Florida governor Ron DeSantis and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley spent most of Wednesday’s CNN debate in Iowa ignoring the harsh reality facing them ahead of the first nominating contest on Monday — Donald Trump leads both of them by double digits among Republicans there as he continues to battle four criminal indictments on the campaign trail.
Both candidates spent most of the two-hour affair sparring with each other, a political gift to the former president who has declined to participate in any of the Republican presidential primary debates this cycle and skipped Wednesday’s to sit for for a Fox News town hall in Iowa.
DeSantis and Haley both railed against Trump for declining to show up to the debate but spent most of their time lobbing nasty attacks at each other, only shifting gears to criticize the frontrunner’s record after being prompted by the moderators. From the top of the hour, they accused each other of lying about their legislative records on an array of issues including border security, social security, and foreign policy.
“One good rule of thumb if she says she’s never said something, that definitely means she said it, and then she’ll say: ‘You’re lying. You’re lying.’ That means not only did she say it, but she’s on videotape saying it,” said DeSantis. He accused the former South Carolina governor of caving to Wall Street donors. Haley responded by saying DeSantis is just frustrated that deep-pocketed donors have been fleeing his campaign to support her instead, directing viewers to look up DeSantisLies.com to fact check him in real time.
Throughout Wednesday evening’s debate DeSantis hit Haley on border policy, referencing her admonition that “we don’t need to talk about [illegal immigrants] as criminals. They’re not. They’re families that want a better life.” He accused her of not following through on delivering school choice for South Carolinians, being soft on K-12 transgender bathroom policies in her home state, and selling out the U.S. to international interests.
“You can take the ambassador out of the United Nations, but you can’t take the United Nations out of the ambassador,” DeSantis said.
Haley hit DeSantis for his state’s high property-insurance rates, being out of touch with many voters on abortion, and accused him of wielding government against private businesses in Florida, namely Walt Disney Co. She also mocked him for “[blowing] through $150 million” with “nothing to show for it,” calling his campaign a multi-million-dollar “revolving door” of political operatives and accusing him of being “desperate” as his campaign continues to tank in the polls. “If you can’t manage a campaign, how are you going to manage a country?”
DeSantis is staking his campaign in Iowa but has been fading in Hawkeye State surveys for months now, dwindling below 20 percent in FiveThirtyEight’s polling average since the summer. He and Haley are now registering in the high teens in Iowa as Trump continues to poll above 50 percent among Republicans there.
The debate came hours after former New Jersey governor Chris Christie suspended his low-polling presidential campaign earlier Wednesday in Windham, N.H, where he was caught on the hot mic ahead of his formal town-hall announcement predicting Haley would get “smoked” in the primary and that DeSantis called him earlier sounding “petrified.”
Christie’s announcement followed an intense pressure campaign from anti-Trump Republicans in the state who had spent weeks urging him to suspend his candidacy to give Haley more runway against Trump in New Hampshire — the only early state where the former president’s polling lead appears to be is shrinking.
Now that Christie’s out, the pressure is on Haley to peel off most of his supporters if she wants to pull off a surprise victory in the state’s open primary on January 23. She continues to surge in New Hampshire as DeSantis fades into the background. Like long-shot candidate and ex-pharmaceutical CEO Vivek Ramaswamy, the Florida governor is polling in the low single digits in New Hampshire — and notably several points behind Christie for several weeks now, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average.