The Voters First Forum provided 11 major GOP presidential candidates their first opportunity to address a nationwide audience while sharing a stage with their opponents.
Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Marco Rubio of Florida also participated, but appeared via satellite from C-SPAN’s Washington, D.C., studio because they were forced to stay on the Hill for evening votes.
The New Hampshire Union Leader organized the event in response to its dissatisfaction with the rules guiding the first nationally televised debate by Fox News set to air later this week. The forum was billed as an opportunity for the candidates to provide longer responses than they might at the debate, but the rapid fire format provided little opportunity for the candidates to delve beneath their talking points.
Each candidate had two opportunities to answer questions from a moderator for a little more than four minutes before retreating to their seats in the front row of the auditorium to watch their competition do the same. Ten candidates took the stage in fewer than 45 minutes.
And the candidates who appeared to capture the audience’s attention most spoke in sound bites. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s remarks about Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton appeared to play well with the crowd.
“I’m fluent in Clinton speak,” Graham said. “When he says, Bill says, ‘I didn’t have sex with that woman,’ he did. When she says, ‘I’ll tell you about building the pipeline when I get to be president,’ it means she won’t. And when she tells us, ‘Trust me you’ve got all the emails that you need,’ we haven’t even scratched the surface.”
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker similarly went after the Democratic competition and added Vice President Joe Biden’s name to the list of candidates he was prepared to defeat, if elected the GOP presidential nominee.
“In the end I’d love to go against whether it’s Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, I’m a new fresh face versus a name from the past,” Walker said making his pitch to the crowd in Manchester. “And most of all, I’ve gotten things done in a blue state.”
But the Republican Party’s front-runner, Donald Trump, was notably absent. Joe McQuaid, the New Hampshire Union Leader’s publisher, told the Washington Examiner before the forum that his absence was tied to an editorial they had published criticizing Trump’s pejorative comments about Sen. John McCain’s military service. Trump also wrote a letter to the paper that seemed to suggest he would not appear because he thought he had no shot of earning the paper’s endorsement.
Ultimately, the forum appears to have mostly served as preparation for Thursday’s nationally televised debate. Some jokes seemed to fall flat, such as when Ohio Gov. John Kasich joked that Cleveland Cavaliers basketball player LeBron James would moderate the upcoming debate in Cleveland. And some candidates appeared rusty, including former New York Gov. George Pataki who answered “Obamacare” when asked which agencies of the federal government he would eliminate.
The event was largely cordial with the candidates often caught by cameras laughing, smiling and whispering to one another as their competition took turns in the hot seat onstage. The candidates will likely not be be quite so relaxed when they take the debate stage in front of a larger audience on Thursday opposite Trump, whose unpredictable antics could throw any candidate off his or her game.
