The Potemkin Debate

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, September 28, 2023

 

The Republican debates increasingly feel like a Potemkin village built to impress conservatives who might otherwise be prepared to leave the party.

 

Do you despair that there’s no room for you on the American right as it becomes more Orbánist and less Reaganite? Well, here’s Nikki Haley to prove you wrong. And Mike Pence. And Tim Scott! And Chris Christie!

 

Even the most hopeless no-hoper, Doug Whatsisname, sounded like an old-school Republican on Wednesday night.

 

The right’s huge populist, postliberal bloc was reduced to two representatives onstage, neither of whom is terribly likable or speaks for them with real authority. Vivek Ramaswamy took the opportunity to try to rebrand as a humble novice who respects his opponents after his arrogance at the first debate alienated everyone. 

 

But it didn’t go well. “Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber,” Nikki Haley told him at one point, an enjoyable burn that obscures the fact that Ramaswamy is far more in tune with the zeitgeist of the American right than Haley is.

 

The other populist onstage, Ron DeSantis, was … fine, although he was prone to leveling conservative critiques alongside populist ones. At one point he scolded the frontrunner for declining to show up and defend the $7.8 trillion in new debt that accrued during his presidency. He also challenged him on abortion, daring him to attend the next debate and look pro-life viewers in the eye when he stoops to calling Florida’s six-week ban a “terrible thing.”

 

If his goal was to avoid major mistakes and cling to his tenuous second-place status as anti-Trump voters search for a champion before Iowa, I suppose he succeeded. The Bulwark’s Sonny Bunch put it well: “DeSantis is doing a great job of protecting his 30-point deficit.”

 

Logistically the debate was a fiasco due to endless cross-talk among the candidates and moderators who couldn’t or wouldn’t assert control. But substantively it was a good night for conservatives—on Earth 2, where the right still believes in classical liberalism and will select its presidential nominee from a pool of candidates who believe in it too. Even the setting, the Reagan Presidential Library, seemed apropos.

 

Here on Earth 1, though, where the absent authoritarian leads in national polling by more than 40 points, it was “a mass delusion,” writes Jonathan Last, “a large group of people simultaneously subscribing to an imaginary version of reality,”

 

That’s the point of a Potemkin village, isn’t it? It’s a subterfuge designed to convince an audience that things are better than they really are.

 

***

 

There was a way this debate could have been interesting-ish.

 

Fox Business, which hosted it, could have zeroed in on the differences between the GOP as it is and the GOP as it would like traditional conservatives and swing voters to perceive it.

 

How do “law and order” Republicans reconcile themselves to a nominee who’s under four indictments and has vowed to pardon people who attacked the Capitol? How do pro-life Republicans move forward if the party nominates someone eager to make a deal with the left that would assuredly leave the vast majority of abortions legal? What should right-wing hawks do if that nominee ends up vowing to withdraw from NATO?

 

Are there any red lines for conservatives which, if crossed, would cause their uneasy coalition with populists to rupture? If suggesting that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed doesn’t cut it, what would?

 

How about the pointless government shutdown that the presumptive nominee has been cheering on in the corrupt hope that it’ll defund the Justice Department’s multiple cases against him? Any thoughts on that?

 

When one candidate is 40 points ahead, the only relevant questions for the rest of the field are how they disagree with him and whether he’s fit for office. If, as is true in this case, the frontrunner differs meaningfully with most of his opponents on ideology as well, a thoughtful debate would focus laser-like on exploring those differences.

 

We didn’t get much of that on Wednesday night. What we got was something that felt ripped from 2015, drilling down on predictable policy disagreements with a Democratic president and marginal policy disagreements among most of the candidates. In many cases the consensus onstage diverged sharply from the consensus among grassroots Republican voters, an incongruity that led former DeSantis staffer (and former Dispatch intern) Nate Hochman to marvel: 

Imagine wasting time at a Republican debate in 2023 on two old-school conservatives squabbling over spending while the guy who’s 40 points ahead is off vowing to use executive power to exact “retribution” on his political enemies. Somehow, we don’t need to imagine it.

 

Increasingly I think wasting time is the point of these events.

 

I won’t be so conspiratorial as to accuse Fox of deliberately trying to help Trump by steering the debates toward subjects that can’t hurt him. My guess is that the Potemkin village of normalcy they’ve built with these events is as much an attempt to reassure themselves that the balance of power within the GOP hasn’t shifted over time as it is to reassure normie voters. To watch Nikki Haley and Tim Scott argue over the national debt is to be transported to a golden pre-Trump era when Fox News wasn’t being outflanked on the right by lunatic populist mega-sites and top-tier Republican candidates weren’t competing to prove who’d be more aggressive in trying to overturn the liberal order. 

 

An era when, in Hochman’s words, the “non-neoconservative right” that appreciates a little Sonnenrad iconography in its campaign ads were still truly “outsiders.”

 

They’re not outsiders anymore. Donald Trump defines the de facto establishment in his party more comprehensively than any politician in modern American history. But it’s in everyone’s interest to pretend otherwise: Conservatives who are uncomfortable with his leadership get to pretend that figures like Haley and Scott still wield meaningful influence within the party while populists who are uncomfortable with their new establishment status get to pretend they’re still insurgents being suppressed by a cabal of Republican elites.

 

And all sides of the party get to pretend that it stands for something on policy more thoughtful and principled than “whatever best serves Donald Trump’s political needs at any given moment.”

