The debate that changed the race — just a little
Byron York
THE DEBATE THAT CHANGED THE RACE — JUST A LITTLE. It’s now been a little more than a week since the first Republican presidential debate, held Aug. 23 in Milwaukee. It takes a while for an event like that to sink in with voters. Yes, Fox News got big ratings with the debate, but many more millions just don’t watch politics. They learn about the debate, to the degree that they do, from the internet, or from TV news, or from talking with friends.
So, now that it’s been a week and a day or so, can we say whether the debate changed anything in the polls? The answer is nothing dramatic, but it does seem to have reordered things a bit.
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Former President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) are still one-two, and still a lopsided one-two. Trump has dropped a couple of points, from 55.4% on the date of the debate to 53.6% Thursday in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls. Both are commanding leads over everybody else. DeSantis, who had hoped to use the debate to stop his long slide in the polls, did not accomplish that goal. On the day of the debate, he stood at 14.3%, and Thursday, he is at 13.5%. Both are far less than the 31.3% he had in January. For DeSantis, 2023 has been a long slump in the polls, and the debate didn’t change that.
The third-place candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, is still in third place. He attracted the most attention of any candidate, good or bad; some viewers were thrilled by his talk-talk-talk in-your-face style, and some were turned off. In the seven polls since the debate, it appears Ramaswamy might have ticked up a bit and then ticked back down. The final result is that he stood at 7.2% on debate day, and he stands at 7.3% now.
The candidate who was in fourth place on debate day, Mike Pence, has fallen to fifth place, even though his support has actually gone up a little, from 4.0% then to 4.6% now. The reason Pence has slipped is because Nikki Haley had one of the best nights of any candidate, going from 3.2% on the day of the debate to 4.9% now. Haley’s jump was the best of any candidate in the field.
Haley’s fellow South Carolinian, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), had the opposite experience. He was virtually tied with Haley on debate day, at 3.1%, and now, he has slipped to 2.4%. Finally, former Gov. Chris Christie, the most stridently anti-Trump voice on the debate stage, also slipped from 3.0% to 2.5%.
The bottom line is that Trump seems to have skipped the debate without consequence. DeSantis could not capitalize on the debate to stop his slide. Ramaswamy got a lot of people talking but didn’t really change his position very much. Pence perhaps did better than some critics said, but Haley did significantly better than that. Scott seemed absent for much of the debate and paid for it with a tick downward in the polls, and Christie’s anti-Trump act is not taking the GOP by storm.
There is no big event in the race before the next debate, to be run by Fox Business at the Reagan Library in California on Sept. 27. When that debate comes, it’s likely some of the questions will be the same as they are today. Can Trump stay up? Can DeSantis stop his slide? Can Ramaswamy catch on? Can Haley create more momentum? So far, this race is changing in increments, without any dramatic shifts.
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