Who the debates helped and hurt

The view from the county chairs

In my most recent survey of county party chairs, I asked them their views of the recent Republican presidential debates held in August and September. The debates may not end up mattering all that much, but they do affect how the candidates are perceived, and it’s useful to get a read on this from party officials.

I asked the county chairs whether they watched the candidate debates this summer and fall. Seventy percent of the respondents said they watched at least one of the debate, and 52 percent said they watched both of them. (These seem like reasonable figures – party chairs are highly attentive to politics and have a real interest in how these debates are perceived.)

I then asked whether the debates made the chairs think more or less highly of each of the candidates. I also invited them to evaluate Trump, even though he did not participate in the debates. The raw results appear in the table below.

The figure below shows the net advantage the debates conveyed for each candidate – the percent who thought more highly of them minus the percent who thought less highly. I’ve arranged the candidates in declining order of net advantage. As we can see, Nikki Haley narrowly did the best, followed closely by Ron DeSantis and Tim Scott.

These results are fairly consistent with media coverage, which generally found Haley, DeSantis, and Scott to be among the top performers (at least in the second debate). Interestingly, though, the debates seem to hurt Mike Pence, Asa Hutchinson, and Chris Christie among these county chairs. This is somewhat surprising, given that Pence was generally given good marks for his debate performances. However, what this likely demonstrates is that the chairs were critical of those candidates who had the more negative things to say about Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, the debates appeared to convey little net benefit for Vivek Ramaswamy, Doug Burgum, or Trump himself. But that’s not the whole story….