An assessment of last night’s debate.
I wasn’t in a place where I could watch last night’s debate live, so I just streamed it this morning. A confession: I’m really not sure at this point that I (or anybody) can really say who “won” a debate, because there are so many different ways for things to be heard and seen. More to the point, I’m skeptical that a debate format with as many as eight candidates on one stage can really ever be won by anyone (although, as we’ve seen in the past, debates can definitely be lost.) It’s especially difficult this year, because the frontrunner skipped the debate. That said, here’s my best assessment:
Donald Trump
We will have to wait and see whether voters care that Trump blew them off, and intends to keep doing so. Trump’s absence drained the debate of some much-expected confrontations, but it also meant that he could only score points if somebody carried his water for him by amplifying his attack lines against Ron DeSantis (the only opponent Trump fears) — and only Vivek Ramaswamy tried, and only obliquely. It was not surprising that the candidates moved gingerly around Trump, given his lingering popularity in the party, picking their spots to criticize him (DeSantis talking about bowing to Dr. Fauci, Mike Pence on January 6, Nikki Haley complaining about spending, and Haley and Ramaswamy talking about needing a new generation of leaders), the exceptions being Chris Christie and, in one instance, Asa Hutchinson. But it was disappointing and a missed opportunity for a layup that nobody took a heavy swing at Trump for skipping the debate.
Ron DeSantisNobody had more to accomplish than DeSantis, and frankly, aside from Christie, nobody else had more they could say to advance their point of view — so the night was inevitably going to end incompletely for DeSantis, requiring him to prioritize which messages to push. The good news, from one perspective, is that he didn’t face any really direct attacks from anyone on the stage: Christie didn’t tear into DeSantis as was expected (perhaps reflecting that Christie really is in this thing to stop Trump), and DeSantis refused to let Ramaswamy bait him with vague references to SuperPAC donors and memos, references that would go over the heads of voters who aren’t tuned in to the specific news-cycle items Ramaswamy was dog-whistling. The bad news on the same front is that DeSantis was given fewer opportunities to mix it up with the rest of the stage and show what the former military prosecutor could do on the thrust and parry he has managed so well with hostile media.
I still don’t love the middle ground DeSantis is plowing on Ukraine, but I still think it’s in line with where a lot of the primary voters are. It kept him out of the crossfire that erupted between Ramaswamy and the three vocal Ukraine hawks (Pence, Haley, and Christie). DeSantis also remains a no-nonsense, all-business guy, which means that his record and bulldog tenacity have to make up for his absence of warmth, flash, and personality. His message is that other people may sell you the red meat, but that DeSantis is the one guy who knows how to operate the grill.
To my eye, the two best moments of the night for DeSantis came early and late. He was the first to go after the (mostly friendly) moderators for asking one of those horrendous “show of hands” questions, about human contributions to climate change (Christie raised a similar objection later to a similar question about supporting Trump). By this morning, Joe Biden’s campaign was already re-cutting those hands-up visuals into a web ad deceptively claiming that those hands had gone up for Social Security cuts and a nationwide abortion ban:
The other best moment for DeSantis was his closing statement, which opened with a Reagan echo (“This is our time for choosing”), emphasized his military service and the mission-focus it gave him, talked about being a dad, and pledged “I will not let you down.” None of the elements were that original, but it hit his central message of reliability and accomplishment in contrast to Trump’s indiscipline, entitlement, and electoral failures.
Vivek RamaswamyIf the goal of a debater is simply to get the most screen time and the most combat, Ramaswamy certainly got that. And if you had any doubt where his campaign’s real agenda lies, he was praised by Trump (nominally, his opponent) as the “winner” for offering the most obsequious praise and the strongest pledge to pardon Trump while being the one candidate not to have a good word for Pence’s stance on January 6 against abusing his position to overturn the election.
All of that attention made him the most divisive figure of the debate, and reactions are likely to be polarized along those lines. This was a heavyweight stage: He shared the debate with five two-term governors, four of whom had also served either in Congress or as senior presidential appointees; a former vice president, governor, and member of House leadership; and a two-term senator. Ramaswamy, who has never won an election, is a newcomer to political debate and activism, has barely even voted in his life, and is still in his 30s, tried to make a virtue of this by broad-brush branding everybody else on the stage as a “career politician” who was “bought and paid for.” This drew intense responses.
Every exchange of the night reflected civility and mutual respect among the candidates — except that every exchange involving Ramaswamy was vitriolic and personal, going in both directions. Pence, Christie, and Haley were all openly contemptuous of him. Pence called him a “rookie” and “too young.” Christie said he was shallow like Barack Obama — perhaps Pete Buttigieg’s smarm may have been a more apt comparison. Haley said he had no foreign-policy experience, “and it shows.” Ramaswamy dished it out, too: he basically repeated Obama’s “the ’80s called” line in trying to lecture Pence about how the USSR doesn’t exist anymore, and accused Christie of running to be an MSNBC commentator and Haley of running to get board seats on defense contractors — a deeply ironic pair of attacks for a man running a vanity campaign aimed at raising his own profile for future gigs. He also dabbled in old-school anti-Catholicism by saying his opponents were treating Volodymyr Zelensky like their “pope.”
