A First Look At the GOP Field in New Hampshire

The forum skirted the Republican National Committee’s debate rules by having the candidates take the stage individually, in two rounds. With short and strictly-enforced time limits for each candidate, the event moved quickly and, at times, chaotically. While not on stage, the candidates sat in the front row of the auditorium, watching their competitors answer a few questions from the moderator. It was an odd set-up—Chris Christie told me a few hours before that it would feel more like they were all running for student body president—but one that allowed every participant more or less equal time to make their case to the voters of New Hampshire and those watching at home on C-SPAN.

The event also made clear how much deeper and better the Republican field is compared with that of the 2012 cycle. Some of the best performances came from those candidates who are unlikely to end up in this week’s first RNC-sanctioned debate in Cleveland. Three candidates did not attend: Donald Trump, Mike Huckabee, and Jim Gilmore.

Here’s a rundown of how each participant performed, in alphabetical order.

Jeb Bush
The format should have played to Bush’s strengths—a seated conversation with mostly policy-based questions. And the former Florida governor had a couple good lines, including one concerning his promise to produce four-percent economic growth as president, something the liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has ridiculed. “The fact that Paul Krugman disagrees with me warms my heart.”

But Bush failed to give direct and succinct answers to a couple questions from the moderator. Asked if he would give the order to deploy ground troops to the Middle East to defeat ISIS, Bush said, “I would take the advice of the military very seriously. We need a strategy, first…. Yeah, I think we need special forces. Boots on the ground? I’m not sure that’s necessary.” Near the end, Bush tried to lightheartedly praise his father while touting a T-shirt his campaign is selling, but he mangled it and ended up confusing the audience.

Ben Carson
The neurosurgeon-turned-conservative-folk-hero has run a subdued campaign so far, but Carson delivered a good performance in New Hampshire Monday night. With his characteristically calm demeanor, he dealt with questions about Obamacare and the Supreme Court methodically. Carson was light on specifics. His critique of Obamacare focused more on how it passed five years ago than the problems it’s causing to the health-care system today. And asked what sort of qualifications he would look for in a nominee to the high court, Carson said he’d be “making sure that they truly understand the Constitution.”

Carson made a strong case for why someone without political experience, like himself, can offer a new and better path forward for the country. But overall, the quiet doctor didn’t stand out at the forum, which doesn’t bode well for his ability to do so at Thursday’s higher-profile debate on Fox News.

Chris Christie
Christie demonstrated why he’s not to be underestimated as an alternative establishment candidate to Jeb Bush. His “tell-it-like-it-is” routine plays well and rings true, particularly when discussing the need to reform federal entitlements. The problem, in his words, isn’t the inability for Americans to embrace the necessary changes to Social Security and Medicare. “The problem is us,” he said, gesturing to himself and his fellow politicians. “We underestimate the American people.” 

The New Jersey governor has spent a great deal of time in New Hampshire, holding long town hall meetings (the next one, his sixteenth, is Tuesday morning) where he engages in the humorous and personal back-and-forth he’s become well known for. On display Monday night, however, was the other, introspective side of Christie, particularly when he was asked why he decided to run. The subtext to the question was Christie’s precipitous fall in the expectations game following the Bridgegate scandal in 2014.

Christie said when he considered running for president in 2012, he looked in the mirror and decided he wasn’t ready for the job. “Everything that’s happened to me in the last 4 years, both good and bad, have made me better,” he said. “I’m ready.”

Ted Cruz
Of the three senators who spoke remotely from Washington, Cruz had the best performance. While Rand Paul and Marco Rubio struggled with the satellite delay and fumbled some answers, Cruz’s more deliberate and dramatic style played well, at least on the screens in the auditorium.

Cruz offered a stinging critique of the nuclear deal with Iran. “I believe this Obama-Iranian nuclear deal is the single gravest national security threat facing America. It is a catastrophic deal,” he said, detailing the concessions the United States has made. He repeated his provocative point that, by facilitating the deal, President Obama’s has become the world’s top financier of Islamic terrorism.

On domestic policy, Cruz stuck to fairly predictable talking points about what Obamacare should be replaced with, including the allowing the purchase of insurance across state lines, expanding health-savings accounts, and “de-linking” insurance from employment to make it more affordable and portable. Standard Republican positions, to be sure, but Cruz delivered them smoothly and efficiently, which comported well with the format.

