Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate in Las Vegas is the final GOP primary debate of 2015. With about a month and a half before the first primary contest—the Iowa caucuses on February 1—it’s become clear the field of plausible contenders is much smaller than the 13 Republicans who will debate in two separate events Tuesday night. It’s possible December 15 will be the last time Republican voters see most of the whole band together before the forthcoming breakup. So which candidates should be cut loose after tonight?
Let’s begin with the first event, the “undercard” debate: future debate organizers should make a New Year’s resolution to scrap it in the months ahead. The undercard debates have had some utility in 2015. Two main-stage debaters Tuesday night, Carly Fiorina and Chris Christie, have spent one debate each on the kids’ stage, giving both candidates a much-needed sense of urgency to perform well.
But the undercard has outlived its usefulness, and Tuesday’s participants—Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, George Pataki, and Rick Santorum—are polling so poorly they barely register as blips in the Real Clear Politics averages of national and early state polls. Onetime undercarders Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal recognized they were going nowhere in the presidential race and got out. It’s up to each candidate himself—and their donor(s)—whether he should quit the campaigns, but the TV networks ought to do their part to encourage our hapless undercarders by dropping the increasingly useless JV debates.
Meanwhile, there are a couple of candidates performing way below their status as main-stage debaters—chiefly Kentucky senator Rand Paul, whose hide was saved from the undercard by the generous folks at CNN. Paul is leading a libertarian movement in the Republican party that’s atrophied away in the same way his poll numbers have. His best position is in Iowa, where he’s been stalled out since August at below four percent support. Paul is simultaneously running for reelection to his Senate seat. In the unlikely event he delivers an all-star performance Tuesday night and prompts a stampede of supporters to bolt from Ted Cruz, he’s likely to spend the next 10 months campaigning in his old Kentucky home.
The same might be said for Carly Fiorina, who burst onto the main stage in September after the only breakout performance on the undercard stage in August. Fiorina’s spurt of support has sputtered out, however, and she’s in Rand-Paul territory in most of the poll averages. Like Paul, she doesn’t have an early state to hold out for. Fiorina’s polling best in New Hampshire, at an average of 4.7 percent, but that puts her behind 7 other candidates. Without a compelling message beyond her ability to skewer Hillary Clinton as perhaps none of the male Republican candidates could, it’s hard to see a reason for her candidacy, or her appearance on the debate stage, after December.
If we stipulate the debate presence of the top four candidates—Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Marco Rubio—we still have to contend with the three remaining governors, all of whom are doing poorly in the national polls but are jockeying for position in New Hampshire. There’s a good argument for keeping New Jersey’s Chris Christie in the debates, since he appears to be on the rise in New Hampshire. One recent poll found him in second place to longtime leader Donald Trump, for instance.
If we have to get rid of one of the governors, the choice would have to be John Kasich of Ohio, who is trailing Christie and Jeb Bush in all but one set of poll averages (he has a smidgen of a lead over Bush in New Hampshire). Kasich and a super PAC supporting him have invested a lot of time and resources into New Hampshire, but he’s been unable to catch any kind of break there in the way Christie has in the last month. Kasich’s plainspoken centrism has appealed to the mainstream media, and he’s had some charming moments in the past debates, but the two-term Ohio governor would probably need a breakout performance Tuesday night, akin to Fiorina’s in the August undercard debate, to boost his poll numbers and justify a spot in the January debates.
Finally, there’s the tricky case of erstwhile frontrunner Jeb Bush, currently polling at 4 percent nationally, 5 percent in Iowa, and 7 percent in New Hampshire. Unfortunately for a would-be insurgent campaign, Bush has whatever the opposite of momentum is. Given his past debate performances, which range from middling to disastrous, there’s no reason to think Bush could create that necessary momentum heading out of Las Vegas. Unless he’s spent the last month perfecting a line that will finally take out either Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, or both.
And yet, Bush has built a complex campaign machine that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon, unless the candidate himself calls it quits. One result of that machine is that it’s been generating some interesting policy proposals. These wonky white papers don’t translate into support, clearly, but they do add to the overall Republican primary process. Last week, for example,the Bush campaign released a detailed plan to “restore the proper balance of power” between the federal government and those of the states. It’s an interesting idea, one worth discussion in the nationally televised debates even if the candidate proposing it has increasingly little chance to win the nomination. Maybe it’s worth it to keep Bush in the mix until his poll numbers drop into the margin of error.
Circumstances could and likely will change between Tuesday’s Las Vegas debate and the next one on January 14 in South Carolina. But a debate that had six GOP candidates—Trump, Cruz, Carson, Rubio, Christie, and Bush—might give Republican voters Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and the rest a better chance to hear deeper questions, longer answers, and a clearer picture of what the choices really are in the 2016 primary.
