A few thoughts, piggybacking on Rich’s post on tonight’s debate:

Rich, I don’t think the relationship between debate performance and poll performance is as close as you make it out to be. Even a boffo debate performance, say, wouldn’t have buoyed Walker. Rubio and Fiorina were the winners, but they haven’t popped in the polls.

With regard to Carson, whose poll numbers have shot up most since the last debate, I’m not sure how much of that is attributable to his debate performance. I have the sense that Carson’s supporters aren’t the sort who get their news from traditional media outlets. Rather, I think there’s a subculture on the right that consists of well-informed people — they’ve read Carson’s books, they receive his newsletter — and it’s this subculture that has contributed to Carson becoming a sort of cultural phenomenon in the Ron Paul mold, who can lock up 15 to percent of the vote.

That also means Carson can bypass a lot of the normal campaign processes — he barely spoke in the last debate – and still maintain strong support through a sort of underground process that amounts to some serious votes.

I imagine Trump’s support right now exists largely independent of his debate performances, and that given the volatility Rich referred to, many of the other candidates are still using these events to compete for donors and money, which will give them some longevity in this process, and less concerned with what the polls show in the immediate aftermath.