NBC’s Chuck Todd Hits Back After Trump Rival Melts Down Over Early Victory Call: Losers ‘Complaining About the Referee’

NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd hit back after James Uthmeier — campaign manager for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) — attacked the network and the media for calling the race in former President Donald Trump’s favor just 30 minutes into the caucuses, likening them to a losing team complaining about the refs.

Burns covered the 2024 Iowa Caucuses for NBC News NOW Monday night, which saw the race called for Trump by multiple outlets at about 8:30 — before most Iowans had even voted. The DeSantis campaign spent the whole night melting down about the call, including during Uthmeier’s contentious yet cheerful interview with Dasha Burns.

Seconds later, anchor Tom Llamas and Todd swooped in to push back:

TOM LlAMAS: Dasha Burns for us at the DeSantis watch party. I want to tell our Ali Vitali to stand by just a little bit longer. We’re going to get to her at the Haley watch party. But I do want to address some of those accusations that came from the DeSantis campaign towards the media that called the race earlier in the night.

Chuck Todd is going to join us now. Chuck, I’d like to be fully transparent with our viewers throughout this entire process. I think we’ve done that the entire night. There are methods that we follow, and there are ways that we do this to call these races, we always use the term project. But when we project a race, especially at NBC news, we are fully confident that we are correct in that projection.

CHUCK TODD: Well, it’s not just that, but we were very mindful of this issue of when do people vote? We were mindful of, okay, if we think we’re able to project this, I mean, we’d seen the polling as well. What’s the earliest we’re comfortable? So we’re not getting in the way of voting.

And what the state party told us is that doors open at 7 and the voting begins at about —

TOM LlAMAS: Eight eastern.

CHUCK TODD: 7:20. So look, there were some folks who thought, okay, we’ll call it at 7:20. I was like, no, you should give people. If the voting begins, then that means you’re going to have a conversation. So we decided not to even look at calling the race until at least the bottom of the hour because according to the state party, voting should have already begun, because we were mindful of this.

It. I get it now. It’s interesting. Ron DeSantis has benefited from this in the past. We called Florida poll close, before voters had finished calling.

TOM LlAMAS: In his reelection.

CHUCK TODD: In his reelection because it was a blowout. And the point is, when it is a double digit victory like this, 20 to 30 points in any of this, whether we’re doing primaries, caucuses or general elections, you’re going to get an early call and projection because of the data we have.

We have physical people at these precincts. We’re not just basing it off of the entrance poll itself.

Look, it’s a fair critique that I have heard for years from candidates who don’t win. You rarely get this critique from the candidates that do win.

Look, I get it. It’s it’s like it’s like a fan complaining about the referees in a close game that they lose, right? You look for different things. But this wasn’t close. If this were a close race, we wouldn’t have called it.

TOM LlAMAS: Yeah. And I also want to say because I asked our decision to ask about this last week when we were prepping for this broadcast and they said, listen, the Iowa GOP has been a great partner and we’ve.

CHUCK TODD: We worked with them on this.

TOM LlAMAS: Tested their data. I mean, they were run throughs, I mean, I mean, this is an ongoing working communication.

CHUCK TODD: It wasn’t a good process when Rick Santorum won, then didn’t win, then won the Iowa, I mean, the party itself was sensitive to this. This is why we were they wanted to work. I mean, to their credit, they’ve been very transparent themselves about this. So because of how badly the 2012 result went when it wasn’t on us, it was actually on the party who failed to show us some data.

Watch above via NBC News NOW coverage of the  2024 Iowa Caucuses.

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