Henry Olsen dissects the 2024 GOP race, where Trump leads by 20–50 points nationally but faces a 35% Iowa threshold to avoid a contested convention. His 45% base is stable, with only 30% open to switching—DeSantis’ fading appeal after failing to counter Trump’s Medicare attacks. Haley’s surge stems from independents, not a Trump exodus, while Olson dismisses fraud claims due to lack of evidence but warns Trump’s trials could backfire for Democrats if acquittals occur. The episode ties these dynamics to a global "Ins vs. Outs" populist wave fueled by economic stagnation and cultural alienation, framing 2024 as a referendum on establishment collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, it's Andrew Clavin, and welcome to this week's interview with the great Henry Olson, a poll watcher, extraordinaire, political commentator, and a podcaster.
Whenever people quote the polls as proof of anything, I always think of a character in a novel by the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, a doctor whose name is Dr. Phrave.
And the idea, the point that Trollope was trying to make is that the state of medicine in Victorian England was such that the doctor was just as likely to kill you as to heal you.
And yet people still called the doctor anyway, even knowing that he might kill them, because people want to believe in experts and people want to believe that someone knows what's going on and someone can predict the future.
And that meant the best doctor then, and maybe the best doctor now was the one who knew what he didn't know and knew to do no harm.
And polling nowadays is kind of similar.
The state of polling is in disarray.
With the invention of the cell phone, it's harder to get people to answer.
People don't pick up.
I know I don't answer the phone at all unless I know exactly who it is who's calling.
So the numbers are less reliable.
And yet, the news media keeps quoting polls as if either they must absolutely predict the future or else they must be rigged when instead the truth is probably somewhere in between that as Doris Day used to say, the future simply isn't ours to see.
And that is the reason I always like to talk to Henry Olson.
He is a guy who not just, he doesn't just know how to read the numbers, which is important.
He's also a man who knows what he doesn't know.
And maybe most importantly, he's one of the few commentators I know who never lets his personal preferences get in the way of what he thinks the numbers say, which is an amazing act of discipline and integrity.
And I love to have him on because of that reason, because it means that someone is always going to get angry at him, which distracts them from being angry at me.
So it's a good thing for me all around the board.
He is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, prolific columnist.
You can find him all over the place.
He has a great podcast.
It's a wonky podcast before people who love politics like I do.
Great podcast called Beyond the Polls, hosted by my friends over at Ricochet.
He's just done a lot of stuff that no one else has done.
Before Trump even existed as a political candidate, he kind of sketched out what a winning Republican candidate would be.
He was one of the few people who didn't count Trump out right before the election.
Henry, it's great to have you here.
Thanks for coming on.
Well, I'm glad to be back and I'm glad to distract the incoming from you and your dad.
That's all I ask.
That's your whole job here.
So let's start with the polls, the state of the next presidential election.
I assume you're seeing what everybody else is seeing, which is that Trump has this enormous lead.
Yeah, I mean, in the Republican race, Trump just has this, as you said, enormous lead.
Now, it's closer in the states where campaigning is taking place.
It's 20 to 30 points in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, whereas it's 30 to 50 points, depending on the poll nationally.
But what stands out to me in those early state polls is stability, that you've seen movement below Trump, DeSantis dropping, Haley rising, the Scott and Ramaswamy bloomlets.
You've seen virtually no erosion of Trump.
And we are now a little over five weeks before the Iowa caucus.
Iowa does have a history of late, rapid, and significant movement.
But if that movement is below the Trump level, it's frankly not going to matter.
That if Donald Trump's getting 45% of the vote, which is where he's polling in Iowa right now, he gets that on caucus night.
He's almost certainly going to be the nominee because he only needs a few voters from the people who want somebody else.
I wanted somebody else, but you're my second choice.
He's really got to be pushed down to the 35% mark in Iowa and New Hampshire and so forth for people to reasonably say, hey, maybe there's an anti-Trump vote out there to be consolidated.
