| | | | |  | | By Ryan Lizza, Rachael Bade and Eugene Daniels | | | With help from Eli Okun, Garrett Ross and Bethany Irvine
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Donald Trump is charging into the Iowa caucuses with a firm lead in the latest polling. | Andrew Harnik/AP Photo | |  | DRIVING THE DAY | | HALEY’S KARMA — LARRY HOGAN endorsed NIKKI HALEY today during an appearance on CNN. “What this race is all about is to try to nominate the strongest possible nominee for November,” Hogan said. “I’m convinced the momentum is with Nikki Haley.” Watch the clip THREE BIG QUESTIONS ABOUT IOWA — One day out from the Iowa caucuses, there are three big questions, all driven by the final Des Moines Register poll, which shows DONALD TRUMP at 48%, NIKKI HALEY at 20%, and RON DeSANTIS at 16%: 1. Will Trump be above or below his Iowa polling average of 51%? The headline on the Des Moines Register poll is that Haley is in second place, but the real story is Trump’s absolute dominance over his main two rivals. The former president is on track for the biggest victory of any competitive caucus in history. His lead is bigger than any seen in previous final DMR polls. The enthusiasm of his supporters is stratospheric. And unlike in 2016, Trump has an extraordinarily well-financed and well-organized operation in the state. The cold weather — the forecast for Des Moines is a low of -19 degrees and a high of -2 degrees tomorrow — will likely benefit the crawl-over-broken-glass voters that Trump attracts rather than the milquetoast Haley backers. Expectations are stratospheric for Trump. If he doesn’t hit 50%, his rivals will be able to claim that more voters came out in subzero weather to vote against him than to vote for him. 2. Will Haley bounce into second place, and by how much? The final DMR poll is best known — and highly anticipated — not because it predicts the precise margins on caucus day, but because it has a good record at capturing what is often the most important dynamic of the Iowa caucuses: who has the late momentum. Just looking at the toplines is deceiving. In 2012, the final DMR poll showed MITT ROMNEY on top, but RICK SANTORUM won. In 2016, the final DMR poll showed Trump with the lead, but TED CRUZ won. Under the hood, those polls hinted that Santorum and Cruz, powered by the crucial Iowa evangelical vote, were still rising and were the late-moving candidates to watch. But last night, ANN SELZER, the highly respected pollster who conducts the survey, went out of her way to make it clear that Haley, despite popping into second place, is not in a similar situation. Haley is on “shaky ground” Selzer told the Register. Unlike Santorum and Cruz, the internals on Haley are not suggestive of a late surge that will continue to rise through tomorrow night. In fact, it’s the opposite. “The deep data on [Haley] suggest she looks stronger in the poll than she could on caucus night,” Selzer told the paper, adding that despite the headline of a Haley second place, “most of the rest of the data here is not good news.” Selzer was particularly surprised at the enthusiasm gap between Haley’s voters and Trump’s voters: Only 39% of Haley’s voters were “extremely enthusiastic” or “very enthusiastic,” while that number was 89% for Trump’s voters. Selzer said those enthusiasm numbers for Haley “are on the edge of jaw-dropping” and “at odds with a candidate moving up.” Despite all of this, the fact that Haley is in the number two spot in the poll means her biggest obstacle tomorrow is heightened expectations. Not finishing second to Trump will now be seen as a major disappointment. One other note on Haley: Jonathan Martin flagged this graf from the NBC News write-up of the poll about Haley’s coalition: “Strikingly, half of Haley’s supporters identify as either independents (39%) or Democrats (11%) — significantly different from the poll’s overall makeup, which stands at 69% Republicans, 23% independents and 5% Democrats among likely GOP caucusgoers.” This led JMart to text us with this intriguing POV: “This isn’t the final Iowa poll. It’s the starting gun for NANCY [JACOBSON] and MARK [PENN]’s all-out campaign to get Nikki to run [on] No Labels’ [ticket]. She already has a base. And it’ll only spike after she wins or comes close in New Hampshire with this same bloc, a real coalition there. We know Nancy has asked people for some time if Nikki would do it. And she’d be more formidable than the others sniffing at No Labels.” Haley on the latest polls and heightened expectations, on “Fox News Sunday” today: “I’m not going to worry about the numbers. What I am going to say is the momentum and the energy on the ground is strong. We feel it. We know that this is moving in the right direction. And to me the only numbers that matter are the ones that we’re going up and everybody else went down and that shows that we’re doing the right thing.”
| | | | A message from Instagram: New federal legislation will give parents a say in teen app downloads.
