Last week on the show, we heard from a group of Iowa Republicans who told my colleague John King that they were pretty much ready to move on from former President Donald Trump.

I can't put my rubber stamp on Trump having more influence over this country.

I love what he did for small businesses. I love what he did for agriculture. I wish he could have done it a little bit quieter.

Well, at the Iowa caucuses, Trump dashed those plans pretty much immediately.

CNN projects that Donald Trump will win the Iowa caucuses. CNN can make this projection based on his overwhelming lead in our entrance poll of Iowa caucus goers and some initial votes.

'That are coming. CNN and other networks made that call before some precincts had even started voting. Trump won 98 of Iowa's 99 counties. Like this was a trouncing. So, like the great journalist John is, he followed up with these voters and the text messages they sent back were revealing, for example, on a possible rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden. Betsy Sarcone wrote UGH. Shanen Ebersol - that's a horrible question. Priscilla Forsyth - looks like I'll have to get my Trumpy bear back out again. Not exactly full throated support. In fact, Shannon Ebersole says she would vote for Trump and expect four more years of Biden. She just doesn't think Trump can win. This is the kind of angst you hear all over the country about a possible Trump Biden rematch. But as the GOP primary arrives in New Hampshire this week, some experts say this may be the last real chance voters have to change that outcome. My guest this week is CNN Chief National Affairs Analyst Kasie Hunt. She also hosts State of the Race on CNN International and CNN Max. We're going to talk about whether independents in New Hampshire can reshape the Republican race, and why President Joe Biden isn't even on the ballot in the Granite State. From CNN this is one thing. I'm David Rind.

How was Iowa you thawed out yet?

Yeah, it was good. Uh, it was freezing. I mean, I mean, freezing doesn't even capture it. It was, like, otherworldly, but it was good.

So, Kasie, we're talking on Thursday, and we've had a few days to dig into some of the data around former President Donald Trump's huge win in Iowa. But just big picture. How would you describe this race now as it heads into New Hampshire?

You know, David, this race is basically, I think, what we had expected all the way along, which is that Donald Trump is just an incredibly dominant frontrunner position.

They put on Nikki Haley. She came in third, a distant third, like I mean a distant third. And they put on Ron Desanctimonious, who came in a boring second.

And taking him on in the context of the Republican Party, especially a Republican Party that's lost Americans, your job is even harder than it ever was.

So even though we're leading by a lot, you have to go out and vote. You just have to do it. If it's cold, if it's hot, I don't care what the hell it is, you have to go out and vote, okay?

And just it also helps explain why we're heading where we're heading in New Hampshire, where people who are undeclared can vote in the Republican primary. That's different from a lot of the rest of the contests going forward. And that's what you're seeing Nikki Haley really try to do here.

So the idea is like these people who are not registered Republicans, they may even be, you know, vote for Democrats normally, but they can kind of come to the polls and say, hey, Nikki Haley, it's looking good. That's the strategy here.

It's a big part of the strategy. And, you know, in New Hampshire in particular, undeclared voters are the biggest group of voters, more than than people who are actually registered with a party. It's sort of part of their very proud tradition as the first in the nation primary. And I talked to Dave Carney, he's a strategist up in New Hampshire who's been working on races there for years and years and has always been one of my go to sources to kind of figure out what's really going on on the ground there.

Well, Trump has a real organization, a grassroots organization there doing block walking with volunteers. They're doing local phone banks around the state.

And there is an acknowledgment there that the people who support Trump in New Hampshire, there's the same sense of fervent support there among those people, among his people, as elsewhere.

There's a neighbor of mine that has a gigantic banner nailed to the second floor of his house. People have painted four by eight on plywood, you know, on their driveway. So I just think the energy is with Trump.

The way Carney put it was to say Trump's got people's yards and the other guys have got the right of way, right? Their campaigns have to stick signs in places that, you know, don't belong to somebody else. But there are plenty of people who are willing to put Donald Trump's name up in their yards. Now, the question is, and this is always it's one of the interesting things. There isn't a race on the Democratic side, right? President Biden is an incumbent president.

