Around the World with Henry and Hugh Hewitt
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Welcome back to Beyond the Polls. New Hampshire has not ended the GOP race and might have thrown a curve to the Biden campaign. We'll hear all about this in my rant and in my discussion with my guest this week, Hugh Hewitt. Let's dive in. Everybody is talking about the Republican primary that happened in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, and there's a good reason for that. There's an actual race.

Donald Trump certainly is the overwhelming favorite, but Nikki Haley is still gamely hanging in there. And so it's person versus person. There's no such race going on on the Democratic side. No one believes that Dean Phillips is going to unseat President Joe Biden. He's in there mainly to attract a protest vote and to make a point that this man is not the best person to represent the Democratic Party against Donald Trump.

So the question is, how did Joe Biden do in yesterday's Democratic primary? Now, the Democratic primary was different because the National Committee has decided to help states that helped Joe Biden and hurt states that did not help Joe Biden in the primary process in 2020. The New Hampshire primary is not an official primary.

that the state would not move its state, so they held it, but it allocates no delegates to the convention. And to respect the Democratic National Committee's decision, Joe Biden did not put his name on the ballot. So that complicates things. The fact that there was no active race also meant that there was a lower turnout. So the sort of undecided, or not undecided, the undeclared voter who would...

be someone who could vote in either party's primary, had little incentive to vote in the Democratic Party primary because there was no game. So let's take a look at the results. Well, as we're recording this, there were 117,000 votes cast in the Democratic primary.

Fifty five percent of those were write in votes for Joe Biden. And there is another unprocessed write ins, which is to say that everyone knows their write ins, but they haven't looked at it to say whether it's for Joe or somebody else of ten point six percent. Is this good for Biden or is this bad for Biden? Well, it's a little bit of both.

It's good for Biden in the sense that even though there was only one semi-serious Dean Phillips, one not so serious Marianne Williamson, and many completely unserious, I'm looking at you, Vermin Supreme, candidates on the ballot, he still got people to walk out of their houses,

show up at the polling booth and write his name in. That's a good thing for Joe Biden. The fact that it's a hefty victory, another good thing for Joe Biden. But let's look at it also in another way. There was nothing else on the ballot. This is a presidential primary. It's not combined with elections for any other office. The only reason to come out and vote in a primary in New Hampshire in January is to vote for president.

So what we're saying right now is that at a minimum, one in three and close to 40% of the voters walked out, made the effort precisely not to vote for Joe Biden in the Democratic primary. Is that good? It clearly shows discontent within the Democratic Party or unease with Joe Biden. And

Think about it this way. If you're just somebody who, yeah, I'm going to vote for Biden, but I'm not really upset with him, you're not going to go to the polls. Or you're the sort of person who would go, if you're undeclared as your registration, would go vote in the Republican primary for Nikki Haley to say, I'm fine with Biden, but I really hate Trump, so this is two bites at the apple. And in fact, there's a lot of evidence that that's what happened.

Eight percent of the Republican primary voters had a party identification of Democrat. Now, they were registered as independent, but they identified as Democrats. So clearly some people did that. And even people who identify as independents can often lean in one way towards a party or another. And clearly some people who are independents but lean towards the Democratic Party who might have voted in a Democratic party.

primary if there had been a live race instead decided to vote in the Republican primary. So what does it mean that so many people walk to the polls for the express and sole purpose of saying no to Joe Biden?

That clearly shows a lack of enthusiasm in his campaign. And I think it's worth putting this measure in perspective. Now, as I record this, Biden has 55.1% of the vote. Another 10.6% are unprocessed write-ins, which is to say they know they are write-ins, but they haven't sat through and counted them all up to allocate them. Well, so far in the counting,

Biden's been getting only between 85 and 90 percent, depending on the town of these write-ins. So not all of these votes are going to go for Biden. It looks like he's going to end up somewhere between 63 and 64 percent of the Democratic vote.

That will be the lowest that an incumbent president has received since George Herbert Walker Bush got 53% against the challenge from Pat Buchanan and a bunch of no-names in 1992. It will be the lowest that a Democratic president has received since 1980, when Jimmy Carter got 48% when he was challenged by Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy and California Governor Jerry Brown.

In fact, no candidate in either party who has received below 68%, 67.9 to be precise, in their party's primary in New Hampshire has won re-election since the modern primary started in 1952. Yes.

Harry Truman lost the New Hampshire primary to Estes Kefauver and dropped out of the race. LBJ got 49% as a write-in in 1968, dropped out a month or so later. Jimmy Carter got 48% against the two candidates, lost to Ronald Reagan. Gerald Ford in 1976 got 50% against Ronald Reagan, lost to Jimmy Carter. And George Herbert Walker Bush got 53% and lost the general election to Bill Clinton.

