In a lot of ways, tonight’s Republican debate looks like the lowest-stakes of the three debates so far. We know what the candidates all look like in a debate setting; we know which lanes they’re each slotted into. And while there will be ten candidates on stage, the field really isn’t that big anymore-a few of these are zombie campaigns, just waiting for the candidate to put them down.
And on top of everything else, the show is up against the World Series. So reasonable Americans should be watching baseball instead of politics.
Of course, just because the stakes look low, that doesn’t mean it’ll play out that way. Because debates are like guns. You know the first rule of gun safety: All guns are loaded. That applies to debates. Candidates have to respect them at all times, because even the most boring, ho-hum debate has the potential to go off at any minute.
Let’s look at the upside/downside potential for the players.
Donald Trump has shown that he can have a not-yuge performance, as he did last time, and still have his poll numbers hold up pretty well. He dipped after the second debate, but the collapse most people keep anticipating hasn’t happened. Also, Trump has been getting better on the stump and you suspect that if he cared to, he could probably get better on the debate stage, too.
I continue to think that his upside for the debate is limited-we’ve seen him have a good debate, and bad one, and in both cases his support settled around the same band. His people are his people, but his ability to win folks over in a debate seems limited.
In both previous debates, I thought Trump had a sizeable downside risk and I think the same is true tonight, but for a different reason: He’s being confronted by the prospect of a surging Ben Carson. And I may be wrong, but I suspect that Trump engages with Carson at his own peril.
Look, it’s one thing for Trump to beat up on Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and John McCain. They’re the Three Horsemen of the Establishment and for Trump voters, the establishment GOP is even more pernicious than the Democratic party. Getting into a tiff with Carly Fiorina is fine, too, because she’s the most insidery-outsider candidate you’ve even seen.
But Ben Carson is none of those things.
Ben Carson is suddenly in second (or even first) place—and has a sizeable lead in Iowa. Why shouldn’t Trump try to take him down? Because Republican voters love him. Carson’s net positives are enormous. There are lots of metrics on this; I’ll give you two of them.
(1) This big Target Point survey of attitudes has the percentage of Republicans “considering” or “strongly considering” voting for Carson at 70 percent—by far the biggest number in the field. (Rubio and Fiorina are tied for second at 62 percent; Trump is third at 56 percent.)
(2) This Quinnipiac poll of Iowa Republicans asked who are you absolutely not willing to vote for? Four percent said Carson. Again, this is the best number in the field. (Care to guess who has the highest will not vote for number? Thirty percent say “no way” for Trump; 21 percent for Bush. Ouch.)
So Trump probably shouldn’t take shots at the most well-liked guy in the race, even if Carson is nipping at his heels.
I think Carson still has upside, even with his rise in the polls. He’s exactly the kind of candidate who could win in Iowa. He’s really likable. And he’s the one guy in the field you could see making a speech like Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing.”
More than anything else, Carson needs to look like a guy who could hold his own against Hillary Clinton in a debate. And this is both his opportunity and his challenge. Everyone has had a look at Clinton’s fastball now and Republicans should understand that while she isn’t invincible, she isn’t her SNL caricature, either. If Carson clears this bar, watch out. If he doesn’t, he won’t be able to stay in the top-tier.
Marco Rubio is chugging along at just under 10 percent and as weird as this sounds, I think he’s right where he wants to be. Because of his political talents, there should be a giant target on Rubio’s back, yet the other campaigns aren’t treating him as a looming threat. That will change at some point. But before the attacks come, every chance Rubio has to introduce himself and talk to voters is a net positive for him. (In that Quinnipiac poll asking who would you not vote for, Rubio finished just behind Carson at 6 percent. People like him a lot, too.)
So Rubio is all upside tonight. At some point the other campaigns are going to take him seriously and by then it might be too late.
Ted Cruz is in the same position as Rubio—he’s basically where he wants to be. If he gives another strong performance (and keeps organizing and raising money the way he has) it becomes harder and harder not to see him in the final grouping come February.
He has a pretty big upside tonight, as he always does on a debate stage. His only potential downside is this: At some point, Cruz may decide that he has to go after Trump. If anyone can do it, it’s Cruz. But it’s a risky proposition. He’s probably better off waiting to see if Trump comes back to earth on his own now that there’s real weakness in his Iowa numbers.
Jeb Bush is in all kinds of trouble. On the one hand, you can understand Mike Murphy’s argument that Bush just needs to be able to power through until February, at which point his Super PAC juggernaut makes him uniquely positioned to do well. On the other hand, this theory means that he has to slog it out to February, which is a long ways off. He has to do that while convincing donors to keep his campaign alive, rather than defecting to Rubio. And for a guy who was the answer to a question no one in America was asking, he seems to be having a really lousy time running for president. (At this point the “!” is almost ironic.)
Alone among the candidates, Bush may have a great deal riding on tonight. If we’re not there already, we’re probably close to the point where Bush has to show the money why he’s a superior alternative to Rubio (or Chris Christie, even) rather than the other way around. Because if the money jumps, there is no Jeb! campaign. At the risk of sounding alarmist, Bush’s downside might be existential.
Carly Fiorina isn’t in as dire a situation as Bush, but she has a lot riding tonight, too. One of the mysteries of 2016 is the disappearance of her big bounce after the second debate. She went from 12 percent and breathless media coverage to 5.4 percent and—nothing. It’s possible that this fade was the result of catastrophic success: Fiorina popped before she had the base or organization to do anything with the momentum. But Carson and Trump aren’t exactly out-organizing the field.
If Fiorina isn’t a stand-out tonight, she could become an also-ran. But if she has another Daniel Murphy night? We could be looking at a Trump-Fiorina ticket! A boy can dream . . .
And finally there’s Rand Paul. If you’re a Paul supporter, enjoy him now, because you may not see him in another one of these debates. Paul has no upside or downside. He’s finished and I’d make it an even-money proposition as to whether he even gets to Iowa.
Oh, there’s the rest of the field, too: Of the bottom three, Chris Christie remains the guy with the best chance to improve his situation, just by dint of his talent. (Part of me wonders if his ejection from the Amtrak Quiet Car was a shoot, or a worked-shoot. I suspect the latter.)
Mike Huckabee is never going to get the magic back—another lesson (which Christie has also painfully learned) on how timing is everything.
And with the slow eclipse of Bush, John Kasich’s best hope for appearing on a presidential ticket is disappearing, too. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
