Chuck Todd on Trump Finishing Second: ‘He Crammed for a College Exam’

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:

LAUER: “Let’s bring in Chuck Todd and Nicolle Wallace. Folks, long night for you. Nice to have you with us this morning.” (Laughter)
TODD: “Where am I?”
LAUER: “Let’s start on the Republican side. Yesterday morning you told us the Cruz campaign was supremely confident. We interviewed Donald Trump yesterday morning and he seemed uncharacteristically subdued. Did they know it was coming?”
WALLACE: “Well, I think the Cruz camp knew it was coming. I saw them the day before and they were calm. They hung out a long time and there were no frantic cell phones. I thought, they either knew they were going to win or knew they were going to lose. They built the model with the capacity to go to 170,000. It went bigger than that They knew they were going to do well last night.”
GUTHRIE: “And what is Trump supposed to make of this? is it just, he didn’t organize well in the end for Iowa, and it’s Iowa specific, or is this a sign that perhaps the support you see in polls over and over again, that there’s less than meets the eye when it comes down to voters writing down his name?”
TODD: “The answer to both questions are yes. Meaning that, look, his people are not people that are used to participating in the process, guess what that means? you’ll work even harder to get them out to vote. Look, he spent — he crammed for a college exam, and he did a lot of really good organizing in the last ten days of this. I think now we look back, he may have saved himself from finishing second. It may have plummeted further had he not put the extra effort he did in the last ten days.”