What’s that? It’s presidential primary season?! Well, I guess it’s time for your resident debate hate-watcher to come out of hibernation and check out the first debate of the 2024 cycle. I hope being over a week late isn’t too far off to be topical.
The first debate of the Republican primary was on August 23rd, exclusively on Fox News (and exclusively available online on their own website, not even on their official YouTube channel!), and it conspicuously lacked Donald Trump. Despite being the frontrunner, he refused to participate due to the requirement that candidates promise to support the eventual nominee and instead sat for an interview with former Fox News liability Tucker “bloviating for his audience” Carlson, which I will not watch for the same reason I will not point a telescope at the sun. The remaining 8 candidates who qualified are all distant followers at this point in the campaign, ranging in the polls from about 1% to about 15% while Trump has been hovering around 50%. Without Trump, it felt like a full debate of a fully open primary, as the candidates spent most of the evening ignoring him and promoting themselves. This is a preview of the post-Trump party – and it comes as absolutely no shock to me that it still contains quite a bit of Trumpist rage.
On to the superlatives!
Biggest Waste of a Question:
Right off the bat, the moderators teed up a question about “Bidenomics” and inflation, and just when I thought they were going to ask “what would you do to bring prices back down?” (a hard question but one they really ought to be prepared for), they made it about a surprise Billboard hit song full of conservative tropes instead.
Candidate Who Least Deserves to Be Here:
By audience reaction, it’s Asa Hutchinson. Even Mike Pence and Chris Christie, who are widely disliked, got noticeable cheers when they were introduced. By my judgement of their performance, it’s Doug Burgum, whose only concrete policy seems to be increasing oil production in a pretty transparent attempt to get federal support for his home state’s volatile economy. (What a shock that a candidate who had to resort to possible campaign finance violations to qualify for the debate is not actually interesting!)
Biggest “I Agree With What You’re Saying But I Don’t Trust YOU To Do It” Moment:
Vivek Ramaswamy pointed out that a lot of Americans currently feel a “lack of purpose”, and shortly after, Burgum praised communities coming together to help each other as a way to reduce crime. And as a disciple of Bowling Alone, these statements make superficial sense to me. However, Ramswamy’s promise of restoring a national identity from the top down sets off “potential fascism” warning bells and Burgum did not elaborate at all on what he thinks any part of government, let alone the president personally, could do to build community aid and trust. You both get Fs for your answers, but for very different reasons.
Biggest “WTF” Moment:
This “award” also goes to Ramaswamy, for when he claimed that climate change is a hoax and that every candidate on the stage other than him had been bribed to spread it. That is a level of either paranoia or dishonesty that ought to be instantly disqualifying… but it won’t, because this is the Conspiracy Theory Party now.
Candidate Who Kowtowed Hardest to God-Emperor Donald:
When the topic of Trump’s criminal charges came up, Ramaswamy was the first and most enthusiastic to raise his hand to say he would vote for Trump, was the first and most aggressive to defend him, and called on the other candidates to join his promise to pardon Trump. He also regurgitated Trump’s paranoid rambling and incredible xenophobia and naive friendliness toward Russia. And you bet Trump saw and appreciated that. It was more like watching a proxy candidate argue on Trump’s behalf than like watching someone running in a primary against him.
Most Unhinged Campaign Promise:
Ron DeSantis threatened to deploy US military force into Mexico “on day one” to attack drug cartels, which is such an obviously bad idea that the editor-in-chief of the National Review took to the web to condemn it this week. Without the kind of explicit permission and international cooperation mentioned by Asa Hutchinson during his own statement about drug smuggling, this would be an invasion of Mexico, not a legitimate attempt at law enforcement or whatever DeSantis thinks he’s supporting. And the fact that Hutchinson’s reasonable position here is an old-school “war on drugs” policy from when he served in the George W. Bush administration really underscores how extreme Republicans have become on this issue. (Amusingly, the Mexican president at the time, Vicente Fox, became an advocate for drug legalization, first of marijuana and then of recreational drugs in general, to undermine the cartels rather than continue fighting them.)
