This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
A new poll measures the warmth South Dakota Republicans have — or don't have — for presidential frontrunners. We take a close look at the feelings thermometers on the South Dakota Polling Project.
Plus, we ask our Dakota Political Junkies about the constitutional debate over whether Donald Trump can be on the ballot.
David Wiltse, Ph.D., and Lisa Hager, Ph.D., are associate professors of political science at South Dakota State University.
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The following transcript was auto-generated.
Lori Walsh:
It is the first Wednesday of a new year and we're bringing you our first Dakota Political Junkies conversation of 2024. Lisa Hager and David Wiltse are associate professors of Political Science at South Dakota State University, and they're seated inside SDPB's Jeanine Basinger studio at SDSU for our conversation.
Dr. Hager, welcome. Thanks for being here.
Lisa Hager:
Good afternoon, Lori.
Lori Walsh:
Dr. Wiltse, welcome.
David Wiltse:
Good to be here.
Lori Walsh:
All right. I want to start. We have two big topics for today. One is the New South Dakota Polling Project numbers, and the other is what we're seeing happen with a constitutional challenge to Donald Trump being on the Republican primary ballot. So we're going to get started right away. Dave Wiltse, remind people about the South Dakota Polling Project and what its mission is.
David Wiltse:
Well, the Polling Project now has been around in one incarnation or another for about two years. I think this is our sixth or seventh statewide poll. We're a nonpartisan research group here at the South Dakota State University in the School of American and Global Studies, and our primary mission is for our own research, but an important part of our mission is to inform the state on the opinions of South Dakotans that often get lost in national polling since we're not the subject of a lot of national polling here and some of the subtleties that might not otherwise be teased out given the lopsided partisan structure of this state.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah, we're going to put a link up to all these current results on our website as well. And of course people could also find them just by Googling South Dakota Polling Project. But you didn't ask people how they would vote. You used this thing called a feeling thermometer to figure out the temperature, warmth or cool about primary candidates in the Republican Party, the front-runners. Tell us why you make that distinction, please.
David Wiltse:
Well, when you're asking questions about people's feelings towards a candidate, a person, or any number of subjects, if you ask a simple thing about are you going to vote for this person or this person, or if you ask if approve or disapprove of someone, that's a pretty course measurement. It's just binary, a yes or a no, or maybe just a few options, and that really is constricting when it comes to measurement. So we use this 100 point scale that is very intuitive. It ranges from zero to 100. Anything above 50 means you have warm feelings towards someone and it can lots of variation within that warmth. Same thing below 50 in terms of coolness. So it really does allow us to get some nice subtle differences and tease out where people's feelings really are towards an individual, a party or whatever the subject is.
Lori Walsh:
What did you learn about South Dakota Republicans regarding the top four candidates? Give us the key takeaways.
David Wiltse:
Yeah, for the most part, South Dakotans like, or South Dakotan Republicans, like most of the candidates that are in the field, the only one who really stood out is Vivek Ramaswamy, who is a relative newcomer, not a lot of people are familiar with him or haven't been until very recently. And even someone like Donald Trump, when he emerged on the scene in 2016, I mean, he was well known. People knew who he was, people knew what he was about. But the takeaway here is almost regardless of who's going to be chosen here, all of these folks really do have relatively good standing amongst South Dakota Republicans.
Lori Walsh:
You didn't see the kind of gender divides that maybe we've seen in the past with other candidates, even though we have Nikki Haley who is one of the female candidates in the race. Tell me a little bit about when you break down the results, and what you noticed that was noteworthy.
David Wiltse:
Yeah, when you look at gender, the only candidate that really had any kind of real gender gap again was Ramaswamy. I think a lot of this has to do with some of those early hesitations that people had about Trump in 2015, 2016, where we did see a gender divide. A lot of those have just kind of washed away since then. Trump really has established himself well amongst Republicans. It's taken time. Some of the hesitations people might've had initially, it took a while for those to evaporate. But for the most part, gender just really wasn't something that was driving people's opinions on any of these candidates. And even with Haley, I mean, she did slightly worse amongst women than she did men.
Lori Walsh:
All right. One more thing here, and that's that voters in general don't love their front-runners. They're not in love with Trump, they're not in love with Biden, and that leaves a door open for a third-party candidate or a spoiler of sorts. So we wanted to find out what South Dakota voters thought about Robert F. Kennedy.
David Wiltse:
Yeah, this really is kind of a strange election for the exact reason that you said. When we look at the primary races, we have two very clear front-runners. I mean, both Trump and Biden are most likely just going to walk away with the nomination unless something really big happens. But we're also seeing such a sharp divide amongst voters. Or not a divide, I'm sorry, but we are seeing such negative feelings to both of these front-runners by the public at large. So we're really in this weird spot. And anytime this sort of distance emerges, these kinds of feelings about the front-runners emerge, it always in popular media, they always think, "Well, this is the year a third party candidate might be able to make some traction."
