Who advanced in Fox Business’s debate in North Charleston? Not Ben Carson, who was pleasant but largely irrelevant. Not John Kasich, who curbed his manic tendency but relied too much, at least for this election cycle, on issues that strike today’s voters as antique; very few know what his references to the Central America controversies of the 1980s were about.

The two candidates who are statistically tied for the lead in Iowa polls — Donald Trump and Ted Cruz — each had a high point and a low point in attacks on each other.