 

Rachel Maddow captured the unreality of Wednesday’s spectacle efficiently:

 

The Republican electorate has effectively decided they don’t really want to do politics anymore. And they’re not all that interested in what politics is, and governing, and political campaigning, and policy competition, and all that stuff. They’re not interested in it. They would prefer to have a strongman, a particular strongman who they already know and like, and prefer to have that. And that is what they want instead of politics.

 

So you get all these other candidates up there and they’re having a political fight, they are talking about politics, and they are behaving like politicians whether or not they have been politicians before, but they are doing politics. And the Republican Party says no to all of them, almost in equal measure, because they prefer a strongman who is going to end politics, and do something that is not about democratic political competition.

 

That’s correct—with the caveat that it’s strongly in the GOP’s electoral interest to pretend that it’s still in the business of doing politics. “Let’s elect a strongman who’ll end all this democratic messiness” isn’t a winning message with swing voters even at this late stage of American civic decline, I suspect. Republicans need something they can point to as proof that they’re still a basically normal party doing democratic politics in basically normal ways, not a personality cult so far gone in its devotion that it believes the term “person of faith” better describes Donald Trump than Tim Scott or Mitt Romney.

 

So they’re holding debates. If you’re worried that the lunatics have taken over the asylum, tune in for two hours to watch Mike Pence and Chris Christie calmly debate non-discretionary spending and let your troubles melt away.

 

These pageants have been so useful to the GOP in communicating a phony sense of normalcy, in fact, that I am a little conspiratorial about the recently announced rules for the third debate on November 8. A serious party would be keen to winnow the field as fall turns to winter, knowing that the Iowa caucus isn’t far away. November should be a time for sending the no-hopers packing and putting the spotlight on the top tier (of, er, also-rans). A polling threshold of, say, 8 to 10 percent in multiple surveys would make sense.

 

Instead the threshold for the third debate will be a measly 4 percent, low enough that we might see the entire gang from Wednesday night back again in November (minus Doug Burgum, in all probability). That serves Trump’s needs, as a big divided field means the anti-Trump vote will remain splintered. But it also serves the institutional GOP’s needs: The more old-school conservatives there are onstage, the greater the false impression of normalcy left on undecided voters will be.

 

It’s a game. The final question posed to the candidates on Wednesday night—”So which one of you onstage tonight should be voted off the island?” a la Survivor— slyly acknowledged as much.

 

The question is how soon the game will be over.

 

***

 

I agree with Mark Antonio Wright that insofar as there was a “winner” on Wednesday, it was Haley. It’s not what she said so much as how she said it, a dynamic from which Trump himself famously benefits.

 

A conservative voter might prefer Pence or Scott or even DeSantis on particular policies, but Haley has proved repeatedly now that she’s the most effective debater of the bunch. She knows her stuff, she’s likably cool under pressure, and she’s willing (even eager!) to fight with opponents—at least those whose names don’t rhyme with “Ronald Grump.”

 

Populists aren’t the only ones who appreciate a “fighter” for their cause. Having twice watched Haley rhetorically pummel Ramaswamy, old-school Republicans desperate for an alternative to the frontrunner and disappointed for myriad reasons in DeSantis might logically gravitate toward her at this point. As Sarah Longwell once said, she’s the perfect candidate—for 2015.

 

Which might be enough to help her break from the pack and emerge as the clear second-place alternative to you-know-who, a mere 30-40 points behind.

 

So as much as Trump might be fine with more debates among a large field in which multiple candidates are stuck in the mud at around 10 percent, he would not want further debates if a breakout candidate might potentially exploit them to push herself higher in the polls.

 

Lo and behold, as of Thursday morning, he’s decided that the party has had enough of debating and that it’s time to unite behind the frontrunner.

 

“They have to stop the debates. Because it is just bad for the Republican Party. They are not going anywhere. There is not going to be a breakout candidate,” Trump said, before saying who he thought performed best in the second presidential debate.

 

“I am very concerned about the RNC not being able to do their job,” Trump added.

 

I’ve been expecting that. In fact, I thought Team Trump would demand an end to the debates after the first one last month, hoping to short-circuit whatever chance still remains for Ron DeSantis to regain some momentum.

 

Halting the democratic process prematurely while Trump is ahead is something of a trademark of his, you know.

 

Normally his lackeys at the RNC would do his bidding, but in this case I suspect they’ll resist and keep the debates going. Sure, Republican voters have lost interest. And sure, giving Haley more nationally televised soapboxes to try to consolidate the conservative vote risks polarizing the party’s two wings ahead of a general election.

 

But they’re getting value out of these Potemkin villages, as I’ve said. And Nikki Haley, for all her ideological virtues, plainly lacks the courage to lead a Reaganite revolt against Trump that would cause an abiding schism in the GOP. Her entire political project since 2015 has been carefully managed to put some distance between her and the authoritarian-in-chief but never too much.

 

I can imagine her throwing roundhouses at Trump if they end up on a debate stage together, just in case there’s some faint, hypothetical path to victory for her out there. Yet I can also imagine her reconciling with him effusively once she’s been vanquished and promptly calling on all wings of the party to come together to elect him to a second term.

 

The story of Nikki Haley’s surge in the polls (assuming it’s real and that it endures) doesn’t end with some Romney-esque crisis of conscience about whether she can remain in a party that no longer believes in classical liberalism. It ends with her excitedly accepting the vice presidential nomination and symbolically bestowing the Reaganite seal of approval on what the GOP has become. Just like Mike Pence did before her.