So, yes, it was harder to get somebody to write in. But on the other hand, 120,000 people walked out of their house to participate in this. Most of them, you know, or at least two-thirds, close to two-thirds, wrote in the name,

It's not that these people were an illiterate or ill-informed electorate. These are people who went out and knew what to do and chose not to do it in the Democratic primary when nothing was at stake. So what I think this shows is a lack of enthusiasm among a certain set of Democratic voters. And it will be very interesting to see what happens in South Carolina on February 3rd.

is that there is a situation that was the state that catapulted Joe Biden from political oblivion into the White House. The first step on the road to the White House, his landslide victory there, caused Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to drop out and endorse him and rally around the moderate Democratic flank to hold off Bernie Sanders going into Super Tuesday. What will he get there?

Now, the electorate of South Carolina's Democratic Party is overwhelmingly African-American. African-American voters have been Biden's bedrock throughout his political career since he became Barack Obama's vice president. And as a result, we should expect him to do very well. But again, the question is how well? Let's put this in perspective.

The candidates who were in the New Hampshire primary who did do well got percentages much higher than 60-something percent. Bill Clinton got 84% in New Hampshire in 1996. Obama got 81%.

Ike got 94% in 1956. More modern Ronald Reagan got 86% in 1984. Trump got 86% in 2020. George W. Bush got 81% in 2004. In fact, taking a look at Bill Clinton's or Barack Obama's or George W. Bush's primaries.

They tended to win with very high numbers regardless. There were a couple of states where Barack Obama did not do well, states that were ancestrally democratic either in the south or on the border of the south where registered Democrats were about ready to re-register as Republicans and he did not do well there. But otherwise he tended to do 80s, over 90% depending on the state, do very, very well. That's typically where an incumbent president facing a non-serious challenge is going to be.

Even George H.W. Bush tended to do well against Pep Buchanan after New Hampshire. He would tend to get in the 60s or the low 70s until Buchanan dropped out of the race. So and Buchanan was a much more serious candidate and a much more skilled candidate than Dean Phillips. So I think the benchmark for Biden on February 3rd in South Carolina has got to be somewhere in the 75 percent mark.

is if he's at or below 75% in a state that is demographically and politically about as favorable in the Democratic primary as he can imagine, then that's a real warning sign. And that's something that's particularly troublesome to Democrats because they've been seeing a lot of signs that

African-Americans are not as thrilled with Joe Biden. Yes, they like him. Yes, they will vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. But he has a much higher job disapproval rating than most Democratic presidents have. He has a much lower margin over a Republican, Trump or otherwise, in polls than most Democrats have. There is some concern.

non-trivial dissatisfaction in the African-American community with Joe Biden. And it'll be interesting to see if it turns up in South Carolina, either in lower turnout or in people who will go out of their polls to go out of their homes. Again, this is a primary that the only reason to go is to vote for president. There's nothing else on the ballot. If somebody gets out of their house on a Saturday or votes early because they have early absentee voting,

and decides to say, I'm going to spend between 30 minutes and an hour of my time voting against Biden for no other reason to do that, then that's something that I think bears watching. So let's keep an eye on this. This is something we'll discuss on the podcast that will come up after February 3rd. But I would say a qualified benefit to Biden from New Hampshire, but enough of a warning sign that it bears watching.

If he lacks enthusiasm and Trump or Haley can generate it, the polls coming in the spring are going to be very upsetting indeed to the Democratic Party elite.

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Well, a lot's been going on in politics, as Prime Minister Harold Wilson once said, a week is forever in politics, and boy, did we have a week. Here to talk with me all about it and talk about the weeks going forward

It's Hugh Hewitt. Hugh is the host of The Hugh Hewitt Show. He is a contributing columnist to The Washington Post, a Fox News contributor, and the professor of law of Chapman University. Hugh, welcome to Beyond the Polls. Good to be with you, Henry, and I'm hoping you'll be able to fill me in on, you seem to know what's going on in every election around the world, and I think there are about 100 of them this year, right? Ha ha ha!

There are a lot of them, and I am trying to follow them. Maybe my readers, listeners, and you would be interested in talking about March 10th's Portuguese elections. I'm always interested in all of them because they aggregate to where the world is going. And what were you covering recently? Was it Sweden? Sweden was a year ago. Poland was in the fall. I did that. Denmark?

