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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, power and prejudices.

This year, 2024, is an election year in America,

a presidential election year. And so we will be doing two podcasts a week, rather than our usual one,

because we want to and because we know you can't get enough Americano in your life.

I am delighted to be joined today by James Johnson,

who is the co-founder of jail partners polling,

and James is about to go to Iowa,

and we're going to talk to him about the Iowa caucuses,

which are coming up next week, Tuesday next week.

James, it looks as I mean,

we do have to take into account that the latest polling is quite old from Iowa. It's rather surprising that in this day and age, with so much on the line in American elections, that there

isn't more recent polling, because I think the latest Iowa polls are about three weeks old,

but we should have some more soon. But those did show Trump, Donald Trump, about 30 points

ahead, I think, in Iowa on average. And so it looks as though Ron DeSantis, who put an enormous amount

of effort into Iowa, has a pretty sophisticated ground game we understand in Iowa, is going to still fall short and come second.

He could even come third behind Nikki Haley, that's possible.

And there was speculation, there was a piece on the Hill, I think it was, that he may abandon his campaign if he doesn't win in Iowa.

What's your view?

I think the first thing to say is that out here, there's not much interest in Iowa.

I was speaking to a media producer who they usually would do a live stream, they're not bothering.

People are generally tending to view it this time round as a

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