From WNYC Studios, I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Tuesday, January 2nd.

Astrid Herndon from the New York Times kicks off our coverage of this presidential election year for the ages.

Astead Herndon is a national politics reporter and host of the politics podcast, The Run Up,

in 2019. He was the Times campaign reporter for Kamala Harris' presidential campaign,

among other things that he's done. Recent podcast episodes have included interviews with Iowa Evangelicals.

Remember, the Iowa caucuses are less than two weeks away. We'll sample from that podcast episode, as well as the one with the very local, really hyper-local focus group he did.

It was at his own Thanksgiving dinner on the surprisingly large

percentage of black voters considering Donald Trump, if you believe the New York Times poll that

came out a little before Thanksgiving. And we'll talk about the whole Nikki Haley Civil War thing,

too. Asda, great to have you back on the show. Thanks for starting

2024 with us. Happy New Year and welcome back to WNYC. Happy New Year of the Youth. Thank you so

much for having me. It's a great way to start the year. Well, the first vote up is the Iowa

caucuses Monday, January 15th, Martin Luther King Day, by the way, though in Iowa, I guess that

doesn't stop them from

having an election. And we will play a clip of one of your podcast episodes from Iowa, but

is the headline here that there is really no drama in this first vote of the year because

Trump is such a shoe in for first place? Or would that be

missing some important things to watch for on January 15th? I mean, I certainly think that's the

headline. And I mean, to your point, all of this has really been reliant on polling over the

past year. We have not seen really any of these other candidates threaten Donald

Trump's lead both in Iowa and in some of these early states. And it's actually grown over the

year in 2023 to the point where we now have some Iowans who are backing other candidates,

...