A Desperate Debate Ends in a Draw

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, December 06, 2023

 

What may be the final debate of the Republican primary cycle — indeed, possibly the final debate of the 2024 election cycle — generated more heat than light on Wednesday night. Voters were presented with a Rorschach test. Each candidate hit their notes and met expectations, so voters who watched the debate probably saw exactly what they wanted to see — whatever that meant to them.

 

Voters who like Ron DeSantis saw him at his best. For the first time in this cycle, DeSantis ran like he was behind in the polls — a prudent calculation, because he very much is. DeSantis didn’t sit back, absorb blows, and stick to his message. Instead, he picked fights, with Nikki Haley in particular, some of which he won. He hammered his closest competitor on transgenderism and the need to prohibit in law access to surgical or pharmaceutical remedies for gender dysphoria in minors. He backed a muscular foreign policy, exhibited his encyclopedic knowledge of policy, and promised convincingly to be a reformer rather than a caretaker in the Oval Office. It was DeSantis’s best primary-debate performance by far.

 

If you aren’t inclined toward DeSantis, you had plenty to chew on, too. Chris Christie dissected him with the surgical acumen he once applied to Marco Rubio, savaging the governor for being evasive — a charge DeSantis confirmed with his habitual evasions. The Florida governor lent credence to vaccine skepticism, attacked American law-enforcement agencies for prosecuting “one of the biggest abuses of power in our history,” and refused to be pinned down on his commitment to Taiwan’s defense. Even DeSantis’s source of presidential inspiration, Calvin Coolidge, sounded insincere. That nod to the principle of radically limited constitutional government was welcome, but Coolidge’s aversion to the application of state power as a remedy for political controversies or even natural disasters does not bear even a passing resemblance to DeSantis’s record in Florida. That inauthenticity contributed to a conclusion you’ve likely already drawn about the governor.

 

If you like Nikki Haley, you were probably satisfied with her performance. She drew an inordinate amount of fire from her fellow candidates on the debate stage, which only confirmed her status as the new front-runner in the race for second place. Haley navigated her way out of thorny attacks on her record and views, and she exhibited all the depth of understanding of foreign-policy issues she has showcased throughout the 2024 primaries. Ramaswamy’s gratuitous attacks on her as “a fascist neocon” who will “send your kids to die so that she can buy a bigger house” probably only made you more sympathetic toward the former South Carolina governor. In short, you didn’t see anything to make you rethink your vote.

 

If you’re a Haley skeptic, your worst suspicions were confirmed. Haley wilted under DeSantis’s interrogation about her views on therapeutic and pharmaceutical remedies for transgenderism in minors, and she disappeared for much of the debate under that pressure. Haley’s attempt to clean up her support for controls on anonymous social-media accounts was unconvincing, and her wonky approach to remedying the problems associated with inflation and illegal immigration probably sounded more like dissimulation than a comprehensible set of policy preferences.

 

For the handful of Republican-primary voters who back Chris Christie, they saw the unvarnished wrecking ball they have come to depend upon to be the skunk at the garden party. He stripped the varnish off DeSantis and Ramaswamy, he shivved Haley for dancing around Trump’s dominance in the race, and he said everything about Donald Trump that Republicans hate to hear. Of course, if you don’t like Christie, you don’t like him for all the qualities he exhibited tonight.

 

Vivek Ramaswamy fans were probably delighted by his willingness to tap-dance across live wires. He leaned into the noxious-boor persona he has cultivated in this race, accusing everyone in his general vicinity of corruption. He endorsed “great replacement theory,” which maintains that lawmakers are seeking to dilute the political power of native-born Americans by importing pliant migrants. He endorsed the idea that both the 2020 and 2016 elections were somehow stolen from Donald Trump. He took aim at the mid-pandemic vaccine-development program and promised to repeal the liability protections that have made American medical-device manufacturing and pharmaceutical development one of the nation’s highest-performing economic sectors. Of course, if those qualities attract you to his candidacy, you’re in a blessedly small minority within the GOP.

 

And then there’s Trump. The former president took it on the chin in absentia more than in any previous debate. DeSantis attacked Trump directly (when prompted) over his advanced age and obliquely over his failure to build the wall and have Mexico pay for it. Haley attacked Trump for ignoring China’s campaign of exporting fentanyl precursors to America and its importation of U.S. technology, which Beijing uses in military applications, and for the deficit spending that occurred under his administration. For perhaps the first time this cycle, Christie was not alone in taking the fight to Trump. There is an assumption abroad that Trump’s support among Republicans is unassailable, but it’s an assumption that his most viable competitors have not tested. Tonight, they did.

 

All this is to say that tonight was a choose-your-own-adventure debate. There were no clear victors and no obvious losers. For the most part, everyone stayed in their lanes. The rest of the story will be left to the voters to tell.