So until I see that, I'm saying it's a massive, you know, in sports betting terms, it would be like a one to five bet on Trump to win.
So this thing that I keep hearing where half the people who support Trump are diehard Trumpers and the other half are kind of in, but they're looking for somebody else, that's just not true.
Or at least not that important.
Yeah, I think it is true.
Maybe not half, maybe it's two-thirds, one-third.
Before the race started, I thought that the baseline, always Trump support was between 30 and 35%.
And every pollster I've asked, including people in campaigns who have told me what their assessment is on the pain of anonymity, you know, under the cloak of anonymity and the pain of death, they all come up with the same number.
So I'm going to assume that it's somewhere around 30 to 35 percent of the total electorate.
So what that means is that there's only about 30 percent of the Trump support that is open to movement.
Now, the question is, who can appeal to that?
At the beginning of this campaign, before DeSantis announced, DeSantis was appealing to that person.
That's why the polls were close.
He has lost that support.
They have gone back to Trump.
And the only question that needs to be asked between now and the Iowa caucus is how much of that group will decide in the end, I prefer DeSantis to Trump, even as I like both of them.
If the answer is not very many, then we're going to see Trump basically have this wrapped up by South Carolina.
And if not, then by Super Tuesday.
What do you think that DeSantis did wrong?
I read a column, a really interesting column by you comparing his campaign to Reagan's back in the day.
What is it that he did wrong?
You know, I think there's a few things he did wrong.
First of all, he didn't come out of the gate smoking.
It's very hard to go from a state to a national campaign.
He's done it better than a lot of governors.
I mean, clearly, Scott Walker is the poster child for first the flame out.
But what he didn't do is have a strong start.
And part of that was personality base, you know, is that I watched DeSantis and Casey DeSantis side by side, or actually one after each other when he held his 99th county in Iowa rally over the weekend, completing what's called the full grass leak.
And if you didn't tell me which one was running and I just got to pick which one was the better candidate, it would be Casey.
Casey's more articulate.
Casey's more energetic.
She's more likable.
There's a reason she's on the stage with him all the time.
Now, he's gotten better.
And his debate performance on Wednesday night was easily his best debate performance.
He's lowered the timber of his voice.
He's more comfortable giving and taking blows, but he didn't come out that way.
And I think that hurt him.
The other thing that most observers haven't pointed out that I might overstate, but the fact is when he came out, Trump hammered him about his support as congressman for cutting Social Security and Medicare.
And the fact is, you go into the DC salons that I have been in for the last 15 years and think tanks and so forth, and it's almost absolute article of faith.
Well, of course, we have to touch Social Security and Medicare.
That's where the money is.
But the problem is, I go there because that's where the money is, is a phrase attributed to the famous bank robber Willie Sutton.
And that's actually how Trump voters view this.
And so I think by pointing out that DeSantis was at least at one point wholly on board with the GOP consensus, hurt him with Trump voters in a way that most polls, because pollsters aren't attuned to that division in Republican politics, didn't ask the questions that hit to that.
But it basically, I think, helped cast him as a faux populist from day one.
And he's never responded.
You know, I have written columns saying, hey, you might want to respond this way.
He has not chosen to engage those questions in the slightest.
And I think he, that points to the third question, which is, if there's no difference from Trump on the issues, then why should you move on from Trump?
There are differences, both in emphasis and in outcome.
But DeSantis has yet to actually turn to Trump voters and say, he says he supports your values and he's fighting for you, but you believe this and he believes that.
Until he's willing to do that, I think we're really talking about second place and not a real run at first place.
You had a discussion, a commentary on your podcast, Beyond the Polls.
Talking about the events in Europe, the Netherlands, the rise of Geert, the anti-Muslim thank you, Geert Felders.
Shocking.
I mean, a guy who was absolutely, I met Geert Wilders years ago and he was the most out politician you could possibly be, the guy in Argentina, the riots in Dublin, in Italy.
And you've said that all of these things are really good indicators for Trump.
