Zach Kessel here, filling in for Brittany Bernstein, who is out this week.
After dancing around “the elephant not in the room” during the first GOP primary debate in August, expect the rest of the GOP field to step up their attacks on former president Trump during tonight’s debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif.
With Trump holding firm to his overwhelming lead four months out from the Iowa caucuses, his opponents — even those not named Chris Christie — plan to lay into the absent front-runner, who will be delivering a speech to the United Auto Workers in Detroit instead of taking the debate stage.
Former vice president Mike Pence plans to tee off on his former running mate tonight if the chance arises, with a campaign adviser telling National Review there are ample opportunities for an attack on Trump to land.
“The former president is running a different style of campaign because he assumes that he’s in an advantageous position,” the Pence adviser said. “It shows a lack of respect for the voters, and I think there’s a lack of respect for the process. There’s definitely a courage issue about not wanting to show up and defend your stances on things which are largely out of step with where conservative voters and Republican voters are.”
Referencing Pence’s speech earlier this month on what he sees as a war between conservatism and populism within the GOP, the campaign adviser told me that contrast will feature heavily in the former vice president’s approach to the debate.
“It’s not only Trump that’s walking away from conservative values and principles,” the adviser said. “There are other people on that stage that are Trump appeasers or Trump-lite. They mimic him a lot in terms of the populist policies that have no foundation in conservative principles, and the opportunity to draw that contrast is one we look forward to taking.”
Florida governor Ron DeSantis — the one-time consensus non-Trump pick — has largely avoided criticizing Trump in explicit terms since jumping into the race in June. But after seeing his polling dip in early states, Iowa notwithstanding, he seems to be course-correcting. In a memo released two days before the debate, DeSantis accused Trump of intending “to capitulate to Democrats on key issues if he is re-elected” and criticized his limited public appearances, saying Trump “continues to replicate Joe Biden’s campaign-from-the-basement strategy despite his own advisors even acknowledging it will hurt him in Iowa.”
Regardless of how aggressive DeSantis gets in his attacks on Trump, it likely won’t be enough for Chris Christie. Like Pence, the former governor also plans to call out candidates he views as insufficiently critical of Trump.
“You’re going to see him draw a contrast with the field — not just with their policy positions, but also how they handle Trump,” a Christie adviser told NR. “He’s going to make sure the voters watching at home understand the governor is not afraid to take on Trump and tell the truth about him. Some of the candidates have been awfully quiet when it comes to the front-runner.”
The Christie official also mentioned his candidate’s spat with Vivek Ramaswamy — one of those “Trump-lite” characters the Pence adviser mentioned — in last month’s debate, saying Ramaswamy wasn’t necessarily a focus during Christie’s preparation, but that the former governor will not pass up an opportunity to call his opponents on what he sees as political gamesmanship.
“His strategy is pretty simple: When he gets on that stage, it’s to listen to questions, answer directly, and call out dishonesty when he sees it,” the Christie adviser said. “And there was a lot of dishonesty coming out of Ramaswamy that day.”
Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and South Carolina governor Nikki Haley — who brought the fight to Ramaswamy on foreign-policy issues in the August debate — garnered the biggest boost in the polls of all the combatants in last month’s bout. Haley, who now polls in third place in Iowa and second place in New Hampshire and South Carolina, was able to make the most of her speaking time.
After her performance in the August debate, she also saw a significant uptick in financial contributions. As NR’s Brittany Bernstein reported, the Haley campaign “says it received more online grassroots donations in the first 24 hours after the debate than in any other single day since [she] entered the race in February,” and during that same window, “traffic to Haley’s website had risen tenfold.” In addition to the money that has flown in, the former ambassador has had more guests join her campaign stops in the past month:
Haley’s first post-debate event in South Carolina seemed to exemplify the surging interest as well. The town hall at the CrossRidge Center in Indian Land drew more than a thousand attendees, with Haley having to stop by three separate overflow rooms to greet voters. The State called the event “the largest crowd the venue has seen.”
