Obviously a different tone to this Republican debate than the last two before it. Donald Trump in his opening and closing statements talked about how millions of people have been entering the Republican primaries and that Republicans ought to embrace them. He’s right about increased Republican turnout, but not nearly all the new voters have been voting for Trump. In between he was relatively emollient and, perhaps, presidential. He evidently thinks he has an excellent chance of being nominated and he brushed aside the requirement that a nominee get 1,237 of the 2,472 delegate votes as an arbitrary marker — as if requiring a majority is arbitrary. You can make arguments for requiring a supermajority or for allowing a candidate with a plurality to win, but to say a majority requirement is arbitrary is absurd. It betrays a certain lack of confidence has can get there.
The other three candidates all did very well, but I find it hard to judge whether they did well enough. Ted Cruz’s goal was to establish himself as the sole serious challenger to Trump, and he persuasively pointed out not only Trump’s current differences from most conservatives on policies but also — and this is duck soup — his past differences. Cruz was at his best in explaining policy, especially how Trump’s 45 percent tariffs, or anything like it, would impose costs on modest-income Americans.
Marco Rubio also had high moments, of inspirational rhetoric, but also of impressive command of public policy, from Social Security to Israel and the Palestinians. This has served him well in many (not all) previous debates, where he managed to outshine all of the others on the stage. But in these regard Cruz and John Kasich also performed ably.
John Kasich came on as more conservative than his reputation, and sometimes almost stridently so. Obviously he was directing most of his remarks to his home state of Ohio, whose 66-delegate winner-take-all delegation he will win next Tuesday or (he says) he will leave the race.
I was struck by two things, one commented on by cable TV commentators, the other not. The first was that Cruz, Rubio and Trump did not argue (except by inference easily outlooked by non-political-junkies) that Trump is unfit for the presidency. There were no overt insults and the words “con artist,” which Rubio has been mouthing repeatedly recently, will not appear in the transcript. The second was that while Trump’s appeal was basically nostalgic — “make America great again” seems to mean restoring all those long-ago-lost auto assembly jobs — while Rubio especially, but also Cruz and Kasich, argued for policies geared to creating the framework for a better, and inevitably different, future.
Polls in Ohio suggest Kasich has a very good chance of carrying Ohio on Tuesday. Polls suggest that Rubio trails Trump in Florida, though several show him not trailing by much. If Florida polling proves as far off as Democratic (but not Republican) polling in Michigan, Rubio could conceivably win Florida by a not inconsiderable margin. What’s not clear is that Kasich after a victory in Ohio would be a serious factor in later contests, and it’s not clear that Rubio would be either even if he wins in Florida. They would perhaps be battling for the votes of upscale voters, among whom they have both run better than average, who could not stomach either Trump or Cruz. It does seem likely that Cruz will emerge from March 15 as Trump’s one serious competitor and a pretty strong one.