Why is that?
Fundamentally, what we're going through is not an American-specific phenomenon.
The world is realigning.
It's realigning along the lines of an article I wrote six years ago called Ins versus Outs, that we are used to over a certain age, that politics is left versus right around questions of culture, around questions of government intervention in the economy.
We're seeing a reordering over the question is, does the system work or not?
If it does, left or right, you're part of the ends.
In other words, George W. Bush has more in common with Joe Biden than he does with Donald Trump because they think the system works.
The only question is how it should be reformed.
But increasingly, people say, no, this doesn't work at all.
It doesn't work for me economically.
It doesn't work for me socially.
And by the way, you're getting my kids killed in wars I don't care about.
And that's the outs.
Geert Wilders is, as you said, about as strong of an example of an out politician as you can get in the Netherlands.
Javier-Malay, a guy who names his dog after, he had a dog, his dog died, and he had the dog cloned.
And three of the clone dogs are named Friedman, Lucas, and Murray Rothbard.
Okay.
So if you know something about libertarian economics, you know where this guy's coming from.
And they win.
And not only do they win, they win massive victories in the context of their party's politics.
And they do it precisely by being outrageous.
And they do it by talking to the demographic groups that worldwide are shifting allegiances away from the left and over to the populist right.
Working class, middle income, lesser educated voters who are still employed in the private sector.
These are the people who 15 years ago were happy with Peronism.
15 years ago, they were happy with the Labor Party in the Netherlands.
15 years ago, they backed Barack Obama over John McCain.
And today they are so disgusted.
They're going to the candidate that says, blow it all up, because this is not working.
And if there is a blow it all up candidate with national credibility in the United States, it remains Donald Trump.
These trends show that all of the attempts by the ends to say, you should care about the things that you used to care about, are not working.
Now, Trump has his own specific personal problems that may end up making him the outlier, whereas he was once the canary in the coal mine.
But the fact is, the more people think the whole system is not working, the more the outrageous person seems to be the credible candidate.
And Donald Trump is nothing if not outrageous and therefore credible.
So you said this appeared somewhere between 15 years ago and now.
You said you made this prediction six years ago.
So you're not talking about the pandemic.
You're talking about something else.
What are the triggering factors that divided the ins and the outs or divided us along in and out?
It started with the end of the Cold War and the bringing of the neoliberal consensus that the 1990s was a consolidation period.
What do we do when the global conflict that has divided the world doesn't exist?
The Soviet Union has collapsed.
What do we do when the victories of Reagan and Thatcher show that market economics and a movement in that direction have strong voter appeal throughout the developed world?
And what do we do as religion begins to decline in fervency and adherence?
Left and right parties of the old coalition began to form a consensus.
We'll be for neoliberalism in markets, but we won't repeal the welfare state.
We'll be for globalization, sending trade, and we'll be favoring of migrant flows so that we can spread our system to the world.
And what we will do is we will continue to fight for democracy as opposed to fighting against tyranny.
And what's happened in the last 20 years is that that doesn't work for a lot of people.
Traditionalist religious people are increasingly being discriminated against or marginalized throughout the Western world.
And this includes traditional Jews.
You know, that the one group of Jews in the United States who's strongly Republican are Orthodox Jews because they too feel distinctly pressured by the secularization of society.
The economic pushes devastated industry.
And the reason we have rising inequality within the developed world is because the rich who trade in finance and trade in ideas contract with poor people for labor, either at home, migration or abroad, trade.
And that's disadvantaged their fellow citizens.
And their fellow citizens say, wait a minute, we're not in this together.
This doesn't work for me.
And militarily, this is less of a case in Europe, although the recent Ukraine war has made it a little more relevant.
And that is the question of why do we need to be fighting all over the place for wars we don't win?
You know, is that we can argue whether we lost Iraq or Afghanistan before withdrawals or temporizing, but we didn't win them.
And so we expand lives, we expend treasure for nothing.
And then the question is, who's dying in these wars?