 

If the last eight years have taught us anything, it’s that institutional conservatism was itself a Potemkin village. Ideological conservatism is real; The Dispatch exists for a reason. But those like the GOP who adopted it as an institutional identity went from self-appointed sentinels of the Constitution in 2011 to cheerleaders for a coup plot 10 years later. It’s impossible to look back at the American right of the Tea Party era from the vantage point of 2023 and not think that most of what they claimed to believe was just a pleasant subterfuge obscuring something darker.

 

Nikki Haley is an ideological conservative and an institutional conservative. If she’s forced to choose between the two by an offer from Donald Trump to become his running mate, there’s little doubt what she’ll do. She’s a perfect Republican for this era.

Climate Scientists Increasingly Favor Destroying the Economy

By Andrew Follett

Friday, September 29, 2023

 

Almost three-quarters of self-identified “climate policy researchers” want to stop economic growth in the name of battling global warming or feel neutral about that proposition, according to a recent survey by the scientific journal Nature Sustainability.

 

The survey asked 764 “climate policy researchers” if they preferred “green growth,” meaning they believe the economy can continue to grow while greenhouse-gas emissions are reduced, “agrowth,” meaning the researcher is essentially agnostic on economic growth, or “degrowth,” meaning they want economic growth in high-income countries to end.

 

A mere 27 percent of respondents stated that “green growth” is preferable, with 73 percent of respondents stating that economic growth is neutral or bad. The latter two positions represent “scepticism toward the predominant ‘green growth’ paradigm with degrowth representing a more critical view,” according to the researchers conducting the study.

 

“Within the broader post-growth framework, degrowth stands as a pronounced stance, critiquing capitalism and advocating for a deliberate and equitable reduction in material consumption and economic activity in high-income countries to achieve more sustainable and socially just societies,” the paper states. “Degrowth scholars underscore the need to shift the focus from GDP to the physical scale of the economy, concurrently emphasizing the important role of equity, environmental justice and democratic decision-making in facilitating a sustainable transition.”

 

Essentially, degrowth or agrowth means actively eliminating industrial civilization and turning back the clock to an era when humans allegedly had less environmental impact, a literal “return to nature” that often intersects with reducing the human population to supposedly reduce its environmental impact.

 

Respondents in rich areas like the European Union and North America were notably much more opposed to “green growth” than were individuals in poorer areas. Around 58 percent of those surveyed from the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) still desire economic growth, compared with only about 13 percent of European Union researchers and about 15 percent of other OECD researchers.

 

Economists and “hard” natural or applied scientists were also vastly more likely to favor economic growth, while social scientists were the most likely to favor “agrowth” or “degrowth.” Specifically, 37 percent of those in the applied and formal sciences favor “green growth,” as do 34 percent of economists, 28 percent of natural scientists, and 26 percent of those in environmental studies. Only around 15 percent of those in the social sciences still see economic growth as positive, with around 38 percent favoring “degrowth” and around 47 percent indifferent to growth. 

 

The survey asked respondents a series of questions including whether “continued economic growth is essential for improving people’s life satisfaction” and whether “economic growth is necessary to finance environmental protection.” The survey’s authors recruited climate-policy researchers for the study by searching an academic database and emailing individuals who published in relevant fields.

 

Environmentalists have used the illusion of a scientific consensus on global warming as a political weapon against “deniers” for years, and it seems they will soon transition to a new consensus in favor of “degrowth.” Many prominent environmental groups embraced a “degrowth” mind-set for decades before they even considered global warming a concern.

 

In 1974, for example, the Sierra Club adopted a position of opposing the construction of any new nuclear reactors for the reason that they could lead to “unnecessary economic growth.” It’s rather suspicious that the solution to global warming that environmentalists demand is precisely the same as what they wanted to do long before it became a widely held concern. Almost as if it’s a solution in search of a problem.

 

Economic growth greatly improves the lives of everyone in the world. When people earn a higher income, it enables them to exit poverty and gain improved living standards, ultimately improving the environment. Prosperity, not degrowth, is associated with a cleaner environment.

 

Since academics, like the researchers who filled out the survey, share very strong left-wing norms, they manage to self-organize into a kind of immune system for rejecting new ideas, and the only way to advance in such a system is to give fealty to progressive ideology.

 

If you ever want to see what an environmental policy designed by the kind of far-left mind-set that is increasingly prevalent in American academia looks like, do a Google search for “Semipalatinsk,” “Aral Sea,” and “Door to Hell.” Are modern-day greens aware of extreme leftism’s record on the environment?

 

It is perhaps no surprise that earlier this month a wildfire researcher, Patrick Brown, admitted that he exaggerated the extent of global warming’s impact on wildfires because he knew Nature would publish only science that embraced an ideologically fashionable worldview. That climate researchers openly admit they must misrepresent the facts so that their research can see the light of day should caution us against embracing consensus narratives.

 

Brown openly states that many climate scientists bow to the pressure from left-wing journal editors and intentionally skew their research to turn up results compatible with a preexisting worldview or political agenda.

 

“This research looked at the effect of warming in isolation but that warming is just one of many important influences on wildfires with others being changes in human ignition patterns and changes in vegetation/fuels,” Brown wrote on Twitter. “So why didn’t I include these obviously relevant factors in my research from the outset? Why did I focus exclusively on the impact of climate change? Well, I wanted the researche [sic] to get as widely disseminated as possible, and thus I wanted it to be published in a high-impact journal.”

