A genuinely serious political debate is difficult with more than three candidates on stage, and impossible with more than five. Tonight, we got to four candidates, excluding the prohibitive poll front-runner (Donald Trump), and all indications are that this is the best we will be offered.
It should have been the DeSantis and Haley show, as Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley are the only plausible candidates left in the field. But the Republican National Committee’s rules proved elastic enough to let Christ Christie and the odious Vivek Ramaswamy on the stage. While they occasionally proved useful foils, with Christie calling his opponents to answer questions and Ramaswamy pulling the campaign into the gutter of personal insults (such as holding up a “Haley=Corrupt” sign), they were never the main show.
It’s hard to call a debate like this an obvious win or loss for anyone. DeSantis and Haley, sharpened by months on the trail and weeks on end of constant press appearances, both entered tonight as fresh and in command as they ever will be for a political debate. The Fox debate with Gavin Newsom has really helped DeSantis to go on offense and not just stick to his stump speech. But within those parameters, this was the best debate of the campaign for DeSantis. He was newly invigorated in finally engaging in back-and-forth with other candidates, and prodded by Christie, he walked up to the edge of saying that Trump is unfit by age for the office — while maintaining along the way that Joe Biden is even older and even worse.
It wasn’t a similar success for Haley. It’s not that she did badly; she had some fine moments. But the dynamics were worse for her. As the rising candidate in the field, she was under more attack than before and could not simply play from the wings. Moreover, a lot of her rise has been based on smacking down Ramaswamy, but he’s been so thoroughly discredited by now (and was wrecked by Christie and booed by the audience) that there is little more mileage to be gained at this stage.
If there’s a distracting dog that didn’t bark, it’s DeSantis rattling his saber against the college football playoffs’ picking Alabama over Florida State — a choice for which Trump has taunted him, and a stance that would be roundly unpopular with the crowd at a debate held on the University of Alabama’s own campus in Tuscaloosa. It doesn’t seem coincidental that DeSantis’s stance was followed immediately by Alabama senator Katie Boyd Britt, whose husband played for the Crimson Tide, endorsing Trump.
What really matters is Iowa. DeSantis has now bet his whole campaign on winning the Hawkeye State caucus, which would change the face of the race. While the candidates engaged in some of the usual overreach, DeSantis made his case that he’s a more truculent, ferocious, and successful combatant in cultural battles than Haley. If anything is able to change the dynamics, that would be it.