Ultimately, Ramaswamy’s entire affect was that of a college sophomore who just learned about politics for the first time and came home to lecture his dad and uncles at Thanksgiving and called them all sellouts to The Man. Republican voters used to viscerally hate people like that. But I suppose it will still win him some fans who just ate up his act.
Mike PenceIt is hard to see how this debate could possibly have gone any better for Pence, at least on his own terms. The responses to questions about his conduct on January 6 made plain the deep respect with which he is viewed by the other contenders besides Ramaswamy. The old conventional wisdom used to be that the first goal in an early primary debate was to “look presidential,” and nobody exuded gravitas and calm authority like Pence. Pence got to talk about every issue he wanted to address, exactly how he wanted to address it, and he showed some steel not only in swatting down Ramaswamy but even in uncharacteristically doing so much interrupting that he had to be reined in by the moderators. Yet, he also embraced the Trump policy record as his own.
The bad news was that Trump’s absence from the stage drained Pence’s defense of his January 6 role of drama, and drained much of the point of his entire campaign. And I still don’t see how he can overcome being too close to Trump for anti-Trump voters and simultaneously hated by Trump loyalists.
Nikki HaleyHaley also played to her strengths and had a near-flawless performance on her own terms, but — unfortunately for her — yet again, a highly predictable one. Oddly for a former two-term governor, she sounds as if she is running to be secretary of state. What she lacks in spontaneity or a lively personality, she seeks to compensate for with an authoritative voice on foreign and national-security affairs. She did a good job framing her practical approach to abortion in common-sense consensus terms (when Pence said that 70 percent of the country favors a late-term abortion ban, she shot back, “but 70 percent of the Senate does not”), and dismantling Ramaswamy’s shaky grip on foreign policy.
Chris ChristieThere is really no question that Christie is the best debater in the Republican field, and probably in the party. He’s a big personality in exactly the way DeSantis and Haley aren’t, he has more range than Tim Scott, and is less buttoned-down than Pence. He’s loud, emotional, argumentative, comfortable in his own skin, and at ease joshing with the moderators, delivering body blows, or even occasionally laughing at himself. He was funny griping to Martha McCallum, “I get the UFO question? C’mon, man.” He was, perhaps surprisingly, the only candidate on the stage to go hard after Hunter Biden, who he promised to send to jail for ten years on gun charges. He had one of the best lines of the night when he was booed for slamming Trump, and it was very much the response of a man accustomed to hecklers: “Here’s the great thing about this country: Booing is allowed, but it doesn’t change the truth.”
Still, to the extent there’s any raison d’etre to a second Christie campaign seven years after the first one failed and a decade after his moment passed, it was to go after Donald Trump — and Trump has effectively pleaded the Fifth against debating.
Tim ScottFor all the reasons why a big stage favors Christie, it hurt Scott. His charm and optimism got lost in the shuffle as he disappeared for long stretches in the wings of the stage. The moderators just didn’t give him a chance to chime in on an education question where he seemed primed to engage with DeSantis, and then they just forgot to ever go back to him on it. He had little chance to discuss foreign policy or to give any real sense of what he would be like as an executive — a problem for the only candidate onstage who has never run either a state or a business. Scott’s problem with the looking-presidential standard is that he looks and sounds like a senator — a failing that has been lethal to the campaigns of dozens of senators over the years. Scott is well-liked and reasonably well-financed, and he’s cautious enough that he rarely makes major mistakes, but he missed any chance to offer an actual rationale for making him the nominee.
Doug Burgum Burgum gets credit for hobbling onstage after a basketball injury, and for being the obligatory guy on a Republican stage who pulls out a pocket Constitution. He signaled his understanding of blue-collar life talking about how, as a young man, all his jobs were the type where you shower at the end of the day, not the start. But he still came off as what he is: a guy who has never been on a stage bigger than the North Dakota regional media market and just doesn’t have the fluency with national issues. A sign that he’s not ready: A more polished self-funding tycoon in politics would have clobbered Ramaswamy for lumping him in with other people he claimed were bought off by donors (but then, given how Burgum bought his own donors to make the stage, maybe self-funding is a sensitive topic.)
Asa HutchinsonHutchinson has a serious resume, but he felt as if he had been beamed in from a 2004 Senate race. He looked and sounded old, everybody else but Christie ignored him, and Christie’s superior willingness and ability to prosecute arguments against Trump made his presence completely pointless.
FieldIf you didn’t qualify for this debate, why are you even still bothering? Stop kidding yourselves.