There’s always the temptation when you’re reading a thriller to skip ahead and see how it ends. And this year there’s no bigger cliffhanger than who will win the presidential race in 2024.
But as the caucuses and primaries kick off in Iowa and New Hampshire later this month, it’s important to remember that people pick presidents, not polls. And no matter what social media or pundits or surveys are saying now, not a single vote has been cast yet. And Americans have a way of surprising you once the votes get counted.
The winners in the early states have rarely been the frontrunners heading into the last two weeks of the campaign in recent years. It’s easy to forget that U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz beat eventual GOP nominee Donald Trump in the 2016 Iowa caucuses, or that former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum squeaked by frontrunner Mitt Romney on a frigid Iowa caucus night four years before that.
Throughout 2011, Santorum had languished in the single digits as he trudged through all of Iowa’s 99 counties. But days before the caucuses, I met up with his campaign at The Button Factory restaurant in Muscatine, Iowa, where more than 100 people had piled in during lunch to hear his conservative pitch. I didn’t even know 100 people lived in Muscatine, nor that so many of them would consider voting for a defeated former Pennsylvania senator for president, but they did.
Political reporters had been paying attention to the presidential election for more than a year before, but actual voters were just tuning in. “When I have these town hall meetings, people say, ‘I didn’t know about you. Where have you been?’ he told me.
Powered by his devout Catholic conservative message and a sweater vest that eventually got its own Twitter account. Santorum rocketed from the back of the pack to beat the dominant Romney by 34 votes that year.
By 2016, Jeb Bush was assumed to be the obvious GOP nominee before the contests began. The mild-mannered Florida governor was judged early on by political reporters to be the sharpest of the Bush kids and a clear favorite in the “electability lane” for 2016 presidential hopefuls.
Cruz and Trump finished first and second in the Iowa caucuses, while Bush finished a disappointing sixth place. But it became obvious that Bush was in real trouble during a town hall in Bedford, New Hampshire, where a friend of the Bush family introduced him. “Let’s talk about getting George Bush elected!” he declared before realizing his mistake. “Uh, Jeb Bush, Jeb!”
Despite Jeb’s $100 million campaign war chest, he had barely made an impression on actual voters, not even family friends. But Trump was a different story. Although reporters dismissed Trump as a sideshow, I’d heard from voters as early as 2011 how much they liked the New York businessman. They felt they knew him from reading his book, The Art of the Deal, or seeing him on The Apprentice. But they didn’t think he could win the GOP nomination, until he did.
But when an Access Hollywood recording surfaced in October of 2016 of Trump joking about assaulting women, the conventional wisdom said that no one who admitted to touching women inappropriately could win conservative women’s votes in November. But a week after the video became public, I talked to Republican women in North Carolina who couldn’t have cared less about Access Hollywood. Lots of them just hated Hillary Clinton. But one was such a Trump fan she said she’d be honored if he touched her inappropriately. “I sure would! Do it again!” she said. She voted for Trump, twice.
And how about Joe Biden in 2020? After he finished an embarrassing fourth in Iowa and New Hampshire, and then third in Nevada, pundits declared his White House chances as good as dead. But he eventually beat the entire 18-person field to win the Democratic nomination. And that’s when I started seeing Biden-Harris yard signs in Republican areas of the Atlanta suburbs that used to be solid Republican.
As I pack my bags for Iowa and New Hampshire, the going assumption now is that the two nominees will be Biden and Trump again. The only reason to take that with a grain of salt, other than the president’s age, Trump’s age, Biden’s low approval ratings, Trump’s low approval ratings, the 91 felony indictments against Trump, falling inflation rate under Biden, the war in the Middle East and the fact that most voters want to choose between someone other than Trump and Biden, is the fact that not a single vote has been cast yet.
Add to that the fact that South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is now polling within three points of Trump in New Hampshire. And did I mention that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is getting a fifth of the vote in a hypothetical November match-up between Trump and Biden?
Voters can be a tricky bunch and, as recent history has proven again and again, the eventual outcome in elections can be what you least expect. Just ask Rick Santorum’s sweater vest.
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