 

Nature, which is closely related to Nature Sustainability (both are published by “Nature Portfolio”), bills itself as “the world’s leading multidisciplinary science journal” and has published continuously since 1869. It is certainly among the most high-impact and prestigious academic journals. But the journal’s decision to focus on politicized gatekeeping by demanding that science adhere to an ideologically fashionable worldview created by confirmation bias makes the science it publishes inherently suspect and less useful.

 

As scientists increasingly favor destroying the economy, with prestigious journals and much of the climate-policy field aligning around “agrowth” and “degrowth” approaches, anyone concerned about the material well-being of mankind should take notice. We should not let environmental stewardship become code for abandoning economic growth and accepting a large-scale decline in living standards and an increase in economic suffering.

When the Stupid Futility Is the Point

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, September 27, 2023

 

This week yet another government shutdown appears inevitable, because a sizable chunk of the House Freedom Caucus believes, in the words of Tim Mattheson in Animal House, “this situation absolutely requires a very stupid and futile gesture on somebody’s part.”

 

What situation? 

 

Before we get to that, it’s important to understand that any situation will do, when you’re determined to deliver a stupid and futile gesture.  

 

In America, the term “counterculture” is so associated with hippies, beatniks, Bohemians and the like, it might seem odd to think of self-described conservatives as counterculture types. But the evidence is all over the place—from the loopy conspiratorialism and secession talk to the bizarre, albeit selective, defenses of lawlessness and even violence—that a lot of right-wingers have shed the pretense of actual conservatism in favor of a permanent pose of performative radicalism from the right. 

 

On the fringes of the House Republican conference, you can find this kind of nuttery aplenty. But, collectively, this countercultural impulse manifests itself most relevantly in an almost Freudian compulsion to lose.  

 

Which brings us to the situation. Earlier this year, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy managed to work out a modestly successful deal with Democrats that extended the debt ceiling until 2025. Given his incredibly narrow four-seat majority and the fractious nature of his coalition, this was hailed at the time as a considerable win for McCarthy and the Republicans, allegedly proving the GOP could be a governing party. 

 

And that was the problem for the radicals. When you’ve convinced yourself that the “system,” “establishment” or “regime,” is irretrievably corrupt or some kind of existential enemy—a common conviction among numerous countercultures for millennia—any form of deal is seen as evidence that you’ve “sold out.” The only way to irrefutably demonstrate that you didn’t compromise your principles—whatever those might be—is to lose. Martyrs are pure. Dealmakers are collaborators. 

 

So the rabble-rousing core of the Freedom Caucus declared that it got rolled in the debt ceiling fight and vowed to use the budget “process” (for want of a better word) to force spending cuts from, well, everyone. They claim McCarthy made them promises he didn’t keep—which might be true. They insist government borrowing and spending is out of control and must be dealt with—which is certainly true. Something has to be done. 

 

Fair enough. But what?

 

Their answer is to force the shutdown of the government.

 

The only problem? This is perhaps the most predictable script of the modern political era. To the shock of no one, voters don’t like government shutdowns and,  mirabile dictu, the party that forces a shutdown gets blamed for shutting down the government while the other party—which in this case happens to control both the Senate and the White House—gets to score easy points. 

 

And then, eventually, a deal is worked out but only after enough damage is self-inflicted. It’s akin to declaring, “Do what I demand or I will repeatedly smash my hand with this hammer until you relent.” 

 

Or maybe it’s like ‘60s  student radicals occupying the Berkeley or Kenyon cafeterias demanding better library hours, more parking, and a total and complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam. Or maybe it’s in the Leninist spirit of “the worse, the better.”  After all, people who make a living from catastrophizing like catastrophes. As McCarthy said Monday, “It’s almost like they want to walk you into a shutdown and then blame you for the shutdown.”

 

That seems to be where their dashboard saint, Donald Trump is coming from. Over the weekend, he reiterated that the GOP should behave as if it has all the leverage. On social media he posted,  “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN.”  Of course, Trump wants to use a government shutdown to “defund” the federal prosecutions against him and “other patriots.” Even if you thought this radical asininity was a great idea, the idea that it could make it through a Democrat-controlled Senate and past the president’s veto is a childish fantasy. 

 

But even the comparatively more modest demands being made by the holdouts are unlikely to clear those hurdles which, again, is why it’s all so futile and stupid. These antics will fail, but not before harming the reelection chances of many Republicans including 18 from districts Biden won. Indeed, the most committed radicals come from extremely safe seats, which they’re not scared of losing.  As for losing control of the House, that would just prove how principled they are.

Dispatches from the Undercard Debate

By Jeffrey Blehar

Thursday, September 28, 2023

 

Remember back in 2015, after nearly two terms of Obama, when it seemed like everyone and their half-cousin had decided to seek the Republican nomination for president? It was a murderers’ row of big-name Republican officeholders and businesspeople: Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, the son of a postman, you name it. I’m pretty sure I was running for president for a moment there early on; everybody was getting into the race, including a reality-TV vanity candidate everyone assumed would fade quickly, so the early debates had to be sorted into two tiers: the “main” debate (for the top polling candidates) and the infamous so-called undercard debates, a bizarrely pointless exercise in which six or seven also-rans yelled at one another while whistling past the graveyard about Donald Trump, who eventually became not only the nominee but president of the United States.

 

In 2023, after all that, the GOP primary debates are now brutally an undercard all to themselves. Trump considers this race won already and is acting like it: rhetorically running on a national level against Joe Biden (by speaking to autoworkers tonight instead of attending the debate). Because that basic reality looms largest of all, it’s hard to get too excited about tonight’s scrap amongst the inevitable also-rans. Given Biden’s weaknesses, they are now running for something more than mere future political prospects. (As I have said recently, to great popularity, few seem to realize just how possible a second Trump presidency is and how weird it would be.)

