Mike Allen: Trump Camp Worried ‘Iowa Softness’ Could ‘Carry over into N.H.’
RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
SCARBOROUGH: "Mike, we have a tracking poll since the Iowa caucuses and we were talking about it might be too early but threest from yesterday, Donald Trump 38%, Cruz 14%, unchanged. Both unchanged. Rubio 12, up two, Jeb Bush, 9%. Christie 6%, Ben Carson at 3%. Right now it looks like things are unchanged one day out but the campaign has just started in earnest there."
ALLEN: "There are a lot of ominous signs for trump. Trump folks are worried. Is that a sugar high? Katty and I were talking off the air that last night ppp tweeted they started a national poll and they said trump was significantly diminished in their first wave, that poll will be out tomorrow. But the trump folks we talked to are worried those Iowa softness, that the inability to target and track the data weakness will carry over into New Hampshire. It’s another sign and there have been a lot of these over the weeks that Donald Trump didn’t take his own campaign seriously enough soon enough. He led in every national poll for 28 straight weeks and he found a new way to run for president and was using star power but as we saw in Iowa on both sides, turning out in these caucuses and primaries is as you talked about on the show, a math problem, a mechanical problem, an organizing problem. That’s the potential Achilles heel. That’s why Chuck Todd said that if Hillary had clearly lost new Hampshire — lost Iowa, it could cost her $50 million because you’re saying you have to go all in every caucus every time."
BRZEZINSKI: "If you’re saying that about Donald Trump, what then are you saying about all the other people who came in — he came in second. So what does that say about Jeb Bush’s campaign and everybody else who trailed? I just wonder if this is being put in perspective."
ALLEN: "Sure, if you’re leading 38-14, I want to be that guy. What trump folks are telling us is that they’re worried that you can’t build a data operation overnight and the operation that they thought they had in Iowa, the analytics they hoped they had, those haven’t been built. You can’t scale those fast enough."
SCARBOROUGH: "He starts with a 44 point lead right now in New Hampshire so obviously he has a little more of a cushion, but can you talk about, Kristen, the difference between polling for a caucus and polling for a primary?"
ANDERSON: "I’m not usually one to say that I think Donald Trump’s analysis of the polls is right, but in this case something he said in the interview earlier in the show is true. It’s harder to poll a caucus than it is a Normal primary. For someone like him if you were overstating his support in the caucus, I think the overstatement may be less in a primary. Because it’s easier to capture this bucket of voters. He’s also right, these folks saying it’s hard to built a data operation overnight are absolutely correct. Up to this point Donald Trump’s strat at the gi has been communication by shotgun. Spread it all across the electorate, machine gun, it hit everybody."
SCARBOROUGH: "That strategy worked, okay, for Marco Rubio who didn’t show up. I mean, we heard constant complaints that he wasn’t in Iowa enough. He decided to use a shotgun approach in Des Moines and eastern Iowa and it worked for him."