Denmark was a year ago. I did that one. I did Slovakia. You know, the thing is, I did Turkey. I did the Netherlands. That was the one I did most recently. Yes. And you see the same thing. And this is what just boggles my mind about people is, oh, Trump, oh, this. Look,

Look, if you aren't educated and you don't live in a major metropolitan area, you are highly likely to be attracted to populist figures on the right. And that's whether you live in Poland, whether you live in the Netherlands, whether you live in Sweden. And it's proving true in Portugal. And if you move back or you move forward 500 years and you look back at 500, will you think the paragraph that this era will write will be the resurgence of nationalism? Absolutely.

I think nationalism is a moral argument to provide for reciprocal duties among citizens.

that people adopt nationalism as a rallying cry, both because they're genuinely attached to their nation state, but also because it provides an argument that says, you owe me something. You owe me something as a fellow citizen as opposed to simply a fellow human being. Because if you say it's a fellow human being, then how, why should I care more about the person from Kansas than the person from Kyrgyzstan? Um,

Will it be a resurgence of nationalism? What I'd like to see 500 years from now is that this was the rebirth of liberal democracy and the re-understanding of community reciprocal obligations rather than treating people as enemies.

You know, look, I'm a Reaganite, and as Ronald Reagan always said, one of his favorite semi-dirty jokes was the boy who said he wanted a pony for Christmas, and he got up, and there was a pile of manure under the table, and he was excited, and he dove right in, and he said, there has to be a pony here somewhere. Well, you know, I feel a little bit like...

1936, Henry, the bad guys in the world have figured out how to talk to each other in China, Russia, Iran, and their proxies. And the good guys in the world are kind of lost and without a purpose or even awareness that they are on the other side of the bad guys.

Yeah, you know, I get disturbed about that as well. I think there's a growing awareness that there, you know, just like after 1936, there began to be an awareness that, hey, maybe this Hitler guy wasn't just a crazy nationalist, but he had broader aims. But it took them a number of years to actually start to do something about it.

and we'll see whether or not we have that strength. You know, I like the idea of standing up to China, but we need to have a military that can do that while also standing up to Russia and building up our allies. And some allies seem to be understanding that better than others. The ones near China are rearming faster than the ones near Russia. And Poland. I'm a big believer in Poland. In fact,

You're old enough to remember James Minchner would turn out a book every two or three years, and I never read the one titled Poland. And now I've gone back to read Poland because I'm interested in Poland again. And they are...

They're about as close to an ally, ally, ally in the old sense as we can get. Yes. And I should note that the ones in Europe that are quickly rearming are the ones that have either been part of the Russian Empire, like Finland, or been under the Russian thumb, like Poland or Romania and so forth. They have been quickly rearming. You know, it's the Western allies that are not rearming fast enough. And unfortunately for the Eastern allies...

They depend on somebody who's richer and bigger than them, and that's either Germany, France, and Italy, and Britain as a quadrumvirate, or us, or a combination of us. And, you know, everyone needs to be rearming quickly.

You know, Henry, you're the host and I'm the guest, but I still want to ask you a question. What is going on in Germany? I know that Schultz may be the least popular elected official or leader of a country in the world, but I also understand there's a new party about which I understand very little. And are they fascist and a new alliance? What is going on there?

You know, the fundamental thing, Germany is, first of all, a late arriver to the populism game, that they did not have a significant populist party until after Merkel

liberalized and allowed all the immigrants in. And that's when the Alternative for Germany, or to use the acronym in German, Alternative für Deutschland, AfD, rose. They are now the second largest party in the polls. They are ahead in the polls in three East German states. And that brings us to the other question, which is 30 years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, there is still a distinct East and West. Germany behaves differently.

So what you've got is a new party formed by a person who in her youth was a member of the East German Communist Party, joined the successor to that party, which called itself the Party of Democratic Socialism, and then merged into a party called Die Linke, which is German for the left. Her name is Sarah Wagenknecht.

And she has formed a new party called Bündnis Zaragankinest. And what it is, is basically to be simplified. We can be like the AFD on immigration and opposition to aid to Ukraine and left wing on policy.

left-wing on economic policy. And, you know, initial polls show that they're pulling support and that they would get somewhere 10 to 15 percent of the vote. You know, new parties tend to start big and fall back, but we'll see. But the fact is that

When you throw in votes that go to other third parties, the legacy parties, the social Democrats, the Christian Democrats, the free Democrats, which used to have 85 to 95% of the vote, have less than a majority. Throw in the Greens...

and you get to less than 60%. So you basically have a 60-something to 40-something split between some version of the status quo and some version of radical change. And it's very difficult.

to govern in that way. They're going to have to come to grips with the feelings of German citizens or these things are going to continue to metastasize and rattle. Does the version of their radical change involve rearming

The radical change does not want to rearm. The radical change is alleged by the German insiders to have ties to Putin's Russia and consequently they are not in favor of significant rearmament, they are not in favor of aid to Ukraine.

