Hello and welcome to another episode of The Pyramid’s belated debate coverage!
The second Republican primary debate was held on September 27th at the Shrine of St. Ronald Reagan, patron of tax cuts, and was hosted and broadcast by Fox Business and Univision. It was also conveniently reposted to YouTube this time, by Nikki Haley, who captured a full unedited two-hour block of Fox News coverage, complete with ads, but also awkwardly stopped during the last segment.
What changed in the month between the debates? A few things, but still not enough to cause a large shift in the race. Miami mayor Francis Suarez dropped out after failing to make the first debate. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson failed to make the second debate but everyone else from last time came back. Trump blew off the debate again, this time to talk to non-union auto workers about why the UAW should endorse him, while meanwhile the actual members of the UAW went on strike to try to work less than 70 hours a week. The polls have barely changed at all except that Trump has gone up a few percentage points since August. Perhaps it really is working in his favor not to show up so that tough questions about his legal troubles aren’t being broadcast to all those voters who say they are “considering” candidates other than him.
So what was the rest of the field, the fantasy “what-if” primary of an election without Trump, doing?
Most Improved Performance:
Doug Burgum actually talked about topics other than his state’s fossil fuel economy and vague platitudes about community!
Biggest Simultaneous Increase and Decrease in My Opinion of a Candidate:
Nikki Haley jumped on board with some of the worst policy ideas of the night (which you’ll see in following answers), but also continues to come off as one of very few candidates who isn’t hilariously incompetent. I think she may be the only candidate on the stage who would be, in a way, good at being president, but would also be a president I largely oppose.
Least Relevant Answer:
Mike Pence was asked why the Republican Congressional majority and the Trump administration failed to deliver on their shared promise to repeal the ACA and whether he thought a Pence administration would be able to do it. His first attempted answer was that mass shooters should be executed. His second attempted answer, after being given the question again to audience laughter, was that federal health funding should go to the states and that the Department of Education should be abolished.
Second-Least Relevant Answer:
Like in the first debate, the first question this time highlighted rising prices and the large majorities of the public who feel stress from their financial situations and say the country is “on the wrong track” generally… and like in the first debate, the moderators fumbled their opportunity to ask for economic policy broadly, instead asking whether it’s right to fire striking workers like St. Ronald did. Tim Scott was the first recipient of that first question, and his extremely rambling answer, which received wild applause, was basically that Biden should be building the border wall to protect America from “fetanol”, a thing he has been visibly and controversially doing in the days since the debate. Luckily, the moderators actually called Scott out on his irrelevant response!
Candidate Most Unsure What Year It Is:
Unfortunately, they then redirected that first question to Vivek Ramaswamy, “winner” of the previous debate’s “shut up” superlative, who recycled the claim that people are being paid more to stay at home than to work. This happened for low-income workers in some states during COVID lockdowns (depending on how much states were already paying in unemployment) but this Trump-era emergency policy ended during the first year of the Biden administration. He repeated the same line near the end of the debate, as his answer to a question about how to lower gas prices in the short term without expanding oil drilling. Assuming he heard the question, I have no idea what type of jobs he was suggesting they would get.
Candidate Who Most Failed Civics:
Scott and Ramaswamy (with honorable mention to Haley), all on the same issue. When asked why he, a member of Congress, should be “promoted” to president when Congress is ineffective and unpopular, Tim Scott’s very first response was to propose a constitutional amendment for a balanced budget. This is – fun fact! – something that Scott absolutely could do in his current office as a Senator, but which is simply not the president’s job. Ramaswamy jumped in with his own budget proposal (which Haley, incidentally, agrees with) that would also be Congress’s job. Presidential candidates promising things that the president explicitly can’t do is a piece of dumbassery that is hardly limited to Republicans, though.
Most Appropriate Answer for the Reagan Theme:
When it came time for Haley to answer the economic policy question, she suggested cutting taxes, reducing the number of brackets, and (I think) eliminating the itemized deduction for state and local taxes, all the while conveniently ignoring that our current tax brackets and the hard cap on the amount of state and local taxes you can deduct are the results of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, a Republican-sponsored bill which passed on almost exactly party lines and was signed into law by Donald Trump.
Candidate Who Most Paid Tribute to St. Ronald:
Ron DeSantis repeatedly cited Reagan in vague terms of projecting strength, but then near the end, in response to a question about abortion policy potentially tilting the political environment toward Democrats, he brought up actually visiting Reagan’s grave and reading a vaguely inspirational quote about all people having a purpose.
Candidate Who Came Closest to Blaspheming Against St. Ronald:
Tim Scott let his ultra-conservative mask slip for a second when he said that Black families survived discrimination being written into US laws. Luckily for him, most people have forgotten that Reagan was elected Governor of California on a platform that included keeping racial housing discrimination legal and was supported for president by prominent segregationist holdouts. No other candidate interacted with Scott’s answer, even though mentioning legally-sanctioned discrimination is one of the things they keep condemning as “Critical Race Theory”.