Why Populists Disadvantage Citizens00:03:52
Well, they're not the sons of the children.
They're not the children, the sons and the daughters generally of the people who are working on Wall Street or working in Washington.
Those people are going to college and law school and MBA and making a lot of money, not enlisting.
The people who are going are the people who are also being hurt socially, who are also being hurt economically.
And this has given rise to the massive movement of outs that are just willing to say, forget it.
You know, this thing about forget it.
One of the things I've noticed, Maloney in Italy, she's softened considerably since taking office.
Millet in Argentina is already kind of dialing back.
I mean, there's a guy who showed up with a buzzsaw, you know, a chainsaw because he was going to cut all the departments and he took a hammer to a pinata of the central bank.
And suddenly he's saying, well, these things take time.
And he's softening Donald Trump, you know, build the wall, you know, lock them up.
None of that stuff ever happened.
Is it the way these people talk that's so appealing to our people, or is it their actual policies?
I mean, I don't even know what Trump's policies are anymore or what they would be.
You know, is that just the fact that they spit in these people's eye that makes them so popular?
Well, a lot of it is the way people talk, you know, is that populism is always a mobilization of a virtuous majority against a minority, an elite, if you will, that is said to have achieved social, economic, and political dominance unjustly.
And that's as true if you're on the left.
You know, you should, there are left-wing populist parties.
We know Bernie Sanders is a left-wing populist who he decries billionaires and Trump decries the politically correct, but they're mobilizing similar constituencies around similar themes, even if their policy prescriptions are different.
What happens when you are sick of it is that the details of the policies are less important than the fact that the old order will change.
And populists will succeed when the old order changes.
What we have seen is places where populists have gotten re-elected, like Hungary, like Israel, because essentially Netanyahu over his career has moved from being an establishment center-right person to being a populist center-right person.
And where they get reelected is where they deliver on some policy solutions, you know, whether it's economics or whether it's culture or a mixture of both.
Some of these people have yet to, we've been able to see whether they can deliver.
But even when you have the upper hand within a coalition, none of these people have pure majorities.
You know, that every political entity is a coalition.
And what Vielders has to do, he won the election, but he only got a quarter of the vote.
He has to deal with people closer to the center than he does.
Maloney won the election, but her party got less than 30% of the vote.
She has to deal with people closer to the center.
So what they're doing is being shrewd politically.
The populist predecessor to Maloney, Matthias Salvini, went in the other direction.
He didn't have a majority.
He tried to govern as a populist, and he ran into the reality that Italy's budget is effectively controlled by bailouts and loans from Brussels.
And so he quickly failed, made peace with the center.
And that's what fueled Maloney because they said, oh, well, Italian voters naturally said, well, you tried and you failed.
Let's go for somebody who can succeed.
And he has dropped from 36% in the polls to nine, and she's risen from four to 30%.
Populist Risks and Rewards00:05:35
You have to be careful when you're a populist.
You get the chance to do something with your rhetoric, but then you have to know how to work with your system to deliver, to entrench yourself, and then to strengthen yourself for future electoral victories.
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I don't know how many times I have to tell you.
There are no easy things.
You know, as you're talking about this, I was thinking of a column by David Brooks a couple of months ago where suddenly it occurred to him that maybe he, meaning the elites, and David Brooks is almost the incarnation of eliteness.
He said, maybe we're the bad guys.
And I thought, wow, that must have been a dream that passed through his mind and out the other side, because nobody seems to want to deal.
Everybody wants to attack Trump for his big mouth and his dishonesty, but nobody wants to deal with what the people were trying to say when they voted for him.
Nobody seems at all to have taken any assessment of that.
I read the Wall Street Journal and the wonderful writers in the Wall Street Journal, but they have made a full court press to make Nikki Haley a thing.
Nikki Haley, to me, is Jeb Bush in a skirt.
I mean, she is that exact, you know, McCain, Mitt Romney character that they always think is going to win, who never wins anything.
Nobody wants her.