They are in some way, various factions will switch, you know, but some are suspicious of NATO itself and some are anti-American. And this is the thing is what you want to do is divide. You want to divide the voters who could be persuaded to back a status quo that's more receptive to their worldviews.

and avoid them radicalizing to embrace somebody who will throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. The German establishment has, as of yet, been unwilling and/or unable, more unwilling than unable, to meet this threat. And so, consequently, people who are dissatisfied are moving to parties that, in their purest form,

would be not friendly to the existing Western security alliance. All right, my very last question about this. When Merkel was PM and they had their immigrant colleagues

open door policy, a percentage of some percentage of the population grew. In the United States, we've had between 8 and 10 million people cross the border in three years. A nation of 330 million people. We can absorb that. That's not the end of the world. But is it on par with what happened to Germany and Sweden and the countries of Western Europe in their immigration influx? Or is ours significantly less?

You know, as a percentage of population, it really depends how many people got here and stayed in the country. You know, then that's something I'm still not sure of. It's certainly millions. The question is, there's a big difference between three and ten. It is, you know, Sweden and Germany absorbed a couple of percent of their population in refugees.

uh over the source of the refugee crisis and they were largely refugees from the middle east or central asia which one study that was published in quillette a few years ago showed came from countries of the world that socio-culturally were about as far apart as you could possibly get from sweden you know our migrants are

Coming from a part of the world that has less of a socio-cultural gap that you know if you're coming from Central America America is less foreign to you than Sweden is to an Afghan man

And you're coming into communities which have been here for decades, which are ready to absorb you as the free electrons of their ethnicity. If you're lucky enough to get in one of those communities, yes. And the bulk of them will be able to find their way to such a community. So in one sense, it's easier. And the other thing that makes it a little bit easier is our nationality is not based on ethnos.

Our nationality is based on acceptance and practice of a set of shared ideals and practices and norms. And so consequently, we are that rarity.

In human history, we are a multi-ethnic, genuinely free state. Most, in human history, multi-ethnic states are tyrannies of one sort or another, usually an empire ruled by one ethnos over another, like the USSR was effectively a Russian autocracy over the non-Russian parts of this state.

I worry less about, you know, I am not in favor of breaking the law. I think what's happening on the border as a personal matter is a disaster. I think that as a political matter, it's Joe Biden's single greatest weakness. And I think the polls document that, that he receives a lower approval rating for the immigration question and the border question than he does on anything else, including inflation in the economy. Yeah.

But as long as it doesn't continue for the next decade, it's a burst we can deal with. I agree with you completely. And the eight million people that came in do not concern me in the least.

There will be bad people. There's a bell curve in everyone, right? So there's a most violent, least desirable edge of the bell curve. And then there are the saints who came in and are outperforming miracles right now. And it's going to even out. We'll be fine. But like markets are forward-looking, politics is forward-looking. And I don't think America thinks that we can do 3 million people a year going forward, especially as the mix changes.

and it becomes not Central America, Mexico, Venezuela, which are all Christian countries with at least a shared understanding of values and family. That it's not...

I might add the way women are treated, the way that children are treated and that boys and girls are the same. I do believe that it's Biden's vulnerability because he's not doing anything. And I believe the Republicans are about to drive over the cliff. We might talk about that. They're about to go over the cliff again for the fourth time in the 24 years I've been doing my radio show. They're going to come up with a big immigration deal and it's not going to get out of the House and they're going to wonder what hit them.

Well, you know, that's the thing, is that

The Republican electorate wants to stop illegal migration, period. They do not want to give legal status to people who are here illegally. Legal status or voting status? I think they would regularize people, but I don't think they want them to vote. Nope. Not according to the New Hampshire exit poll. Interesting. One of the things that during, in 2016, and it'll be interesting to see how this goes going forward, but in 2016, the

pollsters asked the question, what do you think should be done with immigration? Should you give them a path for legal status? Should you think you should deport them? Majorities in every state except two in Mississippi and Alabama said give them legal status. And it rose the less conservative the state is. In New Hampshire, the question was asked and a majority said deport them. Interesting, because I think the purple card

which means you can walk around the country and get a job until you break the law, in which case we're putting you on a plane back to wherever you're from, is the ideal solution. But if it's not in the polling, it's not in the polling. Yeah, and again, we will see as things go forward how this stands. I do not support the purple card because we have had for 25 years stagnant wages for people without a college degree.