According to a new poll by Morning Consult conducted in November 2023, more than 75% of parents believe teens under 16 shouldn’t be able to download apps without parental permission.1
Instagram wants to work with Congress to pass federal legislation that gets it done.
Learn more. | | | |  The caucus results will go a long way in showing the path ahead for Ron DeSantis. | Jamie Kelter Davis for POLITICO | 3. Does a third-place finish convince DeSantis the race is over for him? The conventional wisdom is that the Florida governor has no place to go after Iowa. He ended up running a one-state campaign and in this final poll, he’s several points below his number in the first DMR poll in August. Haley is the potential Trump-slayer in both New Hampshire — where Democrats and independents, who don’t have a competitive Democratic primary to focus on, can participate — and South Carolina, where she was governor. The entire GOP primary has been a battle of attrition to see who would earn the right to take on Trump. Iowa will make the final cut. Will DeSantis realize that? It will be particularly hard for DeSantis to drop out if he beats Haley. And Steve Shepard notes that the DMR poll has some good news for DeSantis: “If the dangerous, bitter cold is going to affect turnout on Monday night, that could benefit DeSantis, the poll shows. Slightly more DeSantis supporters (62 percent) said they will definitely attend the caucuses than Trump supporters (56 percent). Only about half of Haley voters, 51 percent, said they’d definitely attend.” DeSantis on his previous predictions that he would win the Iowa caucuses, on ABC’s “This Week” this morning: “I’ve learned that it’s good to be an underdog. Our supporters, some of them roll their eyes at these polls. … I’d rather have people count us out. I’d rather have people lower expectations for us. I tend to perform better like that.” Watch the clip Good Sunday morning. Thanks for reading Playbook. Drop us a line: Rachael Bade, Eugene Daniels, Ryan Lizza. THE PLAYBOOK INTERVIEW: DAVE KOCHEL — Playbook has been in Iowa since early last week. The weather was an almost too-perfect metaphor: The race is frozen in place with few campaign events and little candidate action since Wednesday’s big night, when Haley and DeSantis shredded each other on CNN and Trump tried to pivot to a general election(ish) message during an hour on Fox News (e.g. he “hopefully” won’t have time for retribution, his one-day time limit on being a “dictator” still stands and he’s got nothing left to offer pro-lifers). We spent 45 minutes with KARI LAKE and an hour with Trump strategists CHRIS LaCIVITA and JASON MILLER on Friday, and while they tried to tamp down expectations, that strategy was betrayed by a supreme confidence in a Trump romp tomorrow. “The intensity of our supporters just to show up to caucus for Donald Trump pales and is so far ahead of whatever Always Back Down, which is broke, has,” said Miller, who worked for the victorious Cruz campaign in 2016. (He was, of course, referencing the DeSantis-aligned super PAC, Never Back Down.) But our most interesting interview was with DAVE KOCHEL, a longtime Iowa GOP operative who ran the caucuses for the party in 1996 and who for decades has been a coveted strategist in the state for aspiring governors, senators, and presidents. The two-hour conversation in Des Moines was brimming with insights about tomorrow. Here are the key excerpts: On Trump’s campaign: “They're organized to a point where they're going to get, I think, the best participation out of their leadership. [They] will help plow the ground here coming up that day and that evening as people assemble. They'll get them there early so there's no checking in too late and missing the ballot. … “It's as good as any really well-organized operation is. They didn't take it for granted. They have serious people running that campaign. I don't think they've left anything to chance. … Chris LaCivita and SUSIE WILES are doing a great job. That's why he's got the lead.” On DeSantis’ campaign: “They've knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors. … The best way to collect information from a voter is not a phone call; it's to go to their door, because you're looking them in the eye. … The hundreds of thousands of door knocks got them more data, more information about the Iowa voter than any other methodology. … “They started early. Now, they have a little bit of a problem starting when they did, because when they started knocking on doors, DeSantis was in the 30s. Now, he's in the low 20s. So there are going to be people they [identified] in April, May, June who might not be with DeSantis now. People move; it's a fluid process. … “His organization, though, will be very, very good because it took time to build. They spent a lot of money on it. They have all kinds of data. And then you add to that what Gov. [KIM] REYNOLDS’ endorsement meant … she was the best news that happened to that campaign.” On Haley’s campaign: “She's taken a much different path. … She had a staffer on the ground — only one through the early summer into the fall. She starts to get hot, has a good debate, raises some money. They add a couple of staff people. … Then she gets the [Americans for Prosperity] endorsement. … They know what they’re doing; they’ve been in Iowa for a long time. … They’ve got almost a dozen field organizers, they've got 100-plus paid canvassers. They’ve been able in the last 45 days or 60 days … to knock on a bunch of doors. They're playing catch up, but they're playing catch up at a time when her ballot was rising. It’s really well-timed. … “Her operation, it won't be as big as DeSantis’ or Trump’s, but it's not nonexistent. It's important also to say, though: We've had people win the Iowa caucuses that had no organization. MIKE HUCKABEE, Rick Santorum — they couldn't have told you who was going out to caucus for them.” On the possibility of a split evangelical vote: “We haven't had a caucus since 2000 where evangelicals have split. In 2000, it was GEORGE W. BUSH who brought a lot of people, and you had other candidates like GARY BAUER — you had kind of a split. … “And here's what I think the division is: I think this is much like the Trump voter writ large across the electorate. I think he's got rural, exurban, non-college working class white evangelicals. And I think the more politically savvy, affluent, college-educated evangelicals are probably going to be with DeSantis. “So if you look to northwest Iowa, where it's just a little more affluent, those Dutch communities are well-organized and [have] good businesses and they're just more affluent — I think that's where they'll go to DeSantis. … With Trump, it's more of a vibe. It's more that they like him because he delivered the judges. But also he sticks it to the left and he drives them crazy. “We're going to see something different this time — which means that you're not going to see somebody just really blowing up at the end like we saw with Santorum and Huckabee.” On the hottest merch in Iowa right now: “They've got these white hats with gold leaf on them that says ‘Trump Caucus Captain.’ They're very coveted right now. I'm sure they'll go for a lot on eBay when this is all said and done. … There's only 1,700 of them. … [It's a] status symbol.” More at POLITICO’s liveblog from Iowa TOP-EDS: A roundup of the week’s must-read opinion pieces.
| | | | A message from Instagram:   | | | | | WHAT'S HAPPENING TODAY | | At the White House Biden and VP KAMALA HARRIS have nothing on their public schedules.
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Nikki Haley is hoping to turn her momentum in Iowa into traction in New Hampshire. | Jamie Kelter Davis for POLITICO | 1. TAKEN FOR GRANITE: As Haley puts the finishing touches on her Iowa blitz, New Hampshire GOP Gov. CHRIS SUNUNU is preparing for the turn to the Granite State, where his endorsement of the former South Carolina governor could prove effective in swaying voters. WaPo’s Maeve Reston spent time with Sununu in Windham, N.H., to get a sense of the scheming and what it might take for Haley to build real momentum: “Sununu is planning the final stretch of the New Hampshire race as though it was one of his own campaigns — poring over state maps with Haley’s aides and his own as he sketches out days filled with a half-dozen to a dozen retail campaign stops that will stretch for more than 12 hours ‘at a minimum,’ he says.” 2. ORIGIN STORY: CHRISTINA PUSHAW has emerged as an ardent and ruthless enforcer for DeSantis online, having quickly risen to the top ranks of the Florida governor’s comms operation. Her style “marries aggression with unabashed hyperbole” and her beefs with journalists are legendary, Eve Fairbanks writes for POLITICO Magazine. It wasn’t long ago that Pushaw was living abroad in Georgia, where she became a fixture offering militant support for former President MIKHEIL SAAKASHVILI, who was convicted of abuse of power and sentenced to six years in prison. So how did she find her way to DeSantis? Fairbanks dives deep on the singular force that is Pushaw. “Her tactics, honed in Georgia, focus on inflating the stakes of a conflict; portraying your critics as agents acting on behalf of larger, well-coordinated interests; and casting your candidate as a once-in-a-lifetime political savior — an approach that seemed exceptionally well suited to a Republican candidate trying to follow Trump’s act.” 3. SHUTDOWN SHOWDOWN: Congress is set to move next week to pass a two-tiered stopgap into March, with six days left until the first of two government shutdown deadlines, Caitlin Emma and Jennifer Scholtes report. “The new funding patch would keep federal agencies running on two different timeframes, like the current stopgap. Funding for some federal agencies would expire March 1, while funding for others would run through March 8, according to a source familiar with the proposal. “Speaker MIKE JOHNSON is backing the plan, which is necessary to finish a slate of 12 spending bills for the current fiscal year, after he previously rejected the notion of another short-term funding extension. Johnson is expected to brief the GOP conference on Sunday night. The second ‘laddered’ approach will almost certainly require hefty Democratic support to pass the House, while conservatives fume at the Louisiana Republican for cutting a deal with Senate Majority Leader CHUCK SCHUMER on a government funding framework for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.” 