You mentioned before that she had a hike in the polls.
Trump, I think it was just yesterday, said it's all an illusion.
When he said that, I sort of thought, I think he may be right.
Do you think this Nikki Haley thing is real at all?
Well, it depends what you mean by real.
You know, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, it depends what the meaning, the real meaning of real is.
Look, this gets back to the question about coalition.
The center-right Republican electorate is a coalition of different groups with different priorities and different emphases.
Is there a segment of the people who will vote for Trump against Biden who would prefer Jeb Bush in a skirt?
Yes.
And that's who Nikki Haley is coalescing.
There was a de facto battle between Pence and Scott and Haley as to who would emerge as the leader of the 25 to 30 percent of the party that essentially does not want Trumpism.
She's winning that.
She's effectively won that battle.
That means she's been rising.
Does that mean she can win?
There is no evidence that Nikki Haley can win without expanding the field massively like they did in Georgia.
You know, what happened is, remember the Georgia primaries.
Donald Trump tries to take out Brian Kemp.
He endorses Slate of people up and down the road to try and basically punish Kemp and Brad Raffensperger for saying, hey, the election wasn't stolen.
You lost Fair and Switch.
All the polls said that Kemp would win against his challenger, but they also said that Raffensperger would be forced into a runoff.
Well, Raffensberger won without a runoff, and Kemp outdid the polls by 30 points.
In other words, the poll, there was about as massive of a polling error as you've ever seen.
Why?
Turnout doubled.
The previous high of Georgia Republicans was around 600,000, 630,000.
1.2 million people voted in the Georgia primary.
Of course the polls were wrong.
They were modeling for a traditional electorate and got sideswiped by an untraditional electorate.
But that's Nikki Haley's chance.
Nikki Haley's doing well with non-traditional Republicans and independents who don't vote in Republican primaries.
If they don't turn out, she's going to get tasted if she emerges as the main, because two-thirds of the party once would prefer Trump to Jeb Bush.
You know, to continue your analogy.
That's what the people like the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board simply refuse to see.
And this is what the people who, you know, David Brooks is writing to maybe were the bad guys.
They embarked on what was called basically safari missions.
We're going to go into deepest, darkest Kruger National Park and see the big five.
And they came back and they said, yeah, we saw the giraffes, you know, the longshoremen, and we saw the elephant, the trucker, and so forth.
Reasonable Doubt Jury00:07:36
Did they learn anything?
No, they have cool photos for their album, but they basically said, yeah, this is what they believe, but we're going to ascribe the worst possible motivations to them and say, well, you know, actually, you deserve your place.
Take the Netherlands.
The leader of the main center-right party, the party that's held the prime ministership for the last 13 years, said the voters have not been listened to enough, to which I said in my column in the spectator world, well, whose fault is that?
You were leading the government for 13.
Who wasn't listening?
You, you personally, your friend.
And so you just have to say, at some point, they know what these people want.
They just don't want to give it to them.
So, Donald Trump, you know, the guy is in a world of trouble.
They're prosecuting him.
I've read, I think I've read all the indictments, and they really, they either seem to me ridiculous, like the one in New York, or they seem to me unfair in the sense that Hillary Clinton has done many of the same things and nobody said a word about prosecuting her.
First of all, let me ask you, the last time I talked to you, you were pretty much where I am, where you said you would be willing to be convinced that the last election was stolen, but you were not convinced at this point.
Are you still there?
Is that still where you stand?
Yeah, the thing is, there's never been any actual hard evidence that has been produced.
I look at the charge that the election is stolen as the equivalent of a criminal charge, which is to say I charge you elections with being guilty of fraud.
So first, I have to ask, do I have sufficient evidence?
And as a lawyer, I'm thinking along this lines using legal terminology.
Do I have sufficient evidence to say that there's reasonable, you know, a reasonable expectation, you know, a chance that this has happened?
All they've done is produce anecdote.
There is actually no single piece of evidence any of them have ever produced that said this thing caused this thing that caused this number of votes.