And what we started to see in the years of the Trump administration, that's finally beginning to change. Why? Because a tight labor market helps people with lower skills.

So if you want to say, well, congratulations, 8 million people, you broke the law. We're going to figure out whether you can stay here, but you can work here in the meantime. That's millions of people who are now in competition with the millions of people who are tangentially attached to the labor force who have access to all of America's social benefits.

So and have a higher reservation wage, because guess what? Twenty dollars an hour looks pretty good to someone who whose alternative is three dollars an hour in intermittent electricity. Twenty dollars an hour may not look good to the second earner in a two earner household when they have options such as public support for public support for health insurance and so forth. So now I don't think these people should get to work at all.

We disagree because I think most of the jobs that the blue collar worker wants are available if we perfect the ability to find them. For example, I like to use Martin Marietta. Think and Terry are building our next generation of missile ships up in Green Bay, Wisconsin. They can't build them fast enough because they haven't got any welders.

And if you move to Wisconsin, if you move to Green Bay, you're going to live in a small town, you're going to be cold, but you're going to make $150,000 a year. And you're going to have a job for 30 years because we're going to turn these things out for 30 years. That's not a job that someone who walked up from Guatemala can do. It is a job that most any welder in America can do. But the information exchange on where there is work is imperfect in the United States. And in fact...

The thing that drives me crazy is there's allegedly a teacher shortage. If you go online and look for a listing of teaching opportunities by grade level, by expertise, by city, by state, by entry wage, you can't find it, which is why there's a teaching shortage. Yeah, you know, the thing is, though, you're still talking about semi-skilled jobs.

You know, there are millions of jobs that are not terribly skilled, that Americans could do. You know, why is it that the people who clean our buildings tend not to be native-born? Why is it that the people who clean our houses are almost all immigrants? Why is it that the people at the checkout counters tend to be immigrants? Or, you know, oftentimes you'll go to construction workers, and you'll find that they're not native-born, and that's actually...

In Southern California, for as long as I was a land use lawyer, I'm retired now. I quit six years ago after 30 years. Every drywaller or 95% of every drywaller on every business was Latino. And they did not speak English because drywalling was a subset of the construction business that had been slowly consumed by Latinos and their cousins and their brothers and their third cousins. And that's the way it works. James Fallows wrote about this for years.

on immigration patterns. And the dignity hurdle for most Americans, they don't want to do that. And it's not jobs that Americans won't do. It's jobs Americans would prefer not to do. Right. And then the question is, and then after this, I want to get over to politics, is when you have an extensive welfare state, what that means is that everyone is paying for that.

What it means is that the person who chooses not to work is receiving some other payment. That person may be getting disability insurance. That person may be getting unemployment longer than they need to. That person may be getting public subsidies and food stamps to work at a job that doesn't cross that dignity hurdle but pays less. In some way or another,

whether they are in the labor force or out of the labor force, allowing unskilled illegal immigrants to compete for that and create those enclaves is something that we pay for in higher spending and ultimately in higher taxes. And the question is, is that something you want?

That is going to be tested in California, which just passed a law that made Medicaid available to recent arrival of migrants. And so if you're a migrant and you've just walked in from Texas, where are you going to go? You're going to go to California because you're going to get free health care, even if it's not very good and it isn't very good. You're still going to go there.

Well, my point is it's not the migrants getting the aid. I mean, maybe, but it's one of the things that Nick Eberstadt documents is the massive increase in Americans who are receiving means tested benefits. Well, who are these people?

These are people who are under competitive threat from foreigners, whether from jobs overseas through trade or from illegal immigration here. And how do they maintain their standard of living? They maintain their standard of living by taking public benefits. So that's the question people need to ask themselves is not do I want benefits going from foreigners? But if what you do is have a tight labor market, Americans will eventually have to decide.

Do you want to keep people out of the labor market? Or employers have to decide, do you want to pay wages high enough to entice Americans into the labor market? But

We're paying California is I suspect is going to see a massive middle class tax increase in the next four or five years because of their over dependence on wealthy people. They're beginning to leave the state. Once that happens, you've got this multi billion dollar annual deficit now.

The only way to square the welfare state they want with the finances they've got is to increase taxes on the middle class. And then we'll see how much. Henry, there's a $68 billion deficit. I'm in California for one month because I am not a Californian. I lived here from 1989 to 2016. I'm a Virginian. And I cut all ties and I come back for a month of sunshine. I'm not paying 14.4%.

which is the high income weight, they're now going to raise every bracket. You are absolutely right. There's no other way to pay for what California has promised. Yeah, they'll raise every bracket. They'll raise the sales tax. They will once again try to waive or get around or amend Proposition 13 and raise property taxes on people who have been paying...

