The Race Remains the Same

For yesterday’s edition of National Review’s Horse Race newsletter — filling in for Brittany Bernstein — I spoke with several campaign advisers, many of whom predicted that their candidates would take the fight to former president Donald Trump during the second Republican presidential primary debate. As it turns out, those advisers’ candidates hewed pretty closely to their campaign staff’s advice.

Before the debate, a member of Chris Christie’s campaign told NR that the former New Jersey governor would “make sure the voters watching at home understand the governor is not afraid to take on Trump and tell the truth about him,” and take on Trump he did. As Noah Rothman writes, “The one-time Garden State governor never missed a chance to criticize Trump for failing to show the proper ‘respect’ for Republican voters by showing up to the debates to defend his record. He made that point at the debate’s outset, he included it in his closing statement, and he hammered the point throughout his remarks.”

Indeed, aside from a joke in which Christie called Trump “Donald Duck” falling flat, the New Jerseyan’s attacks on the former president seemed to land. Florida governor Ron DeSantis also hit Trump on both his absence and on policy, charging Trump early on in the night’s proceedings with being “missing in action,” and then calling on him to “defend his record where [he] added $7.8 trillion to the debt.” But, as Mark Antonio Wright argues, his recent tack against the former president may be “a day late and a dollar short.” 

I wrote yesterday that South Carolina senator Tim Scott’s standing in the race had likely fallen as a result of his performance in the August debate:

Since then, Scott’s polling numbers, which had surged from late July, took a hit: He went from a high of 10.5 percent in Iowa to 7 percent, 7.5 percent in New Hampshire to 4.7 percent, and 14 percent in his home state to 11 percent, according to the RealClearPolitics average. And if he does want to capitalize on debate success as the campaign official suggested, he’ll need to have that success in the first place.

Scott used last night’s debate as an opportunity to reintroduce himself to the GOP electorate and did not fade into the background as he had in August. He gave the audience one of the evening’s most — and only — poignant moments with a soliloquy on race and his personal story:

Black families survived slavery. We survived poll taxes and literacy tests. We survived discrimination being woven into the laws of our country. What was hard to survive was Johnson’s Great Society, where they divided to take the black father out of the household to get a check in the mail, and you can now measure that in unemployment, in crime, in devastation. If you want to restore hope, you’ve got to restore the family, restore capitalism, and put Americans back at work, together as one American family. Our nation continues to go in the right direction; it’s why I can say I have been discriminated against but America is not a racist country. Never ever doubt who we are. We are the greatest country on God’s green earth.

His campaign views his performance last night as exactly the kind of debate success on which their candidate can capitalize.

“He definitely won the debate,” a Scott campaign adviser told NR. “He was controlling the conversation throughout the entire debate, and he had key moments, whether it be calling out Vivek for his dealings with China or pushing back on Ron DeSantis on slavery, and he delivered a really optimistic and positive message.”

It’s worth noting that Scott’s criticism of Florida’s African-American history curriculum was, as Mark pointed out, “flatly wrong on the merits.” And it wasn’t the only moment during the debate in which Scott parroted false claims about his fellow candidates. In an instance of South Carolina-on-South Carolina violence, the Palmetto State senator attacked Nikki Haley, the woman who appointed him to his seat in the first place, on allegations that she had spent $50,000 in taxpayer money on curtains while U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. That allegation stems from a 2018 New York Times story so incorrect that the Times eventually issued a clarification, admitting that “the decision on leasing the ambassador’s residence and purchasing the curtains was made during the Obama administration, according to current and former officials.”

Scott certainly spoke more during this go-round than he did in August, which stands to help him as the length of time until the first contest of the 2024 primaries shrinks. He promises to be at the forefront of voters’ minds in a way he has not been since his surge in polling and media attention, which began in July, died down over the past month, and he addressed issues last night that he was unable to in the first debate. He criticized Vivek Ramaswamy effectively on his ties to China, pointing out that “the same people that funded Hunter Biden millions of dollars [were partners] of yours as well.” In the spin room later that night, Scott argued it is “not a surprise [Ramaswamy] wants to turn Taiwan over to China by 2028; now we have a fact pattern that helps us see why.” But it remains to be seen whether he’ll be able to insert himself as the most viable non-Trump candidate in the race.

As of now, that mantle probably still belongs to Haley. The former governor and U.N. ambassador continued what she started in the first debate, attacking Vivek Ramaswamy over his recent flip-flop on TikTok and sketchy record on China. Getting off what may have been the best line of the night — and perhaps one that only would’ve worked coming from her — she said to Ramaswamy, “Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber.” It’s the sort of insult that may have seemed like too much out of anyone else on stage, but Haley’s southern-mom demeanor and significant foreign-policy experience help against a potential charge of firing off canned zingers.

“Nikki went into the debate knowing there would be a lot of eyes on her and there would be a target on her back,” a Haley campaign adviser told me. “That’s pretty much how it’s always been in her life. When she was governor, there were a lot of people in the establishment who did not like her and were gunning for her. And certainly that was true with the U.N. Both other countries and the State Department establishment did not like Nikki; they thought she was too pro-Israel and spoke her mind too much, and she thrives in that kind of environment. She was aggressive, she was feisty, and she was also substantive.”

Haley’s rise in the polls since the August debate augurs well for the rest of her primary campaign, and last night’s debate does not seem like it will shake things up too much. But for her to effectively capture the non-Trump vote within the party, the field will need to begin winnowing. We’ll see if that happens over the coming months.