Like it or not, the story coming out of tomorrow will be Vivek Ramaswamy.
In the most well-advertised anticlimax since the 2008 release of the Guns ‘N Roses album Chinese Democracy, tonight the 2024 candidates for the Republican presidential nomination minus hugely favored front-runner Donald Trump appeared onstage in Milwaukee for the first primary debate. The results were more entertaining than one might have expected. Aside from the mistake of confining all economic discussion during a period of massive inflation and personal financial uncertainty to an opening question based on a novelty protest song, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum ran a substantively solid debate. But it all felt rather peripheral when all was said and done. Donald Trump counter-programmed with a Tucker Carlson interview that I haven’t watched yet.
Anyway, here is my general ranking of the candidate performances in this opening skirmish in what currently looks like the race to be Runner Up, from least impactful to most impactful. Note that this is different from “worst” or “best,” because those judgments are inevitably suffused with my own political bias.
(8) Asa Hutchison: I am reminded of Admiral Stockdale (a genuine hero and stoic philosopher, mind you), who opened the 1992 vice-presidential debate as Ross Perot’s ticket-mate by asking, “Who am I? Why am I here?” The former Arkansas governor never said it, but it was written on his face. Whatever lane he sits in is already filled with more character (by Pence) or charisma (by Christie), and he had nothing to add to the debate. I’m told by many he was a fine governor, once.
(7) Doug Burgum: The North Dakota governor was surprisingly intriguing, though he’s been mocked for months. He has a federalist, constitutional, and liberty-centered approach that actually sounded refreshingly sober and thoughtful. He’ll go nowhere, naturally.
(6) Tim Scott: For a candidate who had received some good press recently (and who is universally well-liked), Tim Scott delivered a disappointing performance, leavened only by the fact that the dynamics of the 2024 race mean that expectations were never high for him in the first place. He occasionally seemed to freeze up under the glare of his first national debate stage. And his folksy and friendly demeanor, while appealing on a personal level, felt almost beamed in from the mid-Aughts Republican political style.
(5) Nikki Haley: Haley’s campaign suffers from the same raison d’être issues as Scott’s and those already mentioned on this list; what I wrote about her candidacy when she announced holds up well. But she was surprisingly aggressive on the stage tonight, in ways that appeal to me: on abortion (raining on Mike Pence’s parade with simple Senate math on a federal abortion ban) and on foreign policy with respect to Ukraine. But I doubt she’ll have much purchase with the Trumpist base. She was feisty and handled herself forcefully without veering into shrillness, a neat trick. But it probably won’t move her numbers, owing to the inherent structural flaws in her candidacy.
(4) Chris Christie: The former New Jersey governor (a longtime nemesis as a disappointed fan in decades past) places this high only because of his potential relevance to the race – as a gadfly, mind you, not a credible threat to win the nomination – and not because of his performance tonight, which was surprisingly tired and limp when it counted the most. Early on, he took great sport in attacking Vivek Ramaswamy (the real dagger was when he compared him, with certain justice, to the self-invented falsity of Barack Obama). But when the time came for him to take his great hacks on the question of January 6, he first got flustered by the crowd’s booing and then seemingly forgot his script, blowing the moment entirely. A colleague theorized that he had premised his campaign entirely around the idea of getting a one-on-one shot against Trump in a debate . . . and Trump pulled the rug out from under him by ducking the debate altogether.
(3) Ron DeSantis: Again, this nominally high placement is quite deceptive. This may be the subject of a piece for later this week, but DeSantis and his team should consider tonight’s debate a bitter disappointment simply because he was largely invisible throughout most of it. The heat was elsewhere — all guns were trained on Vivek Ramaswamy — and DeSantis, who entered the debate as the leader among the non-Trump candidates, was an afterthought. When he got a chance to speak, his lines were canned pre-writes and audibly so, though he delivered his talking points with confidence for the most part. Surely he was grateful to take almost no fire from the other candidates at all; but in a way, that’s all the evidence you need to know that he was a secondary participant tonight. He needed a breakout moment and didn’t get it. Expect his numbers to continue to fade.
(2) Mike Pence: Mike Pence will not be the Republican nominee for president this year or any other year. And I suspect that Mike Pence is aware of that in his heart, because he conducts himself like it. I have had my issues with Pence since even before he was chosen as Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick, but he is clearly running a campaign of conscience, and the way he spoke tonight about January 6 and his behavior versus Trump’s was the one moment of genuine sober dignity in the debate. When Pence first entered the race, I wrote that he ought to seriously consider why he was in this race. Tonight, he gave us our answer: He’s in it for posterity’s sake. It’s an honorable reason.
(1) Vivek Ramaswamy: Like it or not, the story coming out of tomorrow will be Vivek Ramaswamy. On a personal level, I find his demeanor repellent: an overgrown Martin Prince from The Simpsons, flailing his hand furiously in the air to be noticed, shouting, “Teacher, please call on me! I’m ever so smart!” He is callow, overeager, and unsophisticatedly glib, and he answers every question in the unmistakeably coil-tensed vocal clip of a YouTube–trained motivational speaker. He will also sell to the Republican primary base; I am not the target market. Barely a word of what he said (outside of his brief aside about civics tests) made a lick of rational sense — and he alone among the candidates onstage seems to realize that none of it has to, and that, in fact, rational sense might be an active obstacle to victory in the primary. Expect his numbers to rise after tonight. And – my sole consolation here – expect Trump to start taking shots at him, too.