For rates frozen for years under Proposition 13 to get them to quote-unquote pay their fair share They're gonna be a lot of people up and down the income scale who will have to pay more to keep the spending that Californians have wanted and then we'll see we'll see if they want to do it or if they decide to leave but I'd like to turn to the question of Politics, okay is the Republican race over? No

I spent most of the show this morning asking callers, which are not indicative of anyone except people who are up too early and nothing to do and going to work. Should Nikki Haley drop out? And I was somewhat surprised because yesterday I asked, who do you support? And I would say 95% of the callers were Trump. And today, should Nikki drop out? Eight out of 10 people said no. And it's because I believe among...

talk radio audience are politically active. They're typically higher educated, higher income, much more involved in politics. It's about my audience runs anywhere from five to 10 million people, depending on the day it is and how many people, 475 different outlets. I think they want the fun. And I believe that there are a whole bunch of

factors working in our business and in every business to keep a race alive through the end of March. Otherwise, it's going to be the endless slog of Biden-Trump with Trump in court and Biden afraid to show up in public. Nikki Haley has a month to persuade people she is better for your children than either of these two people.

I am Switzerland, but I'm not taking a position on this. But it does seem to me there are a lot of incentives for people to pull her her lever come Super Tuesday. I don't think she can win South Carolina. Well, that's an interesting question. Do you think she can come close in South Carolina? No.

Then what's her path? Because, you know, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Alabama, Missouri are more or not Missouri, Mississippi, but maybe Missouri, all more conservative than South Carolina. Texas, similar state, maybe a little less conservative, not much. If she can't even come close in South Carolina, what's her path? Or is this really just entertainment? Is it Michigan voting on the 5th?

Michigan votes on February 27th. It's a very complicated thing going on with Michigan. Michigan is the one that's in my mind is where she plants her flag and moves a little bit forward. And then thereafter, we've got 16 different states vote on the 5th, six vote a week later, and four vote a week later. And so what she's got to do

is just keep the ball in play long enough to pick up some wind. If she doesn't win anything by the 19th of March, it's over. But if she's won four or five, it's not. Well, that's interesting because what you're saying is at some point, the delegate count gets very daunting for her.

You know, I'm looking here at the calendar and March 12th, Georgia votes. That's a state with no party registration. Hawaii votes. That's a closed caucus. Mississippi votes. No registration, but very conservative. And Washington votes. And that's a state where there's no party registration. I'm sorry. She could do well in some of those. Correct. Washington, Hawaii, Georgia.

And then you've got, to me, the all-important race of Ohio.

you know that ohio is the state that does not have voter registration and it is a winner take all primary so uh... if she's able to win uh... the uh... in ohio then she's able to make up you know if she gets percentages in these super tuesday states that are all proportional and then she wins a winner take all state like ohio then suddenly she's back in the ball game but um...

So what you're saying is even if she's losing, because of things like this, there's the path that she can have to continue forward and see where she stands on the middle of March. I've used the analogy that in the NFL or the NBA, some teams hang around and they're down two or three scores as the fourth quarter opens and they can't possibly win, but they do.

And so Nikki Haley hangs around because it's a one on one race. It's what everybody has wanted. One on one race. And she comes up with a message. And I've been trying. I'm neutral on this. I think I know Trump's message, which is we need to destroy the administrative state because they are out of control. Nikki Haley's message, I think, is I am better for your children and your grandchildren.

I think that's her message. And if she can make that message stick, Ohio has a three-way Republican primary, Bernie Marino, Frank, the Secretary of State, and Matt Dolan. Everybody's going to vote in Ohio. And they're all going to vote. I have no idea which way it's going to go, but I think you put your finger on it. And if she does pull that off, now California is a winner-take-all state, and that's going to go for Trump.

And that's a big deal. They used to do it by congressional district. They don't do it that way anymore. Well,

So, yeah, it's interesting you use that. I used an analogy similar in the close to my piece in The Telegraph this morning where I said, you know, most of the time when you're watching a sporting match, the team that's ahead late wins. But sometimes it doesn't happen. I was just thinking about that Super Bowl a few years ago when everyone was preparing for the Atlanta Falcons. And then Tom Brady comes back to the chagrin of millions.

and brings the trophy home to New England. That really is what Nikki Haley needs to be, is have a Joe Montana, Tom Brady fourth quarter to come back from a daunting deficit, but take advantage of your opponent's weaknesses, generate enthusiasm, expand the playing field, throw out whatever sporting analogy she wants. But that's really...

The challenge ahead of her. It's not a case of your typical challenge where somebody is a slight favorite or a slight underdog, but you can see where things can go. This is a significant underdog, but not impossible.

