Make no mistake: getting bumped from the primetime debate is bad news for a Republican presidential campaign. The undercard debate, to which Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee have been relegated next week, serves mainly to reinforce the perception that its participants are losers.
Christie and Huckabee are also the first two primetime debaters to fall from the main line-up, while Lindsey Graham and George Pataki have joined Jim Gilmore in not even qualifying for the undercard event. All of these candidates are struggling and this downward movement will have people asking why they are even still running.
All that being said, perhaps Christie can take a page from the only candidate to graduate from the undercard to primetime — the New Jersey governor could dominate the Fox Business undercard debate as thoroughly as Carly Fiorina dominated the first one.
It won’t be easy. Huckabee is no slouch as a debater himself and the surviving undercard participants, Rick Santorum and Bobby Jindal, are the most eloquent of the lower-polling candidates.
But Christie is a force in his own right. He needs to use a Donald Trump-free forum as his time to shine. Even a modest bump could put him back on the main debate stage next time around.
The obvious counterpoint to this is that Christie is coming off his best debate performance (in fact, he had two strong debates in a row) and it didn’t help him. How much can he really expect to get out of the less-watched earlier debate? And while Fiorina has continued to poll well enough for primetime, she’s had trouble sustaining the momentum created by her initial debate successes.
Yet if Christie is going to continue his presidential campaign, he has to play the bad hand he’s been dealt the best way he can. Knocking it out of the park in a debate with just four candidates and none of the biggest celebrities in the race might be the only way to keep his struggling bid alive.