I want to get to that.

But what that means is that there's less pressure for voters who are undeclared, who maybe usually vote for Democrats to play in that primary. And so there's sort of an expectation that they'll be more willing to, because New Hampshire voters are honestly so engaged and interested in participating in the process, they know that they'll make a bigger difference if they vote in the Republican primary. And honestly, whether or not Nikki Haley is able to come close or even win New Hampshire is going to depend entirely on those undeclared voters.

Is Ron DeSantis really conceding the state? Like, what is his plan?

Well, you know, you'll remember President Biden actually pulled stakes up out of New Hampshire back in 2020 on his path to the nomination because he decided it wasn't the place for him to be. So this isn't the first time that something like this has happened.

In the state. Call for you. Hear of delegates I'm picking. I want to pick up delegates. Everyone that goes out and votes for me, he's gonna help me get delegates. And that's what we want to do.

And in the context of these primaries being an expectations game, sometimes it can be helpful because it makes it easy on the back end when you lose and they know that they're going to lose. To be able to say, well, we weren't really trying anyway. Of course we lost. You always want to think about these races in terms of how the candidates relate directly to each other.

I think her record is not one that conservatives trust. She's cave. She's focusing all of the donors issues, kind of the corporatism that doesn't work. So the question is just want if you want an alternative to Trump, you know, I'm the only one that's going to be able to get votes, uh, from core Republicans and conservatives. And then, folks.

It was right under the surface in the latest CNN debate where Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis got to stand on the stage together. There is no love lost between those two.

He's closer to zero than he is to me. I mean, he's invisible in New Hampshire. He's just invisible in South Carolina. We're focused on Trump. That's the key. We were focused on DeSantis in Iowa. We're no longer focused on him. It's Trump in New Hampshire and Trump in South Carolina.

And South Carolina. Is Nikki Haley's home state. All right. So by going down there and kind of camping out, I think the DeSantis people are like, wow, we got a better shot at inching that number up. At the very least, we'll poke Haley a little bit. And I think they enjoy that a little bit.

So then what would a Nikki Haley performance on Tuesday have to look like to demonstrably change the contours? Of this race.

There's a real sense that Nikki Haley has to outright win New Hampshire.

I mean, Trump says things Americans aren't stupid to just believe what he says. The reality is, who lost the house for us? Who lost the Senate? Who lost the white House, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump. Nikki Haley will win every single one of those back for us. I've proven that.

So. And if she doesn't, then it becomes entirely clear that Donald Trump is going to basically go most likely unbeaten through the rest of the string of primaries, because.

That's ballgame.

If she can't beat him in New Hampshire, where is she going to beat him? I don't see any place on the map.

So can you explain this Democratic primary and how it's going to work here? Because there's been like a lot of changes and there's another guy running, right. Like what's going on?

Yeah. So it's a little bit of a conundrum for Democrats. This is has to do with the Democratic Party itself. Each party sets their primary process up. They decide the order in which states are allowed to go. They determine how the delegates are counted to select their nominees. And after the 2020 election, Joe Biden didn't do very well in New Hampshire. It's not a friendly state for him. South Carolina handed him the nomination, and many Democrats believe that the demographic makeup, in particular of South Carolina, is something that reflects the party, reflects the country in a way that the very, very white demographics of Iowa and New Hampshire just do not. And so they first of all, they got rid of the Iowa caucuses as the first up. And Iowa didn't really protest. They had a really disastrous, honestly counting experience back in 2020.

I still have PTSD from that.

I know I remember sitting there for hours thinking, what are we going to learn anything? And slowly realizing that the probably nothing by the end of the night was going to come. So I don't think there was a lot of objection to moving Iowa, but New Hampshire has been a different story. New Hampshire is very, very proud of their role in the primary process.

Why did you start your campaign in New Hampshire?

It's where presidential campaigns have started for 103 years. And there's a beautiful history here. But I found in New Hampshire, which is so remarkable, is the civic engagement that I really don't see the same all around the country, people who take this so seriously.

