There was a Republican presidential primary debate tonight – did you hear about it before or after it was over? I myself was watching only out of a sense of professional duty, because I’ve seen this movie before already: five individualized versions of The Sixth Sense, except this time every person up there on that stage was already dead, long ago, and seemingly everyone in the audience understood it except for them. (It was a surprise to us all back in 2016, but the twist is old and tired by 2023.) With the understanding that nothing in this debate changed a single thing about the overall dynamics of the GOP primary race — as Semafor’s Dave Weigel pointed out, Trump scheduled a rally down the street to counterprogram, his own way of windmill-dunking on the rest of the field — here are the basic takeaways:
(1) Haley had another solid night, firmly in command of her brief and more restrained in her aggression than last time. In the second debate, her major blemish was a seemingly needless catfight about hopeless inside-baseball South Carolina politics with Tim Scott. This time she avoided all serious entanglements while also quietly (and accurately) pointing out that Vivek Ramaswamy is “just scum” for randomly dragging Haley’s daughter (who, like most Zoomer kids, uses TikTok) into a debate about the platform.
(2) Vivek Ramaswamy is just scum. He actually had a decent answer on abortion late in the evening, but it didn’t even come close to undoing the damage he otherwise did to himself. Aside from speaking like he had just earned a certificate from an enunciation seminar held at a local Ramada Inn, Ramaswamy’s shot at Haley’s daughter drew boos from the audience. He also, rather casually, accused Volodymyr Zelenskyy of being a Nazi, and I’m not kidding: Speaking of Ukraine as a non-paragon of democratic virtue, he said “it has celebrated a Nazi within its ranks, a comedian in cargo-pants, a man called Zelenskyy.” It was so randomly insane that nobody either on stage or in the audience seemed to have caught it. Ramaswamy’s team promised the media in advance that he would be “unhinged” tonight. Mission accomplished.
(3) Ron DeSantis spoke like a man who thinks he missed his shot. I’m not sure whether that’s true, in the sense that I’m not sure the shot ever existed in retrospect. But DeSantis handled the debate tonight like a man who had internalized the reality of this race. And here is the cruel irony: It was his best debate yet, because of that. DeSantis will never be mistaken for a natural bon vivant (in fact, not a single person on the stage tonight had any notable stage charisma), but he was at his most natural tonight, hitting all his beats and never getting too drawn into the weeds. He was particularly strong on the foreign policy questions, an area where he (interestingly) projected far more strength and competence than Nikki Haley, who has the actual hands-on experience from her time at the U.N. Perhaps we would never have gotten to see this DeSantis until it was too late. Perhaps it never mattered anyway. But this is the guy who should have run, right out of the gate — unafraid to contrast himself with Trump or anyone else on the stage, and far more at peace with it all.
(4) Two other people participated in the debate tonight, but they shouldn’t be there anymore, and I forgot what they said. I wish them the best.
There will be another debate in December. Until such time as an actuarial event intervenes to change the nature of this field, the state of play has not changed: These are essentially dispatches from what would have been an incredibly hard-hitting and substantive debate in 1996 or 2008.