What next after messy, chaotic GOP debate?
Byron York
WHAT NEXT AFTER MESSY, CHAOTIC GOP DEBATE? The Republican presidential race is a bunch of challengers chasing former President Donald Trump. The second debate of the campaign, held Wednesday night at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, was supposed to help clarify, and perhaps rerank, the status of those challengers. It didn’t. Instead, it left the field of Trump’s opponents in greater disarray than before.
That was a big change from the first GOP debate. That debate, held last month in Milwaukee, helped focus the public’s perceptions of the field. On the positive side, Nikki Haley emerged as a significant player in the race. Vivek Ramaswamy made a powerful first impression on many voters. Ron DeSantis kept his head above the water even though he did not get the boost his supporters hoped he would enjoy. On the negative side, Tim Scott made little contribution, Mike Pence failed to connect, and Chris Christie could not move beyond his campaign’s only reason for existence, which is bashing Trump. Two also-rans, Asa Hutchinson and Doug Burgum, did nothing to change their position as also-rans.
So Haley, Ramaswamy, and DeSantis came out of the first debate ahead of the game. But only Haley really turned her debate performance into a real benefit. Ramaswamy’s new prominence turned out to be a double-edged sword — a lot of people don’t like him, and seeing him more makes them not like him more. For his part, DeSantis was unable to stop his long slide in the polls and went from clear second place in the race to barely-ahead-of-the-pack status.
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The change after the first debate was so marked that there were reports of major Republican donors, all anti-Trump, turning from DeSantis to Haley as their preferred candidate to challenge the former president. “Some Republican donors now eye Haley as best hope against Trump,” Reuters reported this week. The news agency said DeSantis was “once seen as the most formidable challenger to former President Trump” but has struggled in recent months, giving Haley the opportunity to step in. “Until the first debate, I hadn’t seen her force of will and her presence,” one unnamed donor told Reuters. “I absolutely would consider donating to her.”
Now what? Here’s the short version of what happened at the California debate. DeSantis did well. After an early strategy of giving canned speeches rather than addressing questions, he loosened up and showed voters why he was the front-runner, outside of Trump, for so long. Haley made solid points but also attacked too much. Her combativeness might well have gone past the point of comfort for voters considering whether to support her. Ramaswamy appeared ridiculous at times, seeking to convince his opponents not to attack him after he spent the first debate saying they were all “bought and paid for.” It didn’t work. Scott tried to make an impression by going after some of his rivals, but he is simply not an attack dog. It’s not in him, which speaks well of him as a human being but made him unsuited for what he tried to do Wednesday night. Pence again failed to connect. And Christie made a fool of himself with a canned joke in which he called Trump “Donald Duck.” With one groan-inducing gesture, he undermined the seriousness of the very premise of his campaign.
One last note — Hutchinson did not make the debate stage. But Burgum did. And he performed better than some of the other, more highly placed candidates in the race. Does that change his status as an also-ran? Probably not. But when Burgum wasn’t jumping up and down trying to get attention, he made solid, substantive contributions to the debate.
So where does the race go now? After the first debate, the race essentially restructured itself from a race in which Trump was far ahead and DeSantis had a substantial lead over the rest of the pack into a race in which Trump was far ahead and DeSantis was part of a pack in the distance, fending off a surging Haley.
Now what? “Coronation, perhaps,” one GOP veteran who is not affiliated with any presidential campaign said. “Field needs to shrink.” There has been a consensus among Republicans trying to defeat Trump that the only way to do so is to pare the field of challengers down to one. That way, the forces trying to defeat Trump would be united. But look at the seven candidates onstage. Do you see six of them dropping out anytime soon to let one have a clear shot at Trump? Yes, some will run out of gas before the end of the year. But others will stay in through the early contests, Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina — and could ease Trump’s victory over a divided opposition.
What is next for the GOP field is probably some level of disarray. All those people who were thinking about supporting Haley — do they now want to wait a little longer before doing so? All those people who declared DeSantis dead — do they want to reconsider their position? And all those people who saw Scott as the ultimate winner — are they rethinking?
What’s next is likely a race that stumbles on, with a bunch of candidates encouraged enough to stay in, or not discouraged enough to get out, and Trump continuing his ride at the top. For his part, Trump essentially called for an end to the process. The Reagan Library debate was so “boring and inconsequential,” top Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita posted Wednesday night, that the Republican National Committee “should immediately put an end to any further primary debates so we can train our fire on Crooked Joe Biden and quit wasting time and money that could be going to evicting Biden from the White House.”
Trump would certainly like that, but it’s not going to happen. The problem is, little else is likely to happen in the near future, either. The clean resolution that some Republicans hoped for, one strong candidate challenging Trump, is probably not coming anytime soon.
For a deeper dive into many of the topics covered in the Daily Memo, please listen to my podcast, The Byron York Show — available on Radio America and the Ricochet Audio Network and everywhere else podcasts can be found.