theory was he could just blanket the state with television ads and do well that way. If you had say, four regional primaries or maybe six straighters, eight weeks where you had multiple states. That would benefit what? A candidate with a lot of money at his or her disposal and high name recognition.

And that would take away the pressure from going to Iowa and having to spend months on end, but DeSantis strategy of going to 99 counties as did Ted Cruz in 2016. So maybe to go back and revise history, maybe in 1992, if you have regional primaries, Mario Cuomo decides to run, why?

Because he has name recognition, a lot of money coming out of New York. He doesn't have to go schlep his way through New Hampshire and Iowa, so maybe you're under. Yeah, the other thing that occurs to me is if going back to the grocery store, if you wanna look at how popular products are, it's very simple.

Are they selling? Are they flying off the shelf or not? And the question would be, is that analogous in politics? Because what you would relate it to is the system popular, not popular. The candidates popular, not popular. How many votes are there in election? How many people are turning out?

But here I'm kind of confused, because on the one hand, the choices aren't good, but then you look at the election results, higher numbers than ever, because we're making it easier for people to vote. So how do we really judge if the system is working well, what do we need to do a poll on that?

 

>> Doug Rivers: I think in general, if you ask people, are they satisfied with the choices they've been getting? They certainly haven't been terribly satisfied in recent years with the alternatives. I mean, the interesting thing about Trump is actually there is a fair fraction of the Republican base that's quite enthused about Trump is happy to get them in 2016.

 

>> Dave Brady: As you recall from YouGov recontact survey where he interviewed the same 5,000 people from May of 2015 to the present, if there had been one national primary, certainly the beginning, hidden one of the governor of Wisconsin at that time. Scott whatever, I forget his last name,

>> Doug Rivers: Walker.

 

>> Dave Brady: Yeah, he was very popular at the start of that and Trump finished was not high. So that's not that I wanna say get rid of those primary. But remember, the old strategy was Iowa and New Hampshire were retail politics. You went in there and you had to actually meet voters and shake hands and that got rid of the street sweepers.

And then you went to the Super Tuesday where you could get down to among the candidates that are left now we can decide a winner and get it over with, so we know who is the candidate and then we can get campaigning on it. And that is I think that, that rationale is just gone now.

It's not like that. You can't go back to that system.

>> Bill Whalen: Doug, I don't think we mentioned the name Scott Walker around Tallahassee these days, do we?

>> Bill Whalen: What I'm getting at Scott Walker in 2015 was the greatest thing since sliced bread and he was going to dominate the Republican primary to be the next president, and it just didn't work out.

And here we are now, eight years.

>> Doug Rivers: There's a long history of these candidates.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, I know there should be. There should be like an annual award for this or at least every four years, somebody should get that trophy.

>> Doug Rivers: The Ed Muskie Memorial trophy. Yeah, the theory of the system was you had these small states with retail politics as Dave said and then you had a winnowing of candidates.

So you could start with 1520 candidates and then you'd be down to a handful and then have something like Super Tuesday, which would get you down to two candidates. And then the end of the process, the final outcome would be determined by the big states running at the very end of the process.

That system has broken down entirely. It's now the cost of running these campaigns. Haley and DeSantis have spent $70 million a piece, that's a lot of retail politics.

>> Bill Whalen: Well, I think that DeSantis is not even including the super PAC money, are you?

>> Doug Rivers: That's right, that's just a fraction of the total amount.

 

>> Bill Whalen: By the way, maybe another lesson in this. Maybe Florida governor's current and pass should maybe not bet everything on a super PAC.

>> Bill Whalen: Referring to Jeb Bush in 2000 and created a super Pac, and he was out after South Carolina as well. Okay, guys, final question. I appreciate your time today.

You do a lot of polling behind the scenes at Hoover and you do a contact poll. You keep after same group of voters and keep coming after them. What are you doing with them in 2024? What do you want to find out?

>> Doug Rivers: Yeah, so we've just done a baseline interview of close to 100,000 people that we are gonna be dividing in the groups and recontacting them either 4 or 15 times over the next year and a bit.

And so we're going to be able to track movements in relatively small groups. This is gonna be an election-

>> Dave Brady: You've got, talking about Yale and Arizona State.

