Inside Iowa: Donald Trump’s Success and the State of the GOP

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: Now, an important bellwether for the U.S. presidential election, Martin Luther King Day is also Iowa Caucus Day for GOP presidential candidates. Despite facing many criminal charges, Former President Donald Trump entered as the frontrunner, with Governor Ron DeSantis and Former Governor Nikki Haley competing to be a strong alternative. New York Times national political reporter Astead Herndon joins Hari Sreenivasan now to speak about what’s at stake.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Astead Herndon, host of “The Run-Up” at “The New York Times,” thanks so much for joining us today.

ASTEAD HERNDON, NATIONAL POLITICS REPORTER, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

SREENIVASAN: Yes. So, tonight, folks in Iowa do something that the rest of the country really doesn’t do, that is caucus for our, let’s say, overseas audience or even the audience at home. Explain just a caucus before we have this chat.

HERNDON: Yes. I mean, unlike a kind of normal primary in which polls would open at a typical time and kind of people will vote throughout the day, a caucus is a kind of community event. Iowa — Republicans will go to a local gym or post office, something like that. They’ll hear kind of pitches from our candidates broadly and then kind of make a more public decision about who they vote for. But most importantly, it means that like there won’t be a kind of rolling through the day type of votes. All Iowans gather at 7:00 p.m. mostly and then kind of make a decision in those groups. And then we get results reported back. And so, it could affect us this evening in terms of timing, when we get results and how much we end up knowing.

SREENIVASAN: Now, I understand, you know, the structural advantage of being first in the nation for the state. But I wonder, is it a good predictor of what happens in that election? Does the person who wins Iowa become president?

HERNDON: The short answer is no, particularly on the Republican side. In 2016, Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses. In 2012, Rick Santorum won the Iowa caucuses. In 2008, Mike Huckabee won the two Iowa caucuses. None of those people ended up becoming the Republican nominee. What Iowa has typically done as the first state is really limit the choices for president and deliver kind of smaller menu of candidates to the rest of the states. And so, you think back to kind of 2016 as the late recent example, it wasn’t predictive in terms of Ted Cruz going on to win the nomination. But it did kind of show the different lanes that were emerging on the Republican electorate. So, you know, evangelicals rallying around Cruz, and I think they have been really the predictive group here in Iowa. But you had Donald Trump kind of originally show that he had more strength than maybe folks expected. This time is going to be a little different because the field is already down to only two or three serious candidates. I think that that — the kind of role of Iowa will be kind of up in question here. But I think it’s really about whether Donald Trump’s dominance and lead over the other two candidates feels matched in today’s results, as we’ve seen throughout polling. And so, in the way that Iowa typically was not predictive, and even more so than that was just about kind of showing where the evangelical slice of the Republican Party is, there’s a chance today that we see that the real grassroots base of Iowa Republicans are with Donald Trump. And if that’s true, that almost certainly makes him even clearly more better position to be the Republican nominee. So, in some ways, because the field is already strong, because this has been such a weird primary in general, Iowa might end up becoming more predictive than it’s typically been, because this race has become so nationalized. And so, you know, I think that we could be in a situation where, you know, the DeSantis’s, the others have gone all in on the kind of the typical Iowa campaigning going to all different counties, things like that, but it has become so tied to Donald Trump’s identity that if the Republican Party here backs him in a big way today, I think it’s going to feel a lot less like that small menu. They typically do. And the slow — the start of that coordination of Trump that I think many expect.

SREENIVASAN: On your podcast, there was an interesting piece of sound, I remember. I want to get this right. This was a voter in Iowa told one of your colleagues that Governor Ron DeSantis is the cover band trying to replace Trump. You know, we don’t need the cover band yet. We still have Trump. What does that illustrate about maybe why DeSantis didn’t catch on?

HERNDON: Oh, I thought that was a great quote, a really insightful one. You know, when we were at the Lincoln Dinner, that was this Iowa dinner that happens last year. That was around — right around the time that Ron DeSantis was trying his first reset, you know, his first kind of admission that things were going well and trying to restructure his campaign to kind of boost his numbers in Iowa. But the problem we were hearing from voters was way more fundamental. It wasn’t that — you know, it wasn’t something that could be solved with maybe strategy or message. It was that they didn’t necessarily think this person was the fighter for their values when they had the kind of “real deal” in Donald Trump. And so, you know, DeSantis has tried to pitch himself as Trump without the baggage. Trump without the rhetoric. Trump without the kind of gruff parts that I think sometimes in media, we say, how can these voters like someone like this? When for a lot of Republicans, that’s the exact reason they like it. They like that he kind of intimidates the system. That he agitates media. That he threatens political opponents. Those are not kind of side dishes to the Trump appeal, but kind of the main course. And so, as Ron DeSantis was trying to smooth out some of those edges or pitch himself as more intellectualized version of that, a lot of voters were saying, that’s not what we wanted. And so, when I hear the cover band quote, that’s what I think about, is that the assumption that Donald Trump needed to moderate either in tone or message, and that that’s what Ron DeSantis showed, that was a bad one because for a lot of the Republican base, the authentic version of Donald Trump, no matter how distasteful, no matter how controversial, that’s the one they want.