Biggest Increase in My Opinion of a Candidate:
I previously thought of Chris Christie as kind of a joke candidate, but to me he really succeeded at the role of “only sane man” here, especially when pointing out how obviously ludicrous it is to defend Trump and dismissing a question about UFOs before pivoting it into saying the president should be a role model of honesty. He should hope that makes a good impression on someone because he is about twice as popular among Democrats as among Republicans right now.
Biggest Decrease in My Opinion of a Candidate:
Tim Scott. I had gotten the impression that he was similar to Mike Pence in the sense of being very conservative but also striving to come off as sensible. Not someone I want to be president, but someone I considered insulated from the craziest part of the party. But then he started spouting the same nonsense that the Trumpiest politicians out there do about “weaponizing the government against political opponents” and now I’m just rolling my eyes at him. Sure, some other candidates said overall worse things, but I expected that from them.
Argument Most Likely to Work on the General Electorate:
I really think Nikki Haley’s abortion policy, protecting early-term abortions and contraception, would be perceived by the general public as relatively reasonable and moderate. The language used in the Dobbs decision does in fact raise the disturbing possibility of enabling states to ban contraception and although the US public is hostile to a total abortion ban, there is also pretty broad support for some kind of gestational limit, and contrary to what you may expect, these ideas exist within both major parties, and even the gender gap on that issue isn’t particularly strong. The risk, of course, is alienating a very stubborn faction of her own party to win over a few disaffected moderates from the other.
Argument Most Likely to Work on Me Personally:
Haley’s answers throughout the abortion segment also hit on a topic that is a perpetual annoyance to me in presidential debates. Presidential candidates should not promise to do things that they are not empowered to do. She is absolutely right that the power to change abortion policy lies in Congress, not the president (and also that the current makeup of Congress would never pass the sort of national ban some others on the debate stage desperately want). I am sick of the failure of our legislature to legislate, and of the reliance on and belief in the president as the policy-maker. But if voters want a president who will insist that their powers have limits and that Congress ought to act, then… well… we already have Biden.
Policy I Most Just Plain Agree With:
Hutchinson and Haley both promoted expanding access to specific classes in schools: computer science for Hutchinson and voc/tech programs for Haley. As someone who grew up in a school district that had those options, and saw that they were popular and helpful classes for a lot of people, I am really sad that so many schools lack them. But at the risk of sounding like a Republican talking point myself for a moment here, if your schools don’t have that and you want them to, then you should be looking to your state and local school boards for solutions, not presidential candidates.
Most Interesting Polarization:
While other coverage has highlighted the intense disagreements on the details of abortion restrictions as a major division among the candidates, I think the candidates’ positions on the Russian invasion of Ukraine were much harsher. The Trumpist side – Ramaswamy and DeSantis – came off as placing little value on alliances and being generally pro-wars of aggression, willing to let Russia expand while we go start a new military conflict of our own with Mexico, while the more traditionally-Republican side – Christie, Haley, and Pence – got vocal to the point of upset trying to get everyone else to take Putin seriously as a threat.
Most Predictable “Clever” Line:
The moderators referring to Trump as “the elephant not in the room”. Ha.
Most Annoying Mispronunciation:
Either something is terribly wrong with my ears, or Hutchinson, DeSantis, Christie, and Burgum all mispronounced “fentanyl” as “fetanol”, like it’s some kind of… alcohol made of cheese?
Shut Up:
Vivek Ramaswamy. Every cycle, there is at least one candidate whose core constituency is the disengaged non-voter, the type of person who distrusts the entire political system yet is also wildly ignorant about it. These voters gravitate toward conspiracy-brained lunatics who make confident yet vague promises of “revolution”. Sometimes, such a candidate never gets mainstream appeal, like Ron Paul. Sometimes, the candidate resonates with other factions and takes off, like Donald Trump. Ramaswamy freely mixed the “outsider” style with a mind-numbing repetition of slogans that left me never wanting to hear him speak again. Christie was right to describe him as sounding like ChatGPT. The best thing I can possibly say about him is that maybe if he continues to rise in the polls he can split the raving loony vote with Trump and create an opening for someone more substantive to win and at least steer our politics back toward being an argument over policy. He and DeSantis, who were already the second- and third-place candidates behind Trump, as well as the ones perceived to be most similar to him, were also rated as having the strongest debate performance by viewers, which is good news for vote-splitting but bad news for those of us hoping to see Trumpism recede.
