Raheem Kassam's Podcast‪.‬ Raheem Kassam

Everyone keeps claiming that Nikki Haley is “performing well” in primary states despite having already dropped out of the Republican race. That’s not true, and even a cursory look at 2016’s data, as well as understanding semi-open primaries, explains that.
Transcript (automatically generated): 
Well, happy Monday morning. Monday, May 13, 2024. And the reason I’m doing it this way and embedding this audio for you instead of just writing down my thoughts as I usually do is, number one, I can tell that more and more people want video and more and more people want audio instead of just written word. So I’m catering to you lowest common denominator people. I’m not doing the video right now because it’s 08:00 in the morning, I’m in my bathrobe, and I haven’t brushed my hair. So you’re gonna have to deal with the audio for now.
The thing I wanted to jump on here and talk about really quickly, and I thought this was only going to be a little bit of a flash in the pan over the last week. But it turns out that a lot of people keep spreading this, let’s call it disinformation because it is. There are countless headlines that I’ve seen over the course of the last few days that say, oh, my goodness, Nikki Haley took 20% of the vote in Indiana in the primary. There are just so many mentions of these sorts of stories. The Wall Street Journal had one this morning which really got my goat up, which is why I’m here. I’m here even before having my first slice of raisin toast this morning. Those of you who follow me on X will understand that reference. Latest obsession of mine.
Newsweek has something, ABC has something, and I even got a message from somebody whose work I follow in the political sphere recently who said, oh, my goodness, you know, did you see all this Nikki Haley stuff? What do you make of it? I said, what are you talking about? They said, well, she got 20% of the vote in Indiana. That’s terrible for Donald Trump, isn’t it? I said, did you go back and look and compare and contrast that to the 2016 primary results? Now, obviously not the same situation, but did you even try to see what’s going on using historical precedent? And the answer was no. And I couldn’t believe it. Well, maybe I’m just that naive, but I couldn’t believe you just wouldn’t load up the Wikipedia page or the New York Times Indiana primary results page from May 3, 2016. But they hadn’t. They didn’t. And they didn’t want to sort of contextualize what happened in Indiana just a couple of days ago. That was May 10. We’re now May 13. Or rather, the last update to the results was May 10. We’re now May 13. And people are still talking about this.
So let me go through it very quickly but comprehensively so that people understand that Nikki Haley is not getting one-fifth of the vote in the Republican primary in Indiana.
Now, having said all of that, Nikki Haley got one-fifth of the vote in the Indiana presidential primary, the Republican primary. However, the things you need to understand for that number to make any sense are threefold. Number one, there’s nobody else in the race apart from her and Donald Trump there. You had a situation where it’s not an open, open primary, but it’s not a closed primary. It’s what they call a semi-closed, semi-open primary. And so you do have the ability for independents and Democrats to change their affiliation and cast their votes appropriately. Now, we know this has been happening in the past. We know this has happened for a long time. Over the course of the early part of this year. I even wrote an article about it on February 25, if you want to go and look that up. It’s called 40% of Republicans didn’t vote against Trump. In South Carolina, Obama operatives used Democrat voters to boost her. And in this article, it’s not too long. Impressed with myself. These things can get lengthy when you go into the details, but I went into the detail on this group Primary P

The following is a loose transcript of the audio embedded above.
So this week, I read – in addition to everything else in the news – Chris Christie’s book, What Would Reagan Do, and my review is as follows.
I think only Chris Christie could possibly achieve something like this. I think only Chris Christie could make Ronald Reagan look like a weak, feminine, moderate, pale-pastel-wearing pansy while not adding anything to the lore, the underlying epistemological foundation of Reagan’s legacy—just zero.
He may as well have been reading from Wikipedia. Maybe he was. And then he just regurgitated that in his own words. I mean, perhaps he was. Because it was that stilted, it has very little flow. It was jarring. It was all sorts of things, you know, “Ronald Reagan was an actor… Ronald Reagan was the president during the Challenger disaster…” A little cut and paste. Tidbits, anecdotes. They’ve appeared elsewhere.
Only Chris Christie could’ve made Reagan both a dislikable figure, especially in the book’s epilogue where he goes, “Oh, well, of course, you know, Reagan got amnesty done, and that’s what Trump should have been doing.” I’m pretty sure that’s one of the things that people disliked about Ronald Reagan. His positive legacy is not amnesty.
I mean, how disrespectful of fatboy Christie in the first instance. Not just only Chris Christie from a technical prowess perspective of making anything he seems to endorse look like utter shite. But only Chris Christie, in the sense that I don’t think anybody else would have had the kind of top-tier grifter mentality even to attempt those philosophical gymnastics. It’s the only form of gymnastics I suspect Chris Christie will ever do.
That is my review of Chris Christie’s book that came out last week. It is a 1 out of 10. It would have been a zero out of 10, but it allowed me to be funny on a pseudo-podcast with you for four minutes.
So. It gets 1/10 for what it created in its wake rather than what it was for itself. Don’t buy it.


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Raheem Kassam returns with this special DD-Day (DeSantis Dropout Day!) episode of The National Pulse podcast where he explains what went wrong, spills the tea, and grinds some axes!
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Raheem Kassam reacts to CNN's Townhall with President Donald Trump in New Hampshire.
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The left has George Soros, Bill Gates, Sam Bankman-Fried, Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, Pierre Omidyar, and just about every corporation in the Western world and their beck and call. I have you. And here’s what I need you to do.


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