“I‘ve actually enjoyed every debate,” Donald Trump said after the CNN/Telemundo/University of Houston debate Thursday night — which might have been his least convincing statement of the night. For the first time in the 10 Republican debates, Trump got pummeled, and pummeled hard, by Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Of all the exchanges, I think the most telling was where Rubio went mano a mano with Trump on healthcare, revealing that Trump didn’t really have anything in the way of a serious healthcare policy — and then circling back and accusing Trump of repeating the same sound-bite-sized response over and over again, the charge that Chris Christie made against Rubio in the debate in New Hampshire. Cruz also got in some tough criticism of Trump’s lack of coherent and consistent policy on healthcare. Both Rubio and Cruz highlighted the thinness of Trump on other policies as well.
In these exchanges Cruz seemed to show more sense of command than Rubio did, but they both got to make possibly devastating points against the front-runner, and Rubio even did so with a dollop of humor. It’s interesting that Cruz rather than Rubio made the electability argument. Cruz’s point was valid, but Rubio runs perceptibly better than Cruz against Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
The major question is whether the debate will reduce Trump’s support. It’s possible: In two previous debates Trump’s numbers wilted at least a bit. And as we know from exit polls, Trump has tended to slightly underperform his poll numbers, while Rubio — except after his debate setback in New Hampshire — has tended to overperform his, as Ted Cruz also did in Iowa.
The problem for each of those attackers, and for John Kasich who presented a stronger and more pointedly conservative case for himself even though he didn’t join in on the attacks on Trump, is that they all did a good job, leaving the opposition to Trump divided. If you suppose that Trump has 33 percent of Republican primary votes — his number in the RealClearPolitics average of recent national polls — and if you suppose that that number has fallen, that leaves open the possibility of his losing even in two- or two-and-a-half-to-one contests.
Bottom line: Rubio and Cruz accepted the advice, and pleas, from conservatives that they go after Trump. We don’t know the effect on voters. But the result, I suspect, is that the race for this nomination is not over.