 

My long account is probably not worth it — I would criticize the debate moderation, the cacophony of hearing candidates bark over one another about trivial matters, Vivek Ramaswamy’s amazing retro ’90s hairstyle, and the general irrelevance of it all. My summary is this: The story of tonight was Nikki Haley, who came out confident and swinging, perhaps overaggressively at times. When she laid into Vivek it was one thing (she devastatingly unmanned him, after his defense of Chinese business and TikTok, by saying that she’d gotten stupider for listening to him), but when she savaged Tim Scott for bizarre, South Carolinian inside-baseball political beefs, she came across like a woman with an assassin’s task: Remove all competitors. One wonders how it will play: Most of the time she was on point and confident, but when she overheated and the argument began to feel personal, she revealed her fatal flaw — a balance between magnanimity and precision dagger strikes suits her overall approach better than going all in.

 

Ramaswamy sought to be more conciliatory this time, after having presented himself as the True Conservative Visionary Leader in the last debate and having been pummeled for it. None of the other candidates were having any of it, even though I think on a purely presentational level his tone was vastly improved over the last time. The visceral hatred every other candidate on the stage felt for him was rather obviously an act of psychological transference: Since Trump wasn’t there to pummel, everyone decided to pummel Trump’s avatar instead. But because Ramaswamy’s tone was different this time (and because most viewers are neither aware of nor particularly interested in his rather sketchy pre-political history), he often came off the better in these exchanges.

 

DeSantis was on his way to having another disastrous non-showing of a debate — it was almost perverse how, as the non-Trump leader in the polls, he was allowed to speak last during the horribly managed introduction — but he rescued his performance with a solid back half, including a stirring defense of life that directly took on Trump’s squishiness about the issue. But the hour was late, and the stakes just too low by that point.

 

The other candidates should drop out tomorrow. Pence, Christie, Burgum, Scott — I could offer play-by-play commentary on their performances, but it feels almost insultingly unnecessary: To give them notice might encourage them to remain in a race in which they simply do not belong. All four have their merits as politicians, but if they care about stopping Trump (as opposed to seeking cabinet positions), they should leave now and winnow the race to the three remaining non-Trump candidates — Haley, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy — who have distinguished themselves. But, again: Donald Trump hovers at or above 50 percent nationally in the primary polls. All of this is a sideshow, an undercard, until something happens to alter the larger Trump vs. Biden rematch dynamic.

Chris Christie’s Night

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, September 28, 2023

 

Ahead of the first Republican debate, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie wasn’t exactly subtle about his intentions. He retailed his plan to use his platform to make what he reasonably expected would be the most full-throated and comprehensive case against Donald Trump’s renomination to the presidency. The performance the governor turned in on that stage failed to meet the expectations he had set for himself, but Christie’s second debate performance more than made up for it.

 

Yes, the former governor took the fight to Trump in absentia, but voters could be forgiven for wondering by the end of the debate’s first hour if criticizing Trump was all he had to offer. Christie ably demonstrated that it was not.

 

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. But Christie wasn’t out on a limb. Florida governor Ron DeSantis ratified the legitimacy of the attack on Trump himself — a layup attack on the front-runner that every GOP candidate somehow passed on during the first debate. But that wasn’t all the former New Jersey governor had for GOP voters.

 

Christie laid into the Trump administration for putting an additional $7 trillion on the national credit card. He managed a rather deft evasion of his one-time support for a pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens in the aughts (a position that was by no means uncommon among Republican lawmakers at the time) by noting that, because the borders remain unsecured and the problem has metastasized for 13 years, amnesty is no longer an option. He promised to send the National Guard to the border to partner with the CBP to “stop the flow” of migration, but he stopped short of endorsing DeSantis and Nikki Haley’s plan to use military force across Mexico’s borders to disrupt cartel operations. That was brave because, even if it isn’t what GOP voters want to hear, armed intervention in Mexico isn’t a workable solution absent the consent of Mexico City, which would not happen without devoting months or even years we don’t have to diplomatic engagement.

 

On the Ukraine crisis, Christie alone connected that conflict to the threats the U.S. faces from near-peer competitors and rogue states across the globe. “They’re all connected,” he said, rejecting the premise that helping Ukraine resist the Russian onslaught sacrifices deterrence against China. “The Chinese are paying” for Russia’s war, the “Iranians are supplying weapons,” and the North Koreans are, too. Christie is right. Every anti-American regime on earth has lined up on one side of this conflict. On the other stand NATO and America’s Pacific allies, including Taiwan. This is not a dynamic that requires a lot of chin-stroking to appraise. It’s painfully obvious where America’s interests lie. If we don’t see it, our adversaries do.

 

Nor did Christie have any time for his fellow candidates who had succumbed to the “naïveté” of presuming that Vladimir Putin is a reasonable negotiating partner. The last four consecutive presidents, including Trump, have all tried to execute something resembling a Russian reset. All of them failed, but their failures were not cost-free propositions. That engagement bought Putin time — time he has used to invade his sovereign neighbors on three occasions, and Ukraine won’t be the last. “He wants to put the old band back together,” Christie said of the Soviet Union. “Only American can stop it.”