And the good news is she's very different from the former president. So there are different teams. There are different makeups. They have different appeals. And I noted last night, you tell me what you saw. College educated Republicans voted for Nikki Haley. People with less than college voted for Donald Trump. And that bodes well for.

in states with more educational achievement than it does in other states with less educational achievement. And I think she's got enough money, or so she told me. She was on my show Monday, and she's got plenty of money. And nobody has enough money, but all it really takes are a couple of people that don't like Donald Trump to keep her in the game, right? At least through the super PAC, legally not through the campaign. Correct.

You know, that's the interesting question is how much of a demand is there? And I want to throw something out at you. You know, I've looked at the crosstabs every which way but loose. And the thing that I keep coming back to is the single biggest predictor of whether you voted for Donald Trump is whether you believe the 2020 election was stolen.

That if you say no to that question, you are like a very small percentage, 10 to 20 percent. I think it was like 13 percent or something in New Hampshire and 11 percent in Iowa.

Iowa and well north of 60 if you believe that it was I think larger than that's like 85% of Trump's vote in New Hampshire came from people who believe the election was stolen and 95% in the Iowa caucus came from that Is that something that Haley needs to be cognizant of that you can throw all this stuff out?

about Trump and too old and chaos and stuff. But there's a lot of people who just think he deserves another shot because he got robbed the first time.

I do believe she ought to go with the Molly Hemingway rigged language, which is that 2020 was rigged. It wasn't stolen. It was rigged. In other words, every change that was made, and many were made, were made by courts, not legislatures. They were improvisations that had not been tested. And we had Mark Zuckerberg back the truck up with billions of dollars, even if that's not completely true.

and remind people that it was a funny election and that we've corrected for that, but that you are sympathetic to their worries that things were hinky. You can't dismiss them. Things were hinky. Things were different. And so I don't think she ought to dismiss it, but I don't think she ought to turn it into a backwards-looking election. I think she ought to turn it into a children-grandchildren election. Do you want your children or your grandchildren...

to get their school years back? Do you want their colleges to return to normal? Do you want Claudine Gay to run every university in America? Do you want these anti-Israel crazies running around the streets of Manhattan and other places? She has a chance to really change the issue set and not via debate, because he won't debate. The former president shouldn't debate. It would be bad politics.

Well, you know, my thought on debate is that the Haley campaign should do what Abraham Lincoln did.

that in the 1858 senatorial campaign, of course, we know about the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but that wasn't because Douglas, who was the incumbent senator and the big fish and Lincoln was the little fish, said, oh, come on, let's just be friends. It's because what Lincoln did was make the habit that whenever Douglas had an event in City X, he would have an event

the same day or the following day if the schedules couldn't work out in the same location. Yep. And basically hound him that you're going to say X, I'm going to hear what you said and then I'm going to respond. And that's what forced Douglas to agree to the debates.

because the alternative was Lincoln had figured out a way that he was getting the better hand. Now, obviously, in the modern day where you're not where everything is much bigger, it's not you go in and you set up a podium and a thousand people walk from their homes and their businesses on the dusty street to listen to you. You can't do that. But if I were her, I would have a Lincoln impersonator follow Trump.

and hang out by the media stage, you know, and just say, it's time to debate. We're the party of Lincoln. Lincoln, you know, Lincoln debated his big opponent. It's time for us to have the debate. I don't know if it would work, but it might be hokey enough to get some media attention. It would get media attention. But I think even better is that she ought to be living on media. And she's not. Inexplicably, inexplicably, she went dark for 10 days.

And I do not... Then she showed up again on my show on Monday. We couldn't get through it. We couldn't get anyone to return our phone calls. She'd been great.

absolutely great throughout the year in terms of returning calls and being, then she went dark. And I think maybe her pollster said, you're surging. Don't do anything to screw it up. She's got to live everywhere that we'll have her every podcast, every cable network, left wing, right wing, provided that the host is not irresponsible, like Alec Jones, provided that somebody is, is willing to ask her and she ought to just talk because she's got to fill up

All the space that she can. The former president can't. Well, I want to close it out, but I'll leave on this note. So I am going to St. Thomas to cover the Virgin Island caucus, which is on the same day as the Nevada caucus.

And it was originally going to be interesting because it's using ranked choice voting, so in a multi-candidate race you'd finally get to answer the question, "Oh, can second and third choices produce a majority against Trump?" Now it's a one-on-one race, so, you know, who's gonna vote for Ron DeSantis and so forth, even though they're on the ballot?