Answer Most In Need of Context:
Ron DeSantis claimed that Florida is ranked #1 in education by US News and World Report. It appears that this score is mainly dragged up by having cheap colleges with high graduation rates. Its K-12 system is only about average on reading and below average on math while having a high graduation rate. Illinois and New York, both popular punching bags for Republican politicians, outdo Florida in both test score categories, but are far worse in graduation rate, suggesting to me that Florida is pumping out a lot of people who got diplomas without actually getting the skills those diplomas are supposed to represent.
Most Unhinged New Policy Proposal:
Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott both apparently think it’s possible to end birthright citizenship by simply asserting that non-citizens are not subject to the laws of the US. Either I am terribly confused about how both laws and words work, or that’s good news for any non-American who wants to commit crimes!
Worst Rehash of a Previous Unhinged Policy Proposal:
DeSantis doubled down on his threat to invade Mexico by framing it as a defensive war, claiming that US territory is already effectively occupied, presumably by drug cartels although he didn’t actually specifically say by whom. Haley joined his threat a few questions later, saying she would send Special Forces to assassinate cartel leaders. This is a strategy that Mexico itself already tried from 2008 to 2021 with the utterly incompetent “help” of the Bush, Obama, and Trump Administrations. It seems to have mainly resulted in a proliferation of local gang wars, a frankly disturbing use of the military as police in Mexico, and increasing drug trafficking to the US, which to put it lightly do not sound like improvements.
Candidate Who Drilled Hardest on One Message:
Chris Christie redirected most of his answers to attacks on Trump and didn’t give much of a reason for anyone to vote for him specifically as opposed to the other options on stage, all of whom were conspicuously not Trump. Maybe he stood out to people whose top issue is supporting charter schools, which was the only actual policy I could remember him mentioning by the end of the debate?
Biggest Verbal Stumble:
Moderator Stuart Varney started right off in the introductions in a way that was both stereotypically very British and very conservative: by being totally unable to pronounce the Spanish last name of fellow moderator Ilia Calderón.
Biggest Policy Stumble:
China. You know what, Republican primary candidates? I agree with you that we very much should be concerned that we are heavily economically dependent on China while they’re militarily supporting countries near us and engaging in “investment” that is arguably colonialism. That is one of the reasons I supported Elizabeth Warren and her agenda of replacing imports in the 2020 election, and am happy to see major legislation pass under the Biden Administration. What exactly is your plan, though, and how do you think it would be better? Everyone seems to be against meaningfully engaging with other countries to steer them out of the Chinese sphere of influence and against any government intervention in the economy that might actively support American alternatives to Chinese products. The closest to an answer was Haley’s proposal to “end normal trade relations until they stop sending us fentanyl”, and sure, an embargo is an articulable and relevant policy, but it translates to “let’s intentionally crash the US economy” when your industrial policy is “don’t have an industrial policy”.
Most Stale Political Meme:
Can we please give up on this phrase “energy independent” that seems to mean “increase oil drilling” regardless of any relevant facts or context? “Energy” means more than just “fuel for cars”, and different solutions may be available in different contexts that are more or less friendly to being made domestically. When it comes to electricity production, for example, in the past decade, our energy sources have shifted quite a bit toward renewables that are practically by definition not imported. But also, the US is a huge producer – in fact, a net exporter – of fossil fuels. Even if we were only talking about fuel for cars, the US mainly produces the grade of oil best suited for making fuels, basically doesn’t import gasoline at all any more, and its imports are other grades of crude oil suitable for other purposes, according to the US oil industry itself. If this isn’t enough to assure politicians that we’re “energy independent”, I don’t even understand what they’re asking for.
Argument Most Likely to Work on Me Personally:
Doug Burgum actually articulated a policy about “shrinking government” that sounds like it could be effective: “inside of every government job, there’s 10 or 20 percent of mind-numbing, soul-sucking work that even the state and federal employees don’t want to do, and you could engineer that work out of the job”. You know what? If layoffs come from doing the same job better, I am not automatically opposed to that. The real question is, would they actually be able to do the rest of their jobs? Or is this just another pretext to leave agencies understaffed?
Most Unexpected Interesting Idea:
I admit, I am kind of intrigued by Ramaswamy’s suggestion to set a legal minimum age of 16 to be allowed to use social media. However, I also have no idea how you could construct a law that would not be a huge personal data risk and I don’t buy his argument that this is a relevant or useful anti-drug-abuse policy, which is how he pitched it. Oh, and again, proposing laws is not the president’s job.
Pettiest Conflict:
Haley and Scott got into a shouting match close to the end about Haley accepting curtains for her office that were paid for by the State Department when she was Ambassador to the UN. I have no further commentary other than to note that this happened.
Overall Loser:
All of the moderators. Time limits weren’t enforced, off-topic responses were sometimes acknowledged but never really challenged in a satisfying way, candidates talked over each other increasingly as the night went on. Who thought it was a good idea to let these people run anything?
Most Likely Lasting Meme:
“Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber.”
– Nikki Haley, to Vivek Ramaswamy