A CNN/SSRS poll released earlier this month showed Haley as the only Republican presidential candidate to beat President Joe Biden in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup by a total greater than the survey’s margin of error, leading the current president by six points. A recent national NBC News poll has her out in front of Biden by five percentage points. In that same poll, Biden leads DeSantis by one point and ties Trump. Given her climb in the polls, a Republican consultant told NR, Haley will likely bear the brunt of the attacks in Wednesday night’s debate.
“There’s going to be a target on her back, but she’s prepared to do what she’s always done: defend her record and promote her vision for America,” the GOP consultant said. “Similar to what she did against the Russians and the Chinese at the U.N., she will have no problem going toe-to-toe with her opponents on the debate stage.”
The operative told me that, because Haley is the candidate best positioned to beat Biden in the general election, her opponents on the right and the left have stepped up their attacks on her. Tuesday night, for example, DeSantis took a shot at Haley on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program, telling the host, “Nikki attacked me for standing up for the kids of Florida” and “sided with Disney when we had the big fight over parents’ rights and education.”
Despite the likelihood that she will be the object of other opponents’ attention, the consultant said, Haley is ready to hold her ground: “Hopefully it doesn’t come to a crazy, chaotic cage match, but we know that if it does, Nikki is going to shine. She’s going to make sure that she defends her record and make sure that her message is out there.”
Last month’s debate was indeed a cage match of the kind the consultant hopes we won’t see Wednesday night, and its foremost casualty appears to have been Senator Tim Scott (R., S.C.), who had spent much of the summer casting himself as the most likely candidate to overtake DeSantis as the chief non-Trump candidate in the field — a narrative bolstered by reports that top Republican donors, having grown skeptical of DeSantis’s chances given certain policies he’d instituted in Florida, had turned their attention to the South Carolina senator. As NR’s Jim Geraghty wrote the day after the August debate, though, Scott’s “charm and optimism got lost in the shuffle as he disappeared for long stretches in the wings of the stage.”
In a memo sent to the Scott campaign’s executive finance committee on September 20, obtained by NR, campaign manager Jennifer DeCasper sought to quell donors’ fears about her candidate’s debate performance, encouraging them to “remember that these nights are merely a single moment in time.” The line does not exactly portend high hopes for Wednesday night, but perhaps the campaign feels the South Carolina senator would do well to set the bar low and jump clear over it.
Or, as a Scott campaign official told NR, the senator prefers to focus on the issues rather than the flashy, combative style that plays well on television, seeing that as the pathway to success in this primary cycle.
“Tim looks forward to being back on the debate stage to draw the serious policy distinctions between the candidates,” the official said. “Whether it be the economy, parental rights, or his vision for the economy, Tim is prepared to have a conversation with voters, be the adult in the room, and demonstrate why he is the strongest candidate to beat Joe Biden.”
The most salient of those policy distinctions may be on the issue of abortion. Scott told Fox News’ Sean Hannity in an interview last week that “Ron, Nikki, the former president, they should support me with a 15-week limit” on abortion at the federal level. DeSantis has demurred when asked whether he would support a national ban on abortion, and Haley spent a considerable amount of time in the last debate contesting the political feasibility of such a move in a back-and-forth with Pence. Trump, for his part, has distanced himself from the pro-life movement in recent weeks, calling DeSantis’s signing of a six-week ban a “terrible thing and a terrible mistake” and charging Republicans with speaking “very inarticulately” about the issue, even though, as Brittany pointed out, he has “declined to give specifics about his own views on the issue.”
The Scott campaign official also stressed the importance of a long-term campaign strategy, telling me that “any candidate who really wants to capitalize on [debate success] needs to be very disciplined and built for the long haul. We have the resources and infrastructure to do that.”