They've been I was up there earlier this year talking to, um, Dean Phillips, the candidate at the congressman who's running against Biden in the Democratic primary, and also to Democrats who worked in the state for years and years. And they are very proud of the ways that they believe that even though their demographics are what they are, they feel they contributed to diversity in the party, including around Hillary Clinton, for example. But for New Hampshire, they're holding on to this process, and they have put themselves first anyway, even though it's breaking party rules. And it means that they won't get any delegates at the convention. But it also means that the president has decided or did decide that he's going to follow the DNC rules. So he is not on the ballot in New Hampshire.

Wow. So when voters go up, Joe Biden will not be a possible name to check.

You will not be able to check a box next to the name Joe Biden. If you are a Democrat voting in New Hampshire, it's not going to exist. The only boxes you'll see are going to be for Dean Phillips, Marianne Williamson, and there are more than likely others on the ballot whose names we don't know. They're always are. Yeah.

Yeah, Vermin Supreme.

Exactly. The candidate with a boot on his head. If you if you've ever seen him in in pictures. Um, so the Democrats have had to mount a write in campaign to try to make sure that, uh, something unexpected doesn't happen to the president in New Hampshire. Just because while it won't matter for the nominating contest, it certainly would be a narrative blow, especially as the president is trying to start taking on a Donald Trump. A sign of weakness against Trump, not something that's that's very welcome to Democrats. So they are nervous about it, and they're nervous about Nikki Haley because they think that, uh, her candidacy may draw those undeclared voters who otherwise might be willing to go into the Democratic primary and write down Joe Biden's name, will want to play, uh, in a competitive Republican primary instead. And it might jeopardize what's going on with them.

But I guess, like, why would they be nervous? Because if his name is literally not on the ballot and he obviously has all the party infrastructure behind him to end up being the nominee, you know, come the summer. So what if Dean Phillips gets, you know, 10%, 15%, whatever it ends up being?

Well, I think they're worried that it might be more than that, um, more than 10 or 15%. And, you know, I think the thing that you have to remember about politics is that there are unintended consequences for almost everything. There are things that you can't see, uh, around corners. You just never know if you let something go, it's always a risk.

I'm fairly confident, but by the time this campaign is over, American citizens will be fully informed of the incredible work that he's done and the benefit that they have to them. And as the president announced just a minute ago, just as a one metric for the people of America, since he's been president, over 14 million jobs have been created.

And and I think the Biden team really knows that, especially because of the narrative that Republicans or Trump supporters are going to use against the president, which is fundamentally that he is weak. And if something unexpected were to happen in New Hampshire, that plays into that narrative, that is simply a problem for the president.

It could be kind of like a vibe check as to like, what is the appetite for a Biden alternative at this point, as it's measured by real voters?

Yeah. I mean, I think the reality is that neither Williamson nor Phillips fall into the category of someone that would be elevated as a strong third party candidate. Sure. But one of the things that we've been watching so very carefully are these third party groups. There's no labels who is considering running a slate that, you know, Joe Manchin has been chatted about. Um, the bigger question to Robert F Kennedy Jr, can he get on? Ballots in places where it would really impact the race. And, you know, it may be as simple as the fact that his last name is Kennedy. He obviously is an anti vaccine conspiracy theorist, but he has generated a following that we can see in the polling. And in places like Arizona, for example, where he does have a shot to get on the ballot, even a couple of points either way uh, could impact or, you know, even less than that, perhaps depending we're expecting the election between Trump and Biden, the Democrat and the Republican. Let's not totally assume Trump yet, but between the Republican and the Democrat to be just razor thin. So when the appetite is this big, bigger than we've seen, uh, since Ross Perot in 1992, uh, you just never know.

Lots to pay attention to. Kasie, thanks so much.

Thank you.

One thing is a production of CNN audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producer is Faiz Jamil. Our supervising producer is Greg Peppers. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula is our technical director. And Steve Licktieg is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Liz Brown Kaiser and Katie Hinman. Remember, you can check out the results from New Hampshire on CNN.com or at the CNN Five Things podcast wherever you listen. And we will be back next week. I'll talk to you later.