4. SANTOS’ SUCCESSOR: The special election for former New York GOP Rep. GEORGE SANTOS’ seat is about a month away, with both parties looking at the Feb. 13 battle as a test case for how they might fare at the ballots in November, WaPo’s Paul Kane writes. How Republicans see it: “If Republicans can hold the seat, they believe that it shows the issues that led to big gains in 2022 in some traditionally Democratic areas remain in their favor, particularly with President Biden’s sagging popularity and voters not crediting him for economic gains over the past year. Add to that the mushrooming migrant crisis at the southern border, which has now been felt in numerous metropolitan areas, and perceptions of rising crime in cities despite national trends showing a drop. How Democrats see it: “Democrats see another chance to extend their string of victories following the June 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned abortion rights and sent the issue back to state governments.” Related read: “In Race to Replace George Santos, Financial Questions Re-emerge,” by NYT’s Nicholas Fandos
| | | | A message from Instagram:   | | | 5. THE OBAMA DRAMA: There is a simmering divide between former staffers for BARACK OBAMA and current Biden aides, with Obama alums worrying that Biden may be ignoring some of his weak spots and lessons learned by the Obama team years ago. Biden allies, of course, say that the split is overstated and stale. But the differences between the two camps “underscore a fundamental point of tension that has long existed between them — one that is core to each man’s political identity,” Holly Otterbein reports. “Obama, for all his lofty rhetoric, is at his heart a technocrat. His team put together the most sophisticated campaign machinery of the modern era, and prided itself on analytics and a field operation that remains unmatched. Many think Obama’s decision to shuttle key White House advisers to the campaign in early 2011 was also critical — and should be mirrored by Biden.” Biden, meanwhile, “has never been an organizational wizard. Instead, he has often relied on his instincts and guts. He has worked within the Democratic Party — heavily leaning on the DNC apparatus, particularly in the months before he started staffing up his campaign — rather than alongside it.” 6. STAFFING UP: The Biden campaign is bringing on a host of new staff, Elena Schneider reports, underscoring the haste with which the reelection team is now bringing operatives on board with November looming. The details: “ANDY CRYSTAL, who previously led research at The Problem with JON STEWART and Patriot Act with HASAN MINHAJ, will be the campaign’s research director. LAUREN HITT, who most recently served as Rep. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ’s (D-N.Y.) communications director, will be a senior national spokesperson for the campaign.” 7. KEEP CALM AND KERRY ON: JOHN KERRY, the U.S. climate envoy, will step down from his official government position before the spring, trading his current post for an informal role with the Biden campaign, Axios’ Mike Allen and Andrew Freedman scooped. Kerry informed Biden of his decision on Wednesday and the rest of his staff yesterday, WaPo’s Maxine Joselow and Tyler Pager report. Next week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and the Munich Security Conference in February will likely be his final appearances on the global stage as a member of the administration. 8. FOR THOSE KEEPING TRACK: House Republicans’ inquiry into the Jan. 6 Capitol attack is ramping up, according to Rep. BARRY LOUDERMILK. “Loudermilk, R-Ga., the chairman of the House Administration Committee’s Oversight Subcommittee, told Fox News Digital that his investigation, which began under former Speaker KEVIN McCARTHY, is expanding with the support of House Speaker Mike Johnson,” Fox News’ Brooke Singman reports. “We’re entering a new phase,” Loudermilk told Fox News. “The speaker has committee whatever resources we need to move forward, and has basically tripled the size of our staff.” 9. BATTER UP: As STEVE GARVEY mounts his California Senate campaign, the Republican is counting on his former career path to give him an edge against the crowded Democratic field in a deep-blue state — that is to say, Garvey is hoping that Los Angeles Dodgers fans and San Diego Padres fans will put him at the top of the lineup, LA Times’ Benjamin Oreskes writes from San Diego. “He hopes what propels him into contention is a nostalgia for his playing days and a political message light on specifics but heavy with criticism about the declining quality of life in California and the scourge of illegal drugs flowing through cities.”