While it is true that the Scott campaign reported a whopping $21 million in cash on hand in August, it is likely no coincidence that his popularity has waned in the month after the first debate. Since then, Scott’s polling numbers, which had surged from late July, took a hit: He went from a high of 10.5 percent in Iowa to 7 percent, 7.5 percent in New Hampshire to 4.7 percent, and 14 percent in his home state to 11 percent, according to the RealClearPolitics average. And if he does want to capitalize on debate success as the campaign official suggested, he’ll need to have that success in the first place.
Around NR
• Jeff Blehar reminds readers that Donald Trump could feasibly become president once again, and urges observers to reckon with what that might mean:
So remember: This man, running a competitive race for the presidency, has also been charged with 91 felonies, most of them related to his departure from it, and could conceivably be convicted on many of them. It’s the Constitutional Crisis we’ve been promised by media alertists since the Watergate era but never actually got. Let’s assume for argument’s sake he is convicted, the reason being that (1) 91 acquittals would be an amazing run of luck, and (2) acquittal solves the problem one way or another for our purposes here on a “crisis of the republic” level. Maybe his conviction carries a prison sentence. Maybe that verdict arrives before the November 2024 elections. And maybe he wins anyway.
• While Jeff discusses the possibility of another Trump administration, Jim Geraghty says that, even though a new Washington Post poll showing Trump ahead of Biden by ten percentage points among registered voters is likely an outlier, it should still be cause for concern among Democrats:
Yes, we don’t have a national popular vote, we have an electoral college. But if a Republican has a lead in national polling, that candidate is in good shape to reach 270 electoral votes. As everyone remembers, George W. Bush and Trump won more than 270 electoral votes while losing the national popular vote; it is difficult for a Democrat to win 270 electoral votes while losing the national popular vote. The Democratic votes in this country are concentrated and clustered in the coasts and upper Midwest; the Democratic candidate is almost certainly going to win California and New York. Democrats wish they could spread out their voters into more states, to make the path to 270 clearer and easier.
• Rich Lowry contends that the split among non-Trump candidates has prevented a competitive challenge to the former president from taking shape, but it’s unclear whether a winnowing of the field would help:
The problem is that to get to [competitive] numbers, you’d need one candidate to surge and others to totally collapse. Perhaps this will happen, but there’s no sign of it yet. And a potential obstacle to it happening is that it’s not clear how transferable support is among the non-Trump candidates. If DeSantis went away, would all his support go to Haley or some of it go to Trump or Vivek? And would all of Haley’s go to Vivek or DeSantis?
• Noah Rothman, writing about Haley’s economic address in New Hampshire last week, argues that “her attacks on Joe Biden’s economic record are perfectly consistent with denunciations of the faddish statist economics to which so many Republicans find themselves attracted.”
Haley’s message is both timely and timeless. Republicans with an ear too close to the internet have convinced themselves that liberty is passé. They insist that small government is out of style. They believe that Republicans can do Democratic economics better than Democrats can, as though true statism has never been tried. It’s a conceit that deserves to be challenged.
• Henry Olsen, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, says DeSantis has not drawn enough of a distinction with Trump on policy matters and believes the issue of abortion provides the Florida governor an opportunity to do so:
Abortion should be front and center because church-going evangelicals, Catholics, and Mormons are the party’s base. They represent the strongest and most loyal voters in today’s Republican Party, and many have made opposition to abortion a litmus test for decades. They need to be made to choose what they care about more: saving unborn children or electing Donald Trump.
• Jim Geraghty predicts that no candidates on the stage tonight will address one of the biggest issues facing the U.S. — our national debt:
For a long, long time, fiscal conservatives — you know, those allegedly merciless tightwads who are always portrayed as pushing granny off a cliff — have warned the rest of the country that the finances for these programs are on an unsustainable path, and the rest of the country has hated them for it.
Every year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services review the numbers, and the most recent conclusion is, “The Medicare hospital insurance trust fund is scheduled to become insolvent in 2031. This means that in 2031 Medicare will be unable to pay for all promised benefits, and Medicare patients will face an initial 11 percent cut in their hospital benefits.”
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