Now, until I see that, basically what they're trying to do is say, we're trying to pass an indictment without having a reasonable expectation that X and Y committed the crime.
And then you've got the question of, well, now to convict, we should have a higher level of proof.
You're nowhere close to a higher level of proof.
No person has ever tried to refute the evidence that I have written about.
I write about, well, here's why I don't believe it.
And to summarize for the listeners, basically the Trump arguments come down to two things, that the Democrats stuffed the ballot box either before the counting, male ballots, or after the counting, you know, allegedly what happened.
If they stuffed the ballot box, what we should see is an unusual spike in turnout in areas that either have high levels of male ballots that obviously under this theory would be stuffed, or in areas where they control the counting because they're adding the ballots after election day.
The fact is you don't see it anywhere, anywhere.
So when I say I can't prove X and Y and Z, but I know that if there's X and Y and Z, there's going to be, you know, if somebody says, I don't, you know, if somebody says that Joe kills Mary with a gun, I may not be able to disprove Joe killed Mary with a gun, but if I can't find Mary's body with a bullet hole in it, I'm going to guess that Joe didn't kill her.
Right.
That's where we are.
So given that, and given these trials, what do you foresee?
And I'm asking you to predict the future so we all know that you're flying blind, but still, what do you see?
How do you picture Trump in the general election?
Well, as Yogi Bear is supposed to have said, predictions are hard, especially about the future.
So I'll give you two.
And then one of my favorite quotes from Lord of the Rings is what Gildor the elf says to Sam when asked advice.
He gives him an answer and Sam says, no wonder.
It's true.
Go not to the elves for advice, but they tell you both yes and no.
So I'll give you, if you, the media narrative is he's going to be convicted.
And I think given the jury pools, when you draw the jury in Manhattan from a place that voted against him like 96 to 4 or in DC, the odds are similar, and given the passions that we have, the odds are that if this gets to a jury trial, that a conviction will occur in the New York case that's currently going on, which is actually not a jury trial, it's a judge trial, or in D.C.
But two things.
One, one of the things that I find particularly weak about some of these cases is their theories of law.
That I look at the case in D.C. and I say, well, the facts Trump did this, Trump did this, Trump did this, Trump intended that, seem pretty damning.
The legal theories are really speculative, really tenuous.
And this is from a guy who procured a conviction of Robert O'Donnell, the governor of Virginia, who then had that conviction overturned by a unanimous Supreme Court.
O'Donnell was a Republican, so that means that his conviction was overturned at a time when Democrats or the liberals had a majority on the court because of the specious legal theory.
So the first thing is that what happens if he gets the conviction, but then it's overturned on appeal?
I think that's a real possibility.
Secondly, the cases in Atlanta and in Florida are going to be against jury pools with a lot of Trump people.
Even Atlanta's Fulton County is a Democratic bastion, but it's a Democratic bastion three to one.
You need a unanimous jury to convict.
All Trump needs is 12-person jury.
Statistically, three of them will be Trump voters.
All he needs is for one of them to say, hell no, I won't go to conviction.
And it's a mistrial.
What happens if Trump gets a mistrial?
The media narrative assumes guilt, What happens if Trump is able to say they made their case to a jury and they couldn't get it done?
I think that could be a big factor in Trump's favor.
And this gets to why I can't predict.
These are known unknowns.
I know these things are in the process.
I don't know how they will play out, but I think the legal situation could be less favorable for Democrats than they are saying because of these known unknowns.
Fascinating.
Henry Olson, always great talking to you.
Your podcast, Beyond the Polls, I just, I eat it up.
It's pure politics.
Love to hear it.
Your columns appear everywhere.
It's great to see you.
And we'll talk again as the election unfolds.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me back, Andrew.
All right.
I hope that managed to get everybody angry at Henry.
So you're forgetting about being angry at me.
And I hope because of that, because of the good feeling between us, you will show up on Friday for the Andrew Clavin Show.