 

But the governor’s performance on that debate stage wasn’t dour. He didn’t channel the eschatological notion that America is such a spent force it will only take one more Democratic presidential term to finally break the greatest country on Earth. He brought the jokes. Sure, Trump failed to build his border wall, Christie said. Nor did he get Mexico to pay for it. Indeed, if Mexico had known they’d only have to foot the bill for 52 miles of new barriers, “they might have paid for the 52 miles,” he joked. In another jocular moment, Christie extended his respect to the field of candidates who did show up for the debate — even Vivek Ramaswamy, with whom he had several heated exchanges in the last debate. Turning then to the over-eager pharmaceutical CEO, who was thrilled by the gesture, Christie jokingly told him to put his “hand down.” That disarmed Ramaswamy, who laughed aloud at the admonition.

 

It wasn’t a bad debate for any of the candidates on that stage. Ramaswamy pivoted from the churlish pose he struck in the first debate to relatable and gracious, and he reminded Republicans why they found him impressive in the first place. Haley displayed a real depth of knowledge on policy with detail-rich responses to questions on health care and foreign affairs. Tim Scott had a standout moment describing the ways in which America had overcome much of its racial past and the faith he had in continued progress. Ron DeSantis did himself a lot of favors by reminding voters of his successes as Florida’s governor, and he showed that Trump’s dominance in the polls does not so cow him that he won’t take the fight to the front-runner.

 

But it was Christie who turned in the most compelling performance. And for Donald Trump’s Republican skeptics, that’s just terrible. No one in this field is as disliked by GOP voters as Chris Christie. That deficit is so deep it’s a hurdle Christie is unlikely to overcome. So, a muddled result favoring the candidate least likely to consolidate the Trump-skeptical vote only prolongs the winnowing process and makes Trump’s nomination more likely.

The Mulligan Debate

By Rich Lowry

Thursday, September 28, 2023

 

Lots of mulligans in this one.

 

Tim Scott realized he had to show up. He was feistier, spoke more, and had some good moments, but I wonder how the nice guy constantly interrupting other candidates will play.

 

Vivek’s internal polling must have showed that he came off as an obnoxious boor the first time around. This version was easier to take. But it’s always a bad sign when a candidate has to adopt basically a new persona from one debate to the next (Al Gore did it in the presidential debates in 2000).

 

Pretty much everyone realized in retrospect they should have taken more umbrage at Vivek’s insults during the first debate, and came armed with oppo. They obviously hate him, and Nikki Haley more than anyone.

 

And, finally, Trump took some incoming for not showing up. Both Christie and DeSantis hit him.

 

Two candidates who didn’t take mulligans and doubled down on their prior strategies were Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis. The Haley approach is to stand out by attacking almost everyone else, but it might have felt like too much and too forced.

 

On the other hand, DeSantis is using the debates to avoid mixing it up with anyone as much as possible — trying to ignore direct attacks and to transcend arguments between the other candidates — while delivering his message with every answer. This produces some good riffs — he was great on education and life — but makes it impossible to win the debate in the usual sense of having an electrifying moment or besting another candidate in a long, heated exchange.

 

My guess is he’s seeking to maintain his high favorable ratings by not attacking anyone (except Trump in a couple of specific places where he considers it advantageous), work Iowa hard, and hope it breaks his way late.

 

Otherwise Doug Burgum made a good impression, and there was way too much cross talk and frenzied over-promising from the candidates.

The Consolidation Debate

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

 

Today we’re going to pretend that Wednesday night’s second Republican primary debate matters.

It won’t be easy. Have a look at the national polling since the first debate on August 23.

Trump’s lead, already north of 40 points when that debate was held, has grown a bit since.

 

Wealthy donors have begun to despair of finding a viable challenger. “Trump’s like 50 points ahead,” said one recently to Politico. “Who wants to get involved and waste money?” Outside groups are largely MIA, not wanting to make an enemy of the prohibitive favorite by spending against him, and some are unhappy about it. “Where were all these people who were speaking a big game [about stopping Trump] when it came time to put rubber on the road?” an adviser to another campaign complained to NBC News. “The bare minimum they could have done was make sure he was so damaged that he wasn’t sitting at 50% in the polls. But because they sat on their hands, they’ve essentially ceded the nomination to him, and it’s through inaction.”

 

Is that so? If only rich conservatives had dumped an extra $100 million on Ron DeSantis’ already lavishly funded super PAC, the cult of Trump that’s propelled him to a Saddam-like lead after four indictments would have cracked at last?

 

Forgive me for doubting that. 

 

But now isn’t the time to point fingers. That’ll come this winter, after Trump cruises to a third nomination and anti-anti-Trump conservatives start grasping for rationalizations to continue supporting this rancid party. The donors failed, the outside groups failed, DeSantis failed—anything to escape the all but inescapable conclusion that a “very large portion” of the Republican base, in Mitt Romney’s words, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”

 

That’s in the future. Right now, because the state of this race is so dreary and so dull in its dreariness, we’re going to liven things up by imagining that Wednesday’s debate might matter.

 

I think it might! Sort of?

 

***

 

In time we may look back and think of the second debate as “the consolidation debate.” That is, the moment when the GOP’s sizable Trump-leery minority began to unify behind a single challenger.

 

Unfortunately, that single challenger is unlikely to be Ron DeSantis.

 

I say “unfortunately” because I remain convinced that the governor of Florida is the only candidate with a theoretical path to victory over Trump. The MAGA base likes him and admires his culture-war achievements in Florida; the conservative rump of the party respects his intelligence and views him, correctly, as a low-bar upgrade over you-know-who in both his temperament and respect for civic norms. He’s the only candidate who can unite the two wings of the party and so, not coincidentally, he’s also the only candidate who led Trump in any primary polling over the past year.