Carly Fiorina
After bursting out of the gate early with her incisive criticism of Hillary Clinton, Fiorina has been somewhat left behind in the discussion since Donald Trump began to suck up airtime. Her low poll numbers will keep her out of Thursday’s main debate, but if she can somehow break through before the September debate and deliver another performance like Monday’s, she could surprise.

Fiorina began with a jab at the efforts by the RNC to limit the debates, peppered in her stump-speech knocks against Hillary. “She lied about Benghazi,” she said. “They knew it was a purposeful terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11. She went to the American people and talked some fiction about a videotape.”

She argued that Republicans needed someone willing to take on the former secretary of state. “We have to have a nominee on our side who is going to throw every punch,” she said. She also offered substantive criticism of the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law, pointing out that the “reform” has crushed small community banks while consolidating ten “too big to fail” banks into five even larger ones. Close Carly-watchers will have recognized it and other points from her stump speech, but Fiorina made her case cleanly and effectively. 

Lindsey Graham
Graham is barely registering in national polls, but he was the most entertaining on the stage Monday night. Known around the Senate as a cut-up, the South Carolina Republican had the audience giggling over one-liners about Bill Clinton (“When Bill says ‘I didn’t have sex with that women,’ he did.”) and his approach to trade and foreign policies (Offering a “clenched fist and an open hand: You choose.”). While reminiscing about the good old days, when Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill would hammer out disagreements over whiskey, Graham suggested “Maybe we need to drink more in Washington.”

Graham took the opportunity to focus on his favorite topics, national security and defense spending. He emphasized the danger posed by unchecked tyrants like Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad. “If you don’t deal with Syria we’re going to get hit here,” he said.

Bobby Jindal
On paper, Jindal seems like an ideal Republican candidate for president: Youthful, intelligent, a two-term governor, and a minority. At age 44, he’s already had the career of a lifetime public servant. As Jindal told me after the forum, “I’m the youngest candidate with the longest resume.” He’s gained the reputation of a thoughtful conservative wonk.

But his performances so far are hewing too closely to a prepared catchphrases, and Monday night was no different. The lines were all familiar: “I am so tired of the left and this president trying to divide us.” “We’re not hyphenated Americans.” “We’ve got a lot of talkers. We need a doer.” They’re good applause lines, but taken together they create an unmemorable routine. 

John Kasich
The Ohio governor is among the newest in the field, and he’s clearly vying to be a Bush/Christie hybrid: a tough-talking, truth-telling compassionate conservative. On NAFTA and trade, Kasich said, “I’m basically a free trader, but I’m a fair trader.” Economic growth, he said, shouldn’t just be “an end unto itself” but rather should be a way to lend help to those in need.

Kasich argued that dealing with the 12 million or so illegal immigrants would mean allowing the “law-abiding, God-fearing” ones to remain in the country while deporting or imprisoning those who break the laws. It’s the sort of position that will help him appeal to more moderate Republicans.

Referring back to his time as House budget committee, Kasich touted the balanced budgets he got through during the late 1990s. He also called for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. “We don’t have the right to live high on the hog and leave the bills to our children,” he said.

George Pataki
Pataki spent the evening trying to dispel the notion that he is an afterthought in the Republican primary, offering some concrete positions on issues and reminding the audience of his experience as a three-term former governor of New York. He made direct, bold pronouncements, though he didn’t always go into detail. “We should get rid of Obamacare, we should get rid of Common Core, and we should cut the federal workforce by 50 percent,” Pataki said. He also spoke movingly about how being governor of New York during the September 11, 2001, attacks changed his life.

But if Pataki wanted to make the case why a pro-choice, Northeastern, 70-year-old former governor belongs in the race for president, he failed to do that Monday. He gave half-hearted answers to questions about gun control and Planned Parenthood funding that belied his more liberal views on those issues.

Rand Paul
Like Cruz, Paul was on a satellite feed from Washington. Unlike Cruz, his delivery was occasionally awkward and halting. (He mistakenly referred to his recent bill to defund Obamacare, when it actually defunds Planned Parenthood.) The Kentucky senator proclaimed he wanted to make a “new Republican party” and suggested he could offer a new way forward for the GOP, but Paul effectively dodged questions that would have allowed him to focus on how he differs from the field.

One question about how his father, libertarian Ron Paul, influences his political philosophy led the younger Paul to call himself a “constitutional conservative” in a long answer that never actually mentioned his father. Another, about whether or not the United States should strip the citizenship of those who fight for terrorist groups like ISIS, prompted Paul to make a distinction between those who are “pointing a gun” at fellow Americans on the battlefield and those who aren’t doing so at home. But what about those Americans like Anwar al-Awlaki, who didn’t fire a weapon but did recruit for al Qaeda overseas? It was an answer, and a performance, that wasn’t likely to encourage his libertarian base nor Republicans who like him but are skeptical of his national security views.