My guess is, and just looking at what we've seen here in South Dakota and looking at other places, whatever warm feelings that have emerged towards Kennedy in the last couple months might be, they're probably going to wash away by the time the general election comes. It's really important to note that in all of the subcategories that we looked at, whether it be by party, gender, age, or education, Kennedy was always on the cool side of our thermometer ratings. So he does have more negatives out there than he does positives. But we do see some interesting results in terms of education and age when it comes to people's affect towards Kennedy. Younger folks and less educated folks really are responding to him better than our more educated folks and older folks. And I think a lot of that has to do with this populist appeal.
Lori Walsh:
So Lisa, I want to bring you into the conversation, particularly around something that we just heard about unless something big happens. Well, this big thing is currently underway, which is this great constitutional challenge based on the 14th Amendment, the insurrection clause basically. Never really been tested. Being tested now. Help people understand what's going on in certain states that are trying to keep the Republican front-runner Donald Trump off the ballot entirely.
Lisa Hager:
Right. So there's a handful of states that have issued rulings either by the Secretary of State that is in charge of elections or various courts. One of the ones that we've heard the most about is Colorado's Supreme Court's decision, but there are courts in Michigan and Minnesota that have also made some rulings. Some of these are barring Trump from being on the Republican primary ballot, and then others are granting him access. And so this is all grounded in this 14th Amendment clause that would disqualify government officials who "engaged in insurrection or rebellion from holding office." So this is found in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
And so what is happening in these states is you have officials in the courts and interpreting whether or not this applies to Trump. So this all gets us back to something we've talked a lot about here with you is the insurrection that took place on January 6th and Trump's role in instigating that or not. And so we'll just kind of have to see what happens. Obviously, all of us court watchers are assuming that this will eventually make its way to the US Supreme Court.
Lori Walsh:
Right. I have not counted this. I looked at the New York Times from yesterday and they said formal challenges have been filed in 33 states. 17 of them are still unresolved. That's as of yesterday in the New York Times. You need 270 electoral votes to win. This could be a very close conversation, and the clock is ticking. It seems like it's forever to the election, but when you look at how fast things move through the courts, it's not, Lisa. This is going to be a legal gymnastics meet, right?
Lisa Hager:
Yeah. I still expect that things will move rather quickly. Although we're used to things moving very slowly when it comes to the judicial system, it can move a lot quicker when there is this sense of urgency. So when we're thinking about things like the recount in 2000 with Bush v. Gore, so the Supreme Court is able to take up these issues and resolve them rather quickly if they want to, so to speak, and if there's that urgency there, which I think is something that we will see where then we'll just kind of have to see how they choose to resolve this issue.
My expectation is they're probably going to not get into really much of the nitty-gritty. With respect to the 14th Amendment. This is kind of what I'm also seeing others think of as well, where we already know that the intention of this particular provision in the 14th Amendment was to bar Confederates from holding office. There is the opportunity for Congress to waive that with a two-thirds vote of both chambers, but most likely they're probably going to focus on Trump really kind of meeting those ballot access requirements in these states and the fact that we don't really actually have him ever really having this answer with respect to his involvement in the insurrection.
Lori Walsh:
So we are probably not going to see the Supreme Court come down with a clear decision about whether or not Donald Trump engaged in insurrection.
Lisa Hager:
Correct. I think that they are going to allow the voters to really make the decision of whether or not they want President Trump as their nominee with respect to the Republican primaries, but also eventually the president. I think that's also probably the best move for them given the fact that they have had some very politically decisive decisions come down as of late.
David Wiltse:
And the Court does have a little bit of a cushion here. And Lisa can correct me if I'm wrong on this, but when it comes to the nomination phase, a lot of state parties can simply opt out of the primary and switch over to a caucus system or a convention system. So let's say he's prevented from coming onto the Colorado ballot, Colorado Republicans will say, "Okay, we'll have a convention instead, and we are going to send all of our delegates Donald Trump's way." So they do have this cushion here in terms of timing.
Lisa Hager:
Right.
David Wiltse:
So it will let them get into summer and be a little more methodical, a little more considered in the decision.
Lori Walsh:
Meanwhile, voters are watching. We're going to leave it there. Professor Lisa Hanker and Professor David Wiltse with South Dakota State University, we appreciate your time. Thank you so much.
Lisa Hager:
Thanks for having us.
Lori Walsh:
Thanks.