SREENIVASAN: Well, now, let’s talk about the other leading candidate here in this, is Nikki Haley. She served as the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. under Trump. Governor Haley has been gaining some momentum and traction kind of in the polling that we see out there. What do you hear from her supporters of why that is?

HERNDON: You know, the why of why it was Nikki Haley has been the other candidates to really move upward in the last six months it really comes down to her doing the kind of traditional campaigning, frankly, better than Ron DeSantis, kind of out debating, kind of pitches to donors. I think this is a candidate that has a more kind of clear-eyed message. You know, she tried — she makes the argument that you don’t need an echo to Donald Trump. You need someone different. I think that actually kind of resonates for people that Ron DeSantis is kind of lost himself in the shadow of Donald Trump. And she’s really emerged as a real alternative kind of figure. The problem, though, is that there’s only ye amount of voters who are interested in the more moderate or less conservative version of a Republican nominee. Haley has tried to pitch herself of someone who has both establishment credentials and has one foot in kind of a grassroots movement of the Republican Party. But I remember when I was at CPAC last year. And when Nikki Haley came on the stage, they booed her kind of relentlessly. The MAGA base of the Republican Party finds her to be a figure that is way cut out, that is way distant from where they want the party to be. You know, Donald Trump really remade the image of Republicans in 2016 and really pulled them away from that kind of Bush era pro-business rhetoric, where a lot of MAGA voters would say actually, like, tied to wars and things like that. And they associate Nikki Haley more with that pre-2016 version of the Republican Party rather than the Donald Trump kind of MAGA version. So, it’s going to be hard for her to kind of coalesce enough people to really overtake Donald Trump. But I do think, particularly in states like New Hampshire, places that have a lot of independence, that have a lot of moderates, have a lot more people who are opposed to Donald Trump, she has really saw herself emerge as their preferred option. But remember, South Carolina is coming up, the state where she used to be the governor. And every piece of polling or every piece of anecdotal data tells us that Donald Trump’s lead over her in South Carolina is bigger than Iowa or New Hampshire. So, she would not only need to do well in New Hampshire, but really make sure she can find a way to gain traction in her home state. Because I think if Donald Trump were to win there, that would be the clear signal that this race wasn’t maybe much of a race at all.

SREENIVASAN: You know, I want to talk a little bit about some of your reporting, both on the podcast as well as in print, about black voters and the support in the Democratic Party. And what I found interesting was here is a population, a demographic that’s been so democratic in the past. And — or I should say sometimes maybe they’ve been taken for granted. But what is the role of black support in America for President Biden and, how in this last cycle, did that support decrease?

HERNDON: Yes. I think this is a structural problem that’s been challenging Democrats for a while after the high watermark of 2012, where you really saw the peak of kind of black voters supporting Democrats. You’ve seen the kind of trail off. And the question has been whether that’s because of individual candidates, whether that’s because of some interest from the Republican Party. And, you know, our reporting really shows that it’s more of a combination of several things. It’s a different rising generation of black voters who feel a different relationship to the party who are further back from that civil rights era, who are more kind of tied to call — who are more likely to call the system broken or be disappointed without the Obama era turned out, who 2016 was a more formative experience for them and they don’t see the kind of the system or the parties in the same way as other generations do. And so, really, when you talk about Biden’s black voter problem, you have to do it in multiple ways, because it’s also a generational problem. It’s also a problem more among black working-class folks than black college educated people. And so, there is different slices of that electorate that are maybe splintering off. But remember, it was always unique that so many black voters back Democrats in those numbers originally. And so, what you’re seeing is kind of a historic, unique kind of backing of the party maybe start to splinter as the electorate kind of changes and diversifies in different ways. I also think the important distinction here is you’re increasingly having black Americans — black immigrant Americans who are part of that population, who have different views and maybe are less rooted in a kind of historic relationship between African Americans and the Democratic Party. And so, that’s been what our reporting has shown is that the nuances in black electorates, the fact that it’s not monolithic, is the exact reason why it’s challenging Democrats in some ways. Because remember, Biden made explicit promises to black communities. As he was being nominated in 2020, because older black voters, particularly folks in the south, really made him the nominee. And he knew that. And he went to them and said consistently that he was going to be a president that followed through on those promises. I just think that that’s a really high bar. And for a lot of people, they’re sick of that same cycle. The politicians come into the church before the election to tell them that this is the most important election and they need black voters to see and support that. That — you know, there’s a little bit of a teach them a lesson attitude, particularly among younger black voters. And I think that’s what our polling shows us. And that’s what our reporting shows us.

