A spirited and kind of substantive debate in Trump's absence

Some candidates beat expectations, as expected

I want to go through how the candidates did individually last night, and a lot of this comes down to expectations, which of course is a very fuzzy and frustrating concept. But I first want to talk about the overall debate, which was honestly substantially better than I thought it would be.

With Trump not in the room, the moderators were able to get through the first hour by steering discussion on the economy, climate change, abortion, crime, and more. And while not all the answers were terribly substantive, the debate did what it was supposed to do, which was tease out the differences among the candidates for the sake of the viewing audience. Vivek Ramaswamy calling climate change a hoax while Nikki Haley says it’s real but we need to pressure China to do more is a useful data point for voters who care about that issue. Pence calling for “leadership” on restricting abortion while other candidates called for consensus was also useful. The disagreements about Ukraine were vast and notable. Obviously, you had eight ambitious people on the stage and the moderators didn’t always do a great job keeping them on task, but it worked somewhat better than expected (and better than it would have work had Trump been in the room).

You could also get a good sense of just where the party is when the subject of Trump came up. The median position seemed to be that Trump had done wrong on January 6th, Pence had done right, that it would be better for the country if Trump weren’t the nominee, but that, for at least six of them, this wasn’t a dealbreaker and they’d still support Trump over Joe Biden. So there you go.

Now, as for the candidates…

Honestly the one who defied expectations the most for me was Mike Pence. I haven’t seen him on a large debate stage before and he was actually very effective at drawing attention, claiming time, getting in a few effective lines here and there, and generally coming off as principled and experienced. I’m not sure it will do him much good in the race, but he was much less stiff and more spirited, especially when it came to pushing back on other candidates, than I thought he could be.

I’d give a solid second place to Nikki Haley. She was probably the strongest candidate on foreign policy, making a number of substantive points about Russia and Ukraine and seeming pretty unassailable on that topic. She was less effective at the cultural digs about trans athletes but also kind of played that down.

Chris Christie was a very effective spokesperson for a set of views that were clearly pretty unpopular in the room last night. And notably, he didn’t just come out swinging against Trump. He came out swinging against the candidates on stage who were defending Trump.

Probably my favorite moments from the debate were when those three candidates above — Pence, Haley, and Christie — came after Vivek Ramaswamy. This was an interesting dynamic and I’m curious what kind of effect it’ll have on the race. Ramaswamy’s whole approach seemed to be to say particularly bombastic and provocative things to try to get under the skin of other candidates, and have those candidates call him out so he gets more face time. If that was his goal, it was a wild success. Ramaswamy pretty much baited everyone with his introductory statement describing himself as a “skinny guy with a funny last name,” exactly how Barack Obama introduced himself in 2008. Christie called him a lightweight. Pence said he didn’t know what he was talking about. Haley insinuated he was an irritating prick. They were all going after him for saying uninformed things and lacking the gravitas to be president.

As

Julia Azari

and I discussed in last night’s chat, these are the kind of things for which some Republicans criticized Donald Trump in 2016, but none will say about him now. Basically, it’s not necessarily bad for Ramaswamy to be seen as the upstart whom the more establishment politicians dismiss as unserious. He might think that’s the way to run like Trump did. However, Ramaswamy was pretty much unheard of 6 months ago, even 6 weeks ago. Trump had four decades of being a household name behind him.

So I’m not really sure where this gets Ramaswamy. He was very effective in commanding camera time, and maybe that’s enough for now. But he also came off far more caustic in this venue that he does in his speeches. A particularly entertaining aspect of the 2020 Democratic contest was how much visible hatred Amy Klobuchar had for Pete Buttigieg, the upstart kid who came out of nowhere to poach her sensible Midwestern vibe. Ramaswamy was Buttigieg last night and the whole rest of the field was Klobuchar.

As for the other candidates… Ron DeSantis was fine. He exceeded the absurdly low standards the political media had set for him, and came off strong on a few responses, but didn’t have anything terribly memorable, except maybe blaming George Soros for urban crime. Tim Scott, similarly, did okay, not really hurting himself but not really grabbing anyone either. Scott’s speeches often contain lots of sweet stories about his mom and growing up and faith and other things that just don’t really work well in quick one-minute answers.

Asa Hutchinson was underwhelming. It was interesting to hear him sound like a pretty traditional Reagan-Bush era Republican, talking about reduced regulation, lower taxes, a scaled back federal role, etc. But for the most part, his schtick is saying the things that Chris Christie is saying about Trump only in a less interesting way. Not sure who that’s for.

Doug Burgum was… fine I guess? Not terribly memorable, but as someone with a recent leg injury I have a great deal of sympathy for him.

Now, what was the point of this since all but one of these candidates is polling in single digits? I still think it matters, since the guy who was not in the room, the guy polling over 50 percent, is 77, has more than 90 pending indictments against, has a potentially large choir of co-conspirators singing about him, and just might be constitutionally ineligible to serve. Maybe none of this stuff ends up mattering, but it seems important enough to have a Plan B in such an environment.