 

He could have been a contender. But I think we’re firmly in the “past tense” phase of DeSantis’ contender status now.

 

For six weeks he’s been below 15 percent in national polling. He remains in second place in Iowa but has slipped further behind Trump there since the first debate. In South Carolina he’s fallen into a tie for third. And in New Hampshire he’s dropped to—deep breath—fourth, behind Chris Christie. He’s not even in double digits anymore.

 

Could all of this start to turn around tomorrow? Sure, hypothetically. But how? What could DeSantis say, realistically, that would persuade the 15 percent or so of Republicans who’ve ditched him for other candidates since early April to feel Ready for Ron again?

 

He has one important card to play. He’s going to put pro-life viewers on notice that Donald Trump thinks the six-week abortion ban DeSantis signed in Florida is a “terrible thing.” If you make Trump president again, the governor will tell them, he’ll sell out the anti-abortion cause by reaching some unacceptable compromise with Democrats. That warning might be worth something to the DeSantis campaign, especially in evangelical-heavy Iowa.

 

Or it might not.

 

For one thing, other candidates onstage like Mike Pence and Tim Scott will also take Trump to task for going wobbly on fetal life. (I hope.) If you’re an Iowa Republican who’s unhappy with Trump’s abortion comments but who feels lukewarm about DeSantis, you’ll have other options.

 

Even if that happens, though, we’re all far too jaded by now to expect Trump’s apostasy on abortion to cost him meaningful support in the primary. “In 2016, Trump had to hew to social-conservative orthodoxy to win the Republican nomination. Now, he may well define the orthodoxy,” Rich Lowry wrote recently. DeSantis’ campaign strategy was premised on that not being true, that Trump’s voters would gravitate to him as he got to the frontrunner’s right on policy—on “wokeness,” on vaccines, on regulating tech companies, and so on.

 

But Lowry is right. DeSantis’ strategy has, accordingly, failed at every turn. Voters don’t want the most populist or the most conservative candidate on the issues, it turns out. They want Trump and will massage their own policy preferences to accommodate him. Why would the issue of abortion be any different?

 

Wednesday night is more likely to be the beginning of the end for DeSantis than a new beginning. He won’t get the free pass from the rest of the field that he got at the first debate; Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley will each want to damage him for different reasons. And while his pro-life pitch could earn him a second look from less-Trumpy Republicans, I wouldn’t count on it: He’s lost 20 points among self-described moderates in New Hampshire since July, the bitter fruit of having spent nine months trying to outflank Trump on the right. I suspect those voters will find his six-week abortion ban in Florida either too draconian or, if not, insufficient to offset the many populist sins of which he’s guilty.

 

Or, maybe, they’ll do what voters usually do and form their opinions based on shallow intangibles like charisma or “likability” more so than minute policy differences. In which case there’s almost certainly nothing DeSantis can do to right the ship.

 

So if any consolidating is going to happen after debate two, it’s probably going to happen around Haley.

 

***

 

Nikki Haley is the only candidate beside Trump who’s gained in national polling since debate one. On August 23, she was at 3.2 percent. Today she’s at 5.4.

 

Not so impressive, particularly given the hype after the first debate about how strongly she performed. But if you look at the early-state polling, you’ll find signs of life. She’s in third place at 9 percent now in Iowa; in second at 14.7 percent in her home state of South Carolina; and at 13.7 percent in New Hampshire, also good for second. The New Hampshire result surprises me given how much time Chris Christie has spent there and how doggedly DeSantis’ campaign has tried to frame the primary as a two-man race, but Haley keeps chugging along. The latest poll of the state published on Monday also found her in second place at 15 percent with the second-highest net favorable rating of any Republican, behind only Tim Scott.

 

She’s already essentially supplanted DeSantis as Trump’s most formidable opponent in the states that count, in short, and it’s seemingly all because of the impression she made at the first debate on August 23. Against all odds, insofar as that event has now altered the trajectory of the primary, it turns out to have mattered.

 

The good impression she left appears to have mattered in another way. In two major polls lately, Haley has performed notably better head-to-head against Biden than any other Republican. If there’s a serious “electability argument” to be made in this primary, it’s hers rather than DeSantis’ to make.

 

The first poll was published earlier this month by CNN and found Haley leading Biden, 46-41. By comparison, Trump led the president by a point while DeSantis tied with Biden at 47 percent. This past weekend, NBC News corroborated that result: Their new survey has Haley 5 points up on Biden versus a dead heat for Trump and a 1-point deficit for DeSantis. Among college graduates and independents, she fared better than either of them.

 

The obvious caveat is that Trump has more baggage than a 747 and DeSantis has spent nine months being torn to shreds by MAGA diehards while no one has laid a glove on Haley. (Although that might be changing. She just got her first Trump nickname!) Once she starts taking flak for her less popular opinions, her margin over Biden should shrink. But for the moment, she’s fulfilling the promise of DeSantis’ candidacy. The governor of Florida vowed he’d be more electable than Trump but hasn’t proved it in head-to-head polling; the former governor of South Carolina has.

 

If her numbers against Biden remain lofty, they might begin to convince Republican voters that the party really does have a stronger nominee available than Trump. Electability matters! And I know someone who agrees:

I don’t mean to overstate Haley’s case. The first threshold of “electability” is winning a primary, of course, and as I said last week, I can’t imagine where a traditional conservative like her would find the votes to do that in an electorate like this one. I quote myself: “The Republican Party in 2023 is a party by and for demagogues. Nikki Haley isn’t a demagogue.” Her realistic best-case scenario is something like the short end of a 66-33 split with Trump.

