A confession: I didn’t wake up at 4:00 am here in Israel in order to watch last night’s Republican presidential debate. A further confession: I can’t say I regret that decision. But it does mean my judgment of the debate, which follows, is based on reading the transcript rather than watching and rather than seeing others’ immediate reactions to the debate.
On the other hand, there’s perhaps a compensating advantage in a little geographical and temporal distance. It means I’ll ignore the theater critic aspects of the evening—”A won this exchange with B,” “that was a great comeback by X against Y”—which can seem interesting and important in the immediate aftermath of debate, but usually end up not mattering much over the longer run.
So looking at the debate at a distance, in terms of the strategic challenges facing the candidates and lasting damage done or not done, I’m inclined to one big conclusion: Donald Trump won.
Why? Because he’s ahead in the race and suffered no real damage. More specifically, at least three issues that could have done damage to Trump were barely discussed.
1. Obamacare. Which of President Obama’s domestic initiatives, perhaps excepting immigration, do Republican voters dislike the most? Obamacare. Donald Trump did nothing to work against it as it was being passed, has actually said nice things about single payer health care, and hasn’t breathed a word as a candidate about an alternative to Obamacare. But the word Obamacare was only uttered only six times in the debate, each time merely in passing as one of the bad things Obama has done. No candidate tried to distinguish himself as either leading the fight against it or having a plan to replace it. So the voter will conclude: Everyone’s against Obamacare, no one is distinguished by having fought it more aggressively or understanding the issue better or proposing a real alternative to it…and so no points are scored on that issue by Cruz or Rubio against Trump.
2. The Supreme Court. The Supreme Court and the role of the president in selecting Supreme Court justices (and other federal judges) were also mentioned only in passing. Here, too, Trump is vulnerable: He knows the least about legal and constitutional matters, he has no record of speaking or leading on such issues (except on the question of Ted Cruz’s citizenship, for which he cited a leading liberal law professor, Laurence Tribe), and he has a sister who’s a liberal activist judge. The Supreme Court, and more broadly constitutional government, is an area of huge comparative advantage for Cruz, and to some degree for Rubio, who as a senator has at least voted against some liberal judges. But last night Trump dodged the constitutional bullet as well—because none of his opponents even fired it.
3. Vladimir Putin. Trump has made bizarrely pro-Putin comments that suggest he really doesn’t want to make American great again, but that he rather wants to let Putin (and others) continue to marginalize America. Putin’s ascendancy goes hand in hand with American decline, and this is something GOP primary voters know. Indeed, it’s something Cruz and Rubio and the other candidates say all the time. But Putin came up once, in passing, in the debate.
It’s pretty simple, I think: If the other candidates don’t raise issues that are a.) important to GOP voters, and on which b.) Trump is at a comparative disadvantage, they’re not likely to gain on Trump. To the contrary, they allow the impression to further sink in that there’s no reason to worry that a Trump presidency would endanger important conservative policy goals—such as repealing and replacing Obamacare, appointing constitutionalist judges, or standing up Putin (and enemies abroad more generally). If the other candidates continue to allow voters to assume that there’s no difference between Trump and them on these (and other) issues, voters will continue to become increasingly comfortable casting their ballot for Trump.
