MILWAUKEE — Some debates produce clear winners. The Republican showdown here Tuesday night didn’t do that; several candidates did well, or at least pretty well.
Some debates produce clear losers, and on that the Milwaukee Theatre faceoff delivered, with John Kasich the consensus choice for worst performance.
How to measure the extent of Kasich’s loss? First, look inside the theater. The Ohio governor received the loudest boos of the night — from a Republican crowd, of course — during an exchange with Ted Cruz over bank bailouts. When the discussion turned to small banks, Kasich portrayed himself as a pragmatic, problem-solving executive to Cruz’s ideologue.
“What would you do if the bank was failing?” Cruz asked.
“I would not let the people who put their money in there all go down,” Kasich said.
“So you — you would bail them out.”
“No,” said Kasich. “As an executive, I would figure out how to separate those people who can afford it versus those people, or the hard-working folks who put those money in those institutions …”
At that moment, the audience envisioned President Kasich sitting at his desk, determining which of them deserves to keep his money and which deserves to lose it. The boos began.
A thousand miles away, in New Hampshire, the state upon which Kasich has staked his entire campaign, pollster Frank Luntz had gathered a group of Republican voters to watch the debate. Things didn’t going well for Kasich, almost from the beginning.
“My NH focus group is offended by Kasich’s interruptions. Really offended,” tweeted Luntz early in the debate. Luntz, who had given participants a dial device to register their approval or disapproval of each candidate’s performance in real time, noted that Kasich’s early performance earned him the “lowest dials of the #GOPdebate — 25. Doesn’t get worse than that.”
But it did get worse than that. “John Kasich is making everyone really angry,” Luntz tweeted later. Still later: “My #GOPDebate focus group is yelling at the screen. They don’t want Kasich to speak.” And finally, when Kasich portrayed himself as the future judge of Americans’ savings accounts, Luntz tweeted, “Kasich just scored the lowest ever in my focus group. His support of bailouts ‘for people who can afford it’ scored an 8.”
After the debate, Luntz asked anyone “who had a negative reaction to John Kasich tonight” to raise his hand. Almost everyone did.
“I need a word or phrase to describe John Kasich,” Luntz continued.
“Boring,” said one participant.
“Tiring,” said another.
“Irritating,” said another.
“Finished,” said one more.
When Luntz asked what the woman meant by “finished,” she said of Kasich, “He doesn’t belong on the stage. Chris Christie should have been there.”
Back in Milwaukee, in the spin room after the debate, Kasich ally John Sununu, the former New Hampshire senator, suggested Luntz might have included too many Trump or Carson supporters in the group. But the Luntz participants ultimately chose Rubio as the winner, so that explanation seems unlikely.
Meanwhile, Charlie Sykes, the influential Milwaukee conservative radio host who was in the hall for the debate, couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “Trust me, nobody in this hall…Nobody…wants to go have a beer with Kasich afterwards,” Sykes tweeted. Sykes devoted a significant part of his post-debate analysis Wednesday morning to discuss just how negatively the Milwaukee crowd reacted to Kasich.
Kasich is currently seventh in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls. He’s tenth in Iowa — he’s not really playing there at all — but fourth in New Hampshire. What will happen now? If other New Hampshire reactions echo those of Luntz’s group, the answer is not much.
