Cruz and Rubio tangled on foreign policy–how interventionist we should be, what stance we should take toward democracy and dictators–on immigration, and on surveillance by the National Security Agency. I don’t think either one of them clearly bested the other. But I think Cruz narrowly won. My starting point includes the hunch that most Republican voters don’t have strong views on NSA surveillance: They have, instead, competing impulses, which lead them to worry both about national security and privacy. Nothing either senator said is going to strike most of them as obviously wrong or unreasonable, but they might mildly prefer Cruz for giving each impulse its due. I think something similar is true of foreign policy: Most voters aren’t going to make a judgment about what the right course in Libya was, let alone cast their ballot on that basis.
Immigration is different. A lot of voters do care about it, and Rubio is on the defensive. He may be able to carry the argument that Cruz has favored giving legal status to illegal immigrants in the past–something Cruz strongly disputes–and that he is open to it even today, and that the difference between their positions is therefore small. But Cruz can always retort that on the bottom-line question, were you for or against the amnesty bill backed by Dick Durbin and Chuck Schumer and Barack Obama, they were on opposite sides. I don’t think that position will doom Rubio, but it will hurt him with Republican voters.
What’s most striking about the Cruz-Rubio debate, though, is that it dominated tonight without involving the polling frontrunner, Donald Trump. Cruz talked about Trump only when forced to. The Cruz-Trump relationship has become something of an obsession in the press, but it doesn’t seem to me to differ all that much from the Rubio-Trump relationship. Both senators disagree with Trump politely when pressed on an issue, with Cruz offering more compliments to the businessman. The only candidates who took on Trump were Rand Paul, who does not appear to still think of himself as a real contender for the nomination, and Jeb Bush, who seems to think that he has to show strength against Trump. Both senators, on the other hand, appear to have decided that one of two things is true: Either Trump will fall on his own, or he can be dealt with later. That’s probably right, but it makes a lot of anti-Trump Republicans very nervous.