| | PLAYBOOKERS | | IN MEMORIAM — “Michael S Berman, 84, beloved husband of Debbie Cowan, died today peacefully after a brief illness. Michael, a Minnesota native, was a veritable Washington institution having served as Vice President Walter Mondale's Deputy Chief of Staff and Counsel and as a subsequent advisor to countless elected officials. … His ‘Mike's Washington Watch’ newsletter has been required reading for anyone interested in politics since 2007 with the most recent one — edition 213 because he counted them — published just a few weeks ago in December. His political acumen was usually prescient, but it was his restaurant and bathroom reviews that kept his readers laughing.” Read the full obituary — “Tom Shales, Pulitzer-winning TV critic of fine-tuned wit, dies at 79,” by WaPo’s Adam Bernstein and Brian Murphy: “Tom Shales, a Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic for The Washington Post who brought incisive and barbed wit to coverage of the small screen and chronicled the medium as an increasingly powerful cultural force, for better and worse, died Jan. 13 at a hospital in Fairfax County, Va. He was 79.” SPOTTED: Jake Sullivan out for a walk in Dumbarton Oaks Park yesterday. SPOTTED at “Caucus for Kochel” hosted by David Kochel at Lucca in Des Moines last night, with a performance by The Sonny Humbucker Band featuring Kochel, Mark Green, David Wolf, Thom Wright and Mark Juffernbruch: Betsy Ankney, Olivia Perez-Cubas, Charlie and Lisa Spies, Slater Bayliss, Dan Senor, Sara Craig Gongol, Ryan Koopmans, Kent Lucken, Christina Pushaw, Ben Smith, Dana Bash, Jeff Zeleny, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Josh Dawsey, Isaac Arnsdorf, Hannah Knowles, Reid Epstein, Ashley Parker and Michael Bender, Dylan Wells, Kate Sullivan, Meridith McGraw, Natalie Allison, Kimberly Leonard, Ben Jacobs, Shane Goldmacher, Sabrina Rodríguez, Fin Gomez, Paul Steinhauser, Jack Agnew, Alayna Treene, Dave Weigel, Shelby Talcott, Robert Costa, Major Garrett, Rob Stutzman, Jennifer Jacobs and Seema Mehta. ENGAGED — Sarah Williamson, a correspondent and anchor for Newsmax, got engaged to Tal Erel on Friday at Eleven Madison Park after Tal carefully coordinated the proposal with restaurant staff. The couple met when Sarah was living in Israel and interviewed Tal before the 2020 Olympics, when he was on the Israeli baseball team that had qualified. Instapics HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Maureen Dowd … Reps. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) and Randy Feenstra (R-Iowa) … Susan Glasser (6-0) … Nina Totenberg (8-0) … Frank Raines … League of Conservation Voters’ Gene Karpinski … Sinead Casey … Shepard Smith (6-0) … Michael Reed of the RNC … Regina Schofield … Colin Milligan of the American Hospital Association … Michael Block … WaPo’s Jen Liberto … CNN’s Molly Gannon … CAP’s Marcella Bombardieri … Mary Kusler … Jonah Bryson of AmeriCorps … Toby Harnden … Herald Group’s Kevin Manning and Matt Brafman … Citi’s Ben Koltun … former North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue … Margaret Chadbourn … William Yeo of Hill & Knowlton Strategies Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. Send Playbookers tips to playbook@politico.com or text us at 202-556-3307. Playbook couldn’t happen without our editor Mike DeBonis, deputy editor Zack Stanton, producer Andrew Howard and Playbook Daily Briefing producer Callan Tansill-Suddath.
| | | | A message from Instagram: More than 75% of parents want to approve the apps teens under 16 download.
According to a new poll from Morning Consult, more than 75% of parents agree: Teens under 16 shouldn’t be able to download apps from app stores without parental permission.1
Instagram wants to work with Congress to pass federal legislation that gets it done.
Learn more.
1"US Parents Study on Teen App Downloads" by Morning Consult (Meta-commissioned survey of 2,019 parents), Nov. 2023. | | | | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Subscribe to the POLITICO Playbook family Playbook | Playbook PM | California Playbook | Florida Playbook | Illinois Playbook | Massachusetts Playbook | New Jersey Playbook | New York Playbook | Ottawa Playbook | Brussels Playbook | London Playbook View all our political and policy newsletters | | Follow us | | | | |