SREENIVASAN: You know, you mentioned that Trump’s ability to appeal to some black male voters isn’t just about Trump, it’s also about masculinity itself and the ways that changing norms around gender and sexuality are reshaping the political landscape. Tell me what that means.

HERNDON: Yes. I mean, I think it’s one of those nuances and intersections that you have to pull out if you’re going to talk about this issue. You know, particularly when we talk to — when we hear the — you know, particularly as polling shows that black men are showing more interest in Republicans and specifically Donald Trump. You know, when we talk to those people we hear about how changing gender roles, how changing language around sexism, changing language around gender and sexuality that came in the last, like, three to four years post MeToo movement, post Arise, and kind of embrace of LGBTQ communities has, for some reason, you know, caused a backlash among some pockets of maybe straight black men. And so, I don’t think that’s unique to black men. But I do think you increasingly have a population of, I think, more traditionally values and particularly masculinity playing an interesting role that’s causing people to be more interested in other candidates. Because I think we should remind ourselves that these are just about one identity. Donald Trump is not just making appeals based off race. It’s also appeals that are based in gender. Our identity politics works in a lot of different ways. And so, that’s what I am getting at, is that when you keep — when we talk about the issue of black men, it should not just come as a surprise just because this group and this demographic has traditionally backed Democrats, and we should only view it through the lens of race. These are also people who are seeing the same kind of cultural shifts that happen in our country and are reacting to them in different ways.

SREENIVASAN: You know, before I let you go here, President Biden at least kicked off this year’s campaigning with a message that this election comes down to the future of democracy. And I wonder, as you travel around and you talk to people in these different demographics, what is the kind of issue that hits home with them? Does something as well, in some ways, abstract as democracy, is that urgency ring through the voters versus, say, the price of eggs or gasoline or whatever it is that animates them?

HERNDON: I would say it’s kind of expressed in different ways when I talk to voters. You don’t really hear — you don’t hear too many voters say, oh, I’m prioritizing protecting the project of American democracy. But you do have people who are worried about Republican extremism. And are prioritizing trying to stop what they think is a different version of the Republican Party. That language that you hear from President Biden is often reflecting from voters. And I do think the midterms give us a good example that you can build a coalition of people who are more independent, maybe have voted for Republicans in the past, and motivate some Democrats on the idea of stopping Republican extremism. Because I think that includes a democracy argument. And for a lot of people includes an abortion rights argument, too. What I think is different in presidential cycles, and particularly in this one, is you have — I mean, in this one, you may very well have two incumbent candidates, which makes it more of a choice election than a referendum on any one or the other. And so, you know, Biden is kind of trying to make this about Republicans and specifically about Trump and saying this is an election to reject them and the other side, where I think where I hear from a lot of people is they feel the choice about Biden and particularly age and the kind of sense of disappointment and things like that against that choice of the Republican side. And so, I don’t think the Democrats can just say the other side is bad, particularly after being in office for four years. I think they have to make a separate type of case about what they are going to do and actually respond to kind of voter concerns on that front. Because when you see why Biden’s poll numbers are so shaky against hypothetical matchup with Trump, it’s not because Donald Trump has massively increased his vote share or new people like him that don’t before, it is because of a huge drop off in people who are liking Biden. Now, that could be good news in terms of people they can — are most likely to be able to win back between now and November. But it also makes really clear that there are fundamental problems that a lot of Democrats have with this president as a candidate, even if they’re fine with him as a president. And so, that is the question I’ve been trying to put to the Democratic Party over the last year is, you know, what is the argument for the next four years, not just the last four years were good? Because for a lot of people that age concern is such a deep one that it makes it harder to look more forward in with this current administration. And so, I think like that’s the real question here is like, what is Biden’s relationship with his own base and own party going to look like? Because we know in presidential years, it’s not just enough to persuade people, to persuade independents or swing voters. You need to motivate and persuade at the same time.

SREENIVASAN: Host of “The Run-Up” at “The New York Times,” Astead Herndon, joining us from Iowa tonight. Thanks so much.

HERNDON: Thanks for having me.