>> Doug Rivers: Yeah, so the project is being done jointly with Hoover and a group at Yale and Arizona State. And so we have surveys in the field every week now through January of 2025.

So we'll have much more to talk about. But the baseline is just being completed and the first wave of the weekly polls went into the field yesterday.

>> Dave Brady: That's very important, among other things that it's gonna solve. First of all, it'd be really good sampling in the states that are gonna determine the election.

But even more than that, you remember there's all these campaign events that the press talks about, Romney's 47%, Hillary's deplorables. And with this panel, we're gonna have enough size to see if those events like that, that the press treats are significant, really make any difference.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, so that is my exit question.

What do you guys hope to get out of the tracking survey? What do you hope to find that we don't get out of current polling.

>> Doug Rivers: So the first thing is national polling, samples of 1,000, 2,000 aren't enough to get to groups. And they're groups that are very interesting in this campaign.

I mentioned earlier suburban voters. Another is young voters who clearly have an uncomfortable relationship with Biden. There are a lot of polls out there based on very small samples suggesting Biden is actually behind among under 30 voters. I don't think that's right, but it's hard to tell with a small sample.

And the last are minorities that you've seen a significant peeling away of, especially Hispanics, but also to some extent black men from the Democrats. And we'd like to understand why that's happening, whether that's part of a longer run process, how much are occurring.

>> Bill Whalen: Dave, the republican equivalent would be women, suburban women.

 

>> Dave Brady: Yes.

>> Doug Rivers: Yes.

>> Bill Whalen: And what other groups, Latinos?

>> Doug Rivers: Latinos are ones that Republicans are hoping to make gains among. And then the question is, to what extent do suburban voters, particularly ideologically moderate voters, tend to come back to the Republican fold? And then we have some events that are coming up that there's likely to be a trial in which Donald Trump is in.

So it's going to be an unusual year in which the places in which you hear from the candidates won't be the same as always in the past. And-

>> Dave Brady: Also with the election, with a sample this size, there's always the question of people put x first, x second.

And so we know what, on aggregate, people say is the most important issue and second, and we know the difference between the party, but we don't know among individual voters. If you say inflation is an important issue, so is immigration, there's another one that's important, how those things trade off.

And I think with a sample size this way, we'll be in a better position to talk about how those trade offs moved over time.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, Doug Rivers, I'm gonna give you the last question. Just as people in Washington tend to take time off in the summer because it's a slow time of the year, things kind of grind to a halt as somebody who watches the election week in and week out.

If Doug Rivers were planning a one month cruise at sea, when would Doug Rivers book that cruise? Would he be booking it in March? Would he be booking it at April, May, June?

>> Doug Rivers: I think I started out by saying it's going to be over by early March, maybe even over in February.

So I hear that's a good time to head to warmer climates.

>> Dave Brady: I've known Doug rivers for a very, very long time, and I can tell you one thing. He's gonna be up at 6 AM. He's gonna be in bed late at night, and it's not gonna have anything to do with the damn cruise.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, guys, well, I hope we can parlay that into getting you back on this podcast soon, cuz it's going to be a very curious election year, and I think we can talk. Hey, thanks for coming on today. I really enjoyed the conversation.

>> Dave Brady: Anytime.

>> Doug Rivers: Thanks, Bill.

 

>> Bill Whalen: You've been listening to Matters of Policy and Politics, a Hoover Institution podcast devoted to governance and balance of power here in America and around the globe. If you've been enjoying this podcast, please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to our show. And if you wouldn't mind, please spread the word.

Tell your friends about us. The Hoover Institution has Facebook, Instagram, and X feeds. Our ex handle is @hooverinst, that's H-O-O-V-E-R-I-N-S-T. Dave Brady is not on social media, but Doug Rivers is, and you can find him at @doug_rivers. I'd also refer him to his excellent polling company, YouGov. That's @yougov, which is spelled Y-O-U-G-O-V.

I mentioned our website at the beginning of the show, which is hoover.org. While you're there, I encourage you to sign up for the Hoover Daily Report, which delivers the best work of Dave Brady and Doug Rivers and their Hoover colleagues to your inbox weekdays. For the Hoover Institution, this is Bill Whalen.

We'll be back soon with a new installment of Matters of Policy and Politics. Until then, take care. Thanks for listening.

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