 

But I do think it’s possible that she’ll ultimately consolidate the party’s Trump-leery vote, and that the process might begin on Wednesday night.

 

If she has another standout debate, roundhousing DeSantis for some of his populist excesses and batting around Ramaswamy on foreign policy like a cat playing with a mouse, traditional conservative voters spread among Pence, Scott, and Christie will begin to consider their options. Fat cats will perk up too. In fact, they already have. “I was with her in New York at a fundraiser last week and it was a room packed with major New York donors who were really hearing her for the first time,” one wealthy Haley supporter told the New York Times on Tuesday. “This is a pivotal week.”

 

Should Haley emerge again as the star of the debate, you can foresee a cycle of “good vibes” that becomes self-propelling. Some conservative voters in other camps will defect to her; her polls will go up, driving further media buzz about a Haley boomlet; donors will begin to swing away from DeSantis and toward her as the only non-Trump candidate in the race who’s shown signs of life in six months; that’ll drive further good buzz; and suddenly the perception might take hold that Nikki Haley is the only game in town for righties who want something different in 2024.

 

If Pence, Christie, and Scott begin shedding support, there’s even a chance she’ll persuade them to endorse her before Iowa, encouraging further consolidation of the non-Trump bloc. Remember, the pressure on also-rans to avoid the mistake of 2016 by getting out early this time and giving undecided Republican voters a binary “Trump or Not Trump” choice will be enormous. The debate is Haley’s chance to seize the “Not Trump” crown off of DeSantis’ head and begin moving toward that binary choice.

 

She seems eager to do so.

 

***

 

This should be the “DeSantis versus Haley debate,” then, and not just because the two are suddenly in a deathmatch for second place in the polls. No two candidates onstage better represent the two wings of the Trump-era GOP. On issue after issue, they’re opposed.

 

Entitlement reform? The populist DeSantis wants hands off while the conservative Haley thinks it’s time to start tweaking retirement ages.

 

Ukraine? The populist DeSantis doesn’t want to increase U.S. funding for the war effort or to see Ukraine admitted to NATO. The conservative Haley is a staunch Russia hawk who’s been calling for the country to join NATO for months.

 

A government shutdown? The populist DeSantis has been egging on House Freedom Caucus types to fight, fight, fight Kevin McCarthy until he meets their demands on spending. The conservative Haley thinks fighting to the point that the government shuts down is “irresponsible and inexcusable.”

 

The UAW strike? The populist DeSantis has been cagey but complained in an interview that Biden’s electric-vehicle incentives are a threat to the auto industry and its workers. The conservative Haley touted her “union-buster” credentials as governor and grumbled about the exorbitant pay raise the UAW is demanding: “When you have the most pro-union president and he touts that he is emboldening the unions, this is what you get.”

 

Abortion? That’s a little complicated.

 

At first blush, the roles are reversed here. It’s DeSantis who took the traditionally conservative position of signing a strict six-week ban into law in Florida whereas Haley has called for “consensus” at the national level, not unlike Trump babbling lately about a compromise between the two sides. But drill down on specifics and it’s harder to tell them apart. Haley thinks there’s a federal role for restricting abortion but is skeptical that the votes are there in Congress whereas DeSantis seems to favor a “bottom-up” federalist approach to the matter.

 

I think they’re both trapped on a tightrope, struggling to find a position that’s righteous enough for ardent pro-lifers without scaring away swing voters in a general election. And so they’ve arrived at roughly the same place, willing to crack down at the state level yet skittish about making any false moves federally. But that’s not to say they won’t clash on the subject on Wednesday: DeSantis might well challenge Haley on her “consensus” comments in order to get to her right among evangelical voters in Iowa. And Haley might double down on “consensus” in order to make herself a little more palatable to populist Republicans who aren’t as invested in the pro-life cause.

 

They have every policy reason and every strategic reason to attack each other. But that’s not true of the rest of the candidates onstage, who’ll need to make a hard choice.

 

If you’re Mike Pence, Chris Christie, or Tim Scott, do you go after DeSantis, Haley, or the absent Trump? DeSantis is the easier target from a policy standpoint since he’s a populist proxy for the frontrunner. If the setting for the debate—the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California—means anything, it should lead traditional conservatives to unite against the common populist enemy.

 

But DeSantis is no longer their first problem in the primary. He’s a fading star whereas Haley’s star is rising and threatening to take their conservative voters along with it. So, strategically, the best thing they can do to preserve what’s left of their viability is … to reenact the crabs-in-a-bucket scenario from 2016 by trying to tear Haley down before she runs away with the Trump-leery bloc.

 

That is to say, their goal tomorrow night might be to avert consolidation. Even though doing so will redound almost entirely to the benefit of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.

 

I’m not optimistic that they’ll lay aside their personal ambition and do the thing that’s best for the party and for the country because, well, how often has any member of this party done that over the last eight years? But in fairness, these aren’t ordinary Republicans: Mike Pence famously did the right thing at a critical moment once before and Chris Christie has gone further than practically anyone else in the party in opposing a second Trump term.

 

So maybe they’ll attack the demagogue who’s 50 points ahead of everyone instead of attacking the conservative who’s 5 points in front of them.

 

I believe in my heart and soul that, if we band together and behave selflessly, there are still enough classical liberals in this party to lose a “Trump versus Not Trump” primary by only 35 points. We can do it! It starts, perhaps, onstage tomorrow night.