Winners at the G.O.P. Debate Did Not Include Bush and Trump
AUG. 7, 2015
Winning a primary debate isn’t about having the best one-liners or drawing the biggest applause.
For top candidates, it’s an audition for party elites, moneyed supporters and, secondarily, voters. The goal isn’t to wow the crowd or surge in the polls, but to reassure — to confirm their ability to win and handle the presidency. For less serious or low-profile candidates, it’s an opportunity to break out — to cause party elites to reconsider or get voters to coalesce behind them.
And whether they do so depends a lot more on how the news media covers the debates than the performances themselves.
From this point of view, the “winners” and “losers” of the debates can end up looking a lot different than what you see on Twitter. A candidate who gets by without much notice could be a winner; a candidate who gets the most attention might, in doing so, have denied himself the elite support it ultimately takes to win.
With that in mind, I suspect most pundits will conclude that Jeb Bush did not do well, no matter how one looks at it. Did he make any great errors? No. He even did well at times, and probably grew stronger as the debate went on. But he did not always nail tough but predictable questions, like on the war in Iraq.
Mr. Bush is less conservative than many other candidates. If he doesn’t show that he can be an especially strong candidate in the general election, and if there are equal or better and more conservative alternatives, it’s hard to imagine today’s conservative Republican Party ultimately coalescing behind him.
There were many equal or better and more conservative alternatives. All of his top three rivals — Scott Walker, Marco Rubio and John Kasich — had good performances.
Mr. Rubio, the senator from Florida, has a good a case to be considered the debate’s top performer. A weaker Mr. Bush probably benefits Mr. Rubio as much as anyone, and if Mr. Bush raised questions about whether he would be a great general election candidate, then Mr. Rubio added yet more reason to believe he could be a good one. Mr. Rubio still has the challenge of figuring out how to break through a strong field in a factional party.
With so little time having passed after the debate, it’s impossible to know whether the media will deem him the sort of overwhelming winner who will get the attention necessary to make a big jump in the polls. But even if this is not the moment he breaks through, he surely advanced his case among the many electability-minded and conservative party elites with reservations about the abilities of both Mr. Bush and Mr. Walker.
Mr. Walker won by not losing. In a lot of ways, the moderators’ tough, specific questions played to Mr. Walker’s weakness. He got no opportunities to make his pitch about fighting unions in Wisconsin. But he handled several tough questions — on abortion; on relations with Arab nations; what he would do after terminating the Iran deal; race; and his employment record — without appearing flustered or making a mistake. His answers were concise and sharp.
His ability to handle tough questions — not his ability to earn the support of conservatives — was the big question facing Mr. Walker entering the debate, and he at least passed the test. He probably didn’t do so well as to completely dispel these concerns, but he didn’t set back his case and may have advanced it.
Mr. Walker’s uneventful performance, however, still poses risks. For him, the danger is that it will provide an opening for a more dynamic conservative to eat away at his support on the right.
Mr. Kasich also advanced his cause. He entered as a largely unknown candidate outside of Ohio, where he is governor. But he was backed by a supportive audience, he deftly handled tough questions, and he had a solid answer on a question about attending same-sex weddings. His answer might not resonate among many Republicans, but it will resonate in New Hampshire — the state where he needs to deny Mr. Bush a path to victory and vault to the top of the pack.
It was Donald Trump, though, who might have had the weakest performance. No, it may not be the end of his surge. But he consistently faced pointed questions, didn’t always have satisfactory answers, endured a fairly hostile crowd and probably won’t receive as much media attention coming out of the debate as he did in the weeks before it. If you take the view that he’s heavily dependent on media coverage, that’s an issue. Whatever coverage he does get may be fairly negative — probably focusing on his unwillingness to guarantee support for the Republican nominee.
The rest of the field — Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Ben Carson, Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee — probably didn’t bolster their cases. Few made mistakes. All had their moments, especially Mr. Carson on race and Mr. Cruz on ISIS. Many of those moments might have been good enough to earn credit among their natural supporters. But I doubt any of them did so well as to earn the media attention or grass-roots energy necessary to move from the middle to the top of the pack.
But this could change if the media — either conservative or mainstream — coalesces around a narrative that makes any of these candidates a victor.