This morning, Nikki Haley spent 20 minutes of her time addressing people via Zoom in the Virgin Islands. So my thought is if she's going to spend 20 minutes of her time addressing people by Zoom in the Virgin Islands, she's going to be spending a lot more time living on media, just like you suggest.

And she's got to flood the zone. And I don't care what it is, if she's on. I don't think she spent time, for example, with Mark Levin, because Mark is considerably more conservative than Nikki. Go on Levin's show. All right. Mark's been my friend forever. He's polite. He's not discourteous. Go on every Fox show. Go on every just be ubiquitous because the president can't do that. And

And earn people's votes. She's very good. Well, that would be an interesting thing, you know, which is make sure on every one of these things, say, I'm going to spend as much time talking with people like you as I can. And one thing all of your listeners or viewers should remember is because the president is unfairly being dragged in these legal cases, he can't.

And that's something you need to consider. I can campaign 24-7, 365. He can't. And the question is, do you think that that's important in taking on Joe Biden? And then she can go on and do the whole rest of the show. But leave that point in there every time she's on the media. And express sympathy for the fact that he is being persecuted. Because I believe we believe that. I have one question for you, Henry, before you go away. I want...

either or both of them to name their running mate because we've got eight months to the election i did the math it is 240 different events that they can do minimum if they did one a day probably between 500 and a thousand if they're a normal candidate each of those i asked a political director at a fairly major west coast deal yesterday they thought they could raise a million and a half tomorrow and that by the end of the fall after you've done relationship they can double that

And so it seems to me that you are just leaving money on the floor if you don't have a veep out there making your points and filling in. And it requires not Reagan naming Schweiker, which you'll remember from 76, but actually naming someone you want to run with. Right. You know, I definitely think that the nominee, particularly because of Kamala's weakness, that the nominee should name

a vice presidential choice early rather than later. Again, whether they should name it now when they're fighting one another is another question. But I definitely think that, you know, let's say it's March 19th and we know who the nominee is going to be, whether the other person wants to admit it or not, the delegate situation is just out of control. At that point,

If Donald Trump is in that position, I was thinking there's two ways to do it. One is you either name the person and it's Trump-like, or you treat it like the frickin'

Apprentice you bring in six people and like okay on April 1. I'm gonna campaign with I'm just throwing your name out here This is no inside information. I'm gonna I'm gonna campaign with Marjorie Taylor Greene She's on the shortlist and you go around with her and then the next week you have the tryout With Byron Donald's and you know just you you all can pick up your six names. What does that do it creates buzz?

buzz. It creates interest. Who's going to get voted off the island? Whose audition is better? What is the man thinking?

Focus the attention on you rather than Biden, but also focus the attention on the person who might be better than Kamala and see what the market says. The market being potential Trump voters, not what the elite mainstream media says. What do you think about that? What do you think about the audition approach? I like the audition approach. I do not...

like MJMGT because I think, again, I would make it people that can add to you, not subtract from you. And I would get Tom Cotton and Mike Gallagher and Mike Pompeo and Robert O'Brien and Joni Ernst and Dan Sullivan. They're all warriors. They're all, we're in a serious time. And I would spend a week with each of them trying

traveling and i pick one of them but i i am i'm a huge believer in a generational jump here if you're going to be 75 or 77 and running give me a 40 year old please show us the future of american politics now lift the curtain because it ain't kamala we know that and something you said contrasting with kamala means serious and smart educated purposeful respected and

I would make sure that my list met those quantities. Well, Hugh, as always, it is delight. It is an educational experience. You can see the professor in you working. I felt like I was back in 1L and the Socratic method was being used. What's the holding of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce, Mr. Olson? Aside from your show, aside from the Washington Post, aside from Fox News, how can my listeners follow your work?

They can go to HughHewitt.com, but I do have a podcast now on iTunes. It's just Hugh Hewitt, and it summarizes the show every day. So rather than listen to 180 minutes of HughHewitt.com, we get it down to about 40. So today it's Tom Cotton, and it's a few other people, and I just put the interviews on there. Cotton tells me, the senator says, I give up on your radio show. All I do is listen to the podcast now. And pretty soon, radio is going to be dead in 20 years.

Because people are going to get in their car and they're going to say, I want to listen to Henry Olson. And that's what's going to come up. And that's the way it is. You know, technology is taking us back to the small village. Only you get to choose the village you want to live in at any particular moment during the day. Well said. Well, Hugh, thank you for joining me on Beyond the Polls. Thank you, Henry.

That's it for this week. Next week, we go deep into the weeds of state-of-the-art sophology with the New York Times' Nate Cohn. Until then, let's reach for the stars together as we journey beyond the pole.

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