The Republicans are back onstage in a debate that presents some interesting strategic opportunities.
Let’s evaluate the landscape by looking at the candidates’ upside vs. downside potential.
First though, an observation: The central fact of the race so far has been the sheer number of quality candidates. There were more people running (17) and more high-quality, plausible candidates (8 or 10, depending on how you count) than in any cycle in the modern political era. This volume of horseflesh shaped the dynamic of the race in fundamental (and unpredictable) ways. You can’t underestimate the importance of those numbers.
Yet suddenly, the field is actually quite small. Yes, there will be seven people on the main stage tonight and another three in the JV debate. But it seems overwhelmingly likely that there are really only three (or at most four) of them with a legitimate shot to win the nomination. Which means that suddenly the field of actual contenders is the same size (or even a little smaller) than it was at this point in 1992 or 2008.
That’s an incredibly rapid contraction, which means that windows have been shrinking at a frightful pace-probably faster than in any cycle we’ve seen before. Again, I suspect that this dynamic is influencing the race in ways that aren’t immediately visible, but are deeply important.
Just something to keep your eye on. Now let’s get to the racing form.
Donald Trump: At this point people are waking up to the possibility that he could actually win this thing. I suspect that Trump has probably thought he could win all along, but there’s a difference between supreme self-confidence and being able to see the finish line, which is where he is right now.
Trump’s big danger is the same one Howard Dean faced: He has excited a large group of nontraditional Republican primary voters. As Philip Bump points out in the reading list down below, if these supporter show up for him, Trump has a real shot at winning the nomination. If they don’t, he’s toast.
(An aside: The more I think about Trump and Dean, the more similarities between them I see. Both were dynamic, unscripted candidates. Both had a penchant for staking out positions that their party elites thought were poison, but which always seemed to help them in the polls. Both inspired intense levels of devotion. Neither was ever willing to apologize, for anything. And most important, both men changed the official ideological orientation of their party on the issue of maximum interest to the party faithful-immigration for Trump and Iraq for Dean.)
So what’s Trump’s debate upside? If he can make Ted Cruz look like just another establishment senator, just another politician, he can really help himself. People seem to have penciled in a win for Cruz in Iowa, but the race there is nip and tuck right now-just Cruz +3 in the RealClear average. If Trump were to win Iowa and then win NH a week later (where he’s currently +18), his chances of being the nominee go way up.
The downside for Trump is the same as it always is: If he is badly exposed on policy it risks popping the entire balloon. And I don’t mean having someone like Jeb Bush lecture him on not being “serious,” but a misstep that reveals how little Trump knows about an important issue. (As almost happened in the last debate with Marco Rubio teaching Trump about the nuclear triad.)
There’s another potential downside, though. If Trump decides to go agro on Ted Cruz, he will find himself in a dangerous spot. Cruz isn’t Jeb Bush, John Kasich, or Rand Paul; in a debate setting he has the ability to see around corners. Trump ought to respect that before getting into a land war with him.
Ted Cruz: A couple weeks ago I thought that Cruz might be peaking a week or two too soon. Now it looks like his timing is just about right. If he’s the nominee, we will look back on his victory over this stacked Republican field as one of the great strategic conquests in American political history.
The Cruz upside is enormous because he stands poised to capture two opposing wings of the electorate. On the one side, he’s ready to scoop up Trump supporters should they become disenchanted with their hero. On the other side, he’s ready to scoop up more mainstream conservatives if they decide they need to rally to a not-Trump. Sit back for a moment and admire the genius.
All he needs to do to accomplish the latter is to continue to box Marco Rubio in on immigration, which he did with remarkable effectiveness at the last debate.
As for downside, there is still the chance that Cruz peaked early. A victory in Iowa has been priced into his stock at this point and he’s already seeing some slippage in the polls there. If he finishes second in Iowa at this point, that’s a loss. So he needs two sterling debates–tonight and on January 28–without losing ground. If he does that, and wins Iowa, then he has a good chance of being the nominee.
Marco Rubio: I’ve been saying all along that Rubio was a thoroughbred and the smart-money bet for 2016. For the first time in the cycle, I’m starting to hedge. Strategically, nothing has changed for Rubio: As Jay Cost pointed out a couple weeks ago, Rubio isn’t doing the Giuliani-option so much as the (Bill) Clinton-option in terms of calendar management.
All he has to do is finish respectably in Iowa (where he’s a solid third) and ahead of the Christie-Bush-Kasich hydra in New Hampshire. If he does that, the rest of the moderate and mainstream conservatives drop out, Rubio absorbs their supporters, and suddenly it’s an evenly split three-way delegate race down the stretch with the later winner-take-all states favoring Rubio.
But Rubio was bloodied by Cruz in the last debate on immigration and he doesn’t seem to have realized it. His central challenge has always been to convince voters that he has genuinely and forcefully changed his position on immigration. He accomplished that in the early part of the campaign, but Cruz succeeded in re-litigating the question and Rubio hasn’t put it back to bed.
That’s his big upside tonight. Forget trying to muddy the waters or tell voters that if you go deep enough there’s not much daylight between him and Cruz. If he can convince voters that he is going to secure the border, that he isn’t going to amnesty illegals-no way, no how-and that yes, this is a change of his position and that he changed it because of President Obama, then he’ll be well positioned going forward.
It also wouldn’t hurt for Rubio let go of some of his optimism and adopt Trump’s more realistic diagnosis of where America is today. As Mark Steyn notes,
Rubio’s real downside is this: For his strategy to work, he probably has to beat the other guys in his lane in New Hampshire. Which means that he’s going to have Chris Christie bird-dogging him all night. And there is no one you want to have sitting on you for two hours less than Christie. Rubio needs to deal with him effectively, which is no small challenge.
Chris Christie: I have such immense respect for Christie’s political skills that I’m totally unsurprised to find him in the final four and nipping at Rubio’s heels in New Hampshire. But at the same time, I’m not sure how much upside Christie has at this point. He can win tactical victories by beating Rubio in New Hampshire (where he’s close) or maybe even Iowa (where he’s spent more time than you think). But at this point, it’s not clear where he would go after that.
If things broke right, he could win the establishment lane and force Rubio from the race. But by that point, the real action would be Trump versus Cruz and Christie would likely be too far back to challenge for the nomination. I’d like Christie’s chances heads-up with either Cruz or Trump, but not in a come-from-behind position against both of them.
The good news is that Christie doesn’t have a ton of downside at the debate. He gets to focus like a laser on Rubio knowing that they’re fighting over the same pot of voters in a single state. The bad news is that if he finishes behind Rubio in New Hampshire, he’s probably done.
As for the rest of the candidates on the stage tonight, they’re all sideshows at this point and will only matter to the extent that they influence voters on the final four.
