It looked like a four-man race going in. It looks even more that way coming out. The nominee is likely to be either Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or Chris Christie. I don’t know where the polls will go, but you could argue that all four of them helped themselves at the Las Vegas debate.
Trump was Trump. If you like him, you probably liked more at the end of the night. If you didn’t like him, his schoolyard taunting of Bush probably rubbed you the wrong way, but otherwise he didn’t seem like the madman the media portrays him as. And whatever else you might think, he has an excellent sense of what the public believes concerning immigration, Islam, and national security: “We are not talking about isolation. We’re talking about security. We’re not talking about religion. We’re talking about security. Our country is out of control.”
It is not obvious—at all—why this is “not a serious” position, as Bush insisted. It might be imprudent. It might be sub-optimal. But it is not patently ridiculous. And voters who are attracted to Trump’s proposals aren’t crazy for supporting them.
But at the same time you could see Trump’s structural weaknesses. He clearly couldn’t tell the nuclear triad from the Chinese Triad. And Bush was right that a few months ago Trump was saying that ISIS wasn’t our problem. Confronted with this change, Trump simply lied and brazened his way out. These are the types of problems that could eventually prevent him from getting to 50-percent-plus-1.
Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were both, as usual, stellar. Both gave solid, substantive performances informed by smart strategic views of the political space. And Chris Christie cut through a lot of the clutter by being the executive heavy.
What really stuck out about Rubio, Cruz, and Christie, though, is that they’re the only ones preparing for a post-Trump Republican future.
Here’s what I mean by that: Either Donald Trump is going to be the nominee, or he’s going to be Howard Dean. My money is on the latter. But what people forget is that Howard Dean remade the Democratic party even in his defeat. Many of the Deaniacs from 2004 never materialized at the polls. But they didn’t exactly melt away into the countryside. Those activated, passionate Dean-supporters became that backbone of the Obama insurgency that diverted the party from Third-Way Clintonism. There is no Barack Obama without Howard Dean. In many ways, Obama is really Dean 2.0.
In that sense, even if Trump is not the nominee, it seems likely that he will have exerted a large pull on the trajectory of Republican party by creating a totally new coalition of voters around a new set of nationalist ideas. And like the Deaniacs, his supporters might not disappear even if he loses this race.
Which means that a politician who wants to lead the party going forward can’t dismiss Trump’s nationalism with a wave of the hand. He’ll be someone who identifies why people are sympathetic to Trump, can convince those people that he understands their concerns, and manages to synthesize Trumpism with the more traditional conservatism of the party.
Rubio, Cruz, and, to a lesser extent, Christie, weren’t just the people on stage closest to achieving that trifecta—they were the only ones who seemed to understand that Trump supporters aren’t a tide to be turned back, but a group of voters to be won over. And the three least effective debaters—to my eyes, Bush, Kasich, and Paul—were the ones who were openly disdainful of the movement that currently commands a dominating level of support within their party.