Rick Perry
What a difference four years can make. After his disastrous and embarrassing run for president in 2012, Perry hunkered down and made an effort to prepare for another run this time around. For those who only remember his debate stumbles, Perry’s Monday solid performance must have made him seem like a completely different candidate. Smooth and with a command of the facts, Perry looked and sounded like a top-tier candidate. Except…

Except the specter of the 2012 “oops” moment still haunts him. The moderator alluded to this when he asked a very similar question: “What agencies would you either eliminate or cut?” Perry got a laugh when he responded, “I’ve heard this question before.” But in the next several minutes of Perry’s rambling answer, he failed to actually name any agencies. It was less a devastating moment than a reminder of how much more ground Perry has had to make up in his second bid for president. It’s increasingly likely the former Texas governor won’t be in Thursday’s debate, but his overall performance at the Monday forum suggests he would have had a much better outing in Cleveland than most would have thought.

Marco Rubio
The satellite feed was not Rubio’s friend either, with the Florida senator stepping over the moderator’s questions more often than not. Being separate from the audience hurt his ability to gauge the room, and several of his answers ran long. Rubio does best with aspirational rhetoric, but trying to shoehorn that into answers to specific policy questions with just a couple minutes of speaking time proved difficult.

Among the presidential candidates, Rubio may be the most eloquent critic of the Iran deal and the Obama foreign policy, but instead he was asked about marijuana legalization, a minor topic, and illegal immigration. He said the states ought to be able to consider very narrow uses of marijuana for medicinal purposes but added that “I’m not in support of any additional intoxicants being legalized,” including marijuana.

On illegal immigration, his position was difficult to distinguish from Jeb Bush’s, and Rubio repeated the same talking points he has since his Gang of 8 comprehensive immigration reform effort failed in the Senate two years ago. He called for “proving to the American people that illegal immigration is under control,” “modernizing the legal immigration system,” and providing work permits for otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants. There was not much new on policy from the Florida Republican. 

Rick Santorum
The former Pennsylvania senator and 2012 Republican primary runner-up gets points for offering a specific critique of the economic state and outlook for working Americans. That echoes his message from four years prior, and he benefits from the fact that parts of the GOP have moved in his more populist direction. 

Wages, he said, “have been flat-lined for 20 years” and economic growth has been stagnant. Santorum called for a 25 percent reduction on legal immigration and argued that importing labor from overseas is pushing down the wages of Americans already working in this country. In response to a question about whether America appreciates small businesses anymore, Santorum eschewed the opportunity to pander and instead noted that the vast majority of Americans don’t own or run a business, and that Republicans need to speak to the needs of working people as well as the needs of businessmen.

But his final pitch shows why Santorum continues to struggle to break out in this crowded field. Much as he did in 2012, he focused on his ability to win over blue-collar workers who traditionally vote Democratic. Santorum pointed out he was the only senator in 2000 to win a state the presidential candidate of his party lost that same year. It’s an important point in terms of political calculations, but it sounds gauche coming from the candidate himself, and it didn’t do Santorum any favors in New Hampshire on Monday. 

Scott Walker
Folks close to the Walker campaign love to talk about how the Wisconsin governor is “unflappable” and cool under pressure. This, they say, is what we can expect to see Thursday in the debates, and Walker certainly performed competently in the one-on-one format of Monday’s forum.

He gave viewers a preview of some well-crafted lines, as well. Dealing with entitlements, Walker said, “can’t just be through cuts and austerity. It’s got to be through growth and reform.” His pitch the New Hampshire voters was, “I fought, and I won. We actually won on the big issues.” And, quaintly and refreshingly, he asked the viewers directly for their votes.

But the format also allowed him to get away with not answering questions directly, such as one about whether climate change is real and caused by man. He called President Obama’s newly proposed greenhouse gas emissions standards a “buzzsaw” to the economic growth. “I’m an Eagle Scout. I want to balance a sustainable environment with a sustainable economy,” he said. It was a great position to take in a general election, but it also didn’t answer the moderator’s question. Walker benefits greatly from the goodwill afford to him by Republican voters who know him from the fights over public-sector union reform in Wisconsin. But will he be able to get away with dodges like that when joined by the other candidates on Thursday?