The Republican presidential candidates who will meet this week for the second debate face a unique challenge: how to counter a front-runner who won’t even be there but is already behaving like the nominee.
Trump’s decision to deliver a campaign-style address in Michigan instead of attending the debate was indicative of his stance.
Trump’s willingness to forget about the primary before it’s even started is at least in part attributable to the unprecedented margin of victory he’s built up in national polls. It also stems from the fact that the other contenders haven’t come up with a convincing counterargument. He also missed the first debate, where his lack of success was on full display as he was mostly ignored by the rest of the field.
“The best thing that Trump has going is that none of his opponents are running a strategy to defeat him,” said Mike Murphy, a long-time GOP strategist who has become a frequent critic of Trump. Not one of his big ones. They are merely putting on Trump impressions.
For the second debate, the most pressing question may be whether or whether any of Trump’s rivals can utilise his absence to make a more compelling case against him and convince him to rethink his approach of basically ignoring the field. I don’t blame him for not showing up to the second debate, Murphy remarked. To paraphrase Winston Churchill: “If they are not going to engage him and are just going to imitate him, then he doesn’t have to be there.”
A month ago, during the first debate, neither candidate paid any attention to Donald Trump, who co-moderator Bret Baier correctly called “the elephant not in the room.” South Carolina’s former governor, Nikki Haley, has called Trump “the most disliked politician in America,” while New Jersey’s and Arkansas’s former governors, Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, have continued to contend that Trump is unsuitable to serve as president. Haley, who served in Trump’s Cabinet as ambassador to the United Nations, has criticised the president for the ballooning national debt.
However, those were minor hiccups in an otherwise smooth 90-minute battle. All contenders except Christie and Hutchinson have said they would vote for Trump if he gets the nomination. This is despite the fact that Trump is now facing 91 felony criminal charges. Republican primary contenders spent more time attacking each other than they did making a case for why voters should switch from supporting the candidate who is now ahead of them in national surveys by as much as 40 percentage points.
Republicans who are not completely sold on Trump tend to think the other candidates were acting this way because they were trying to utilise the first nationally televised discussion to primarily introduce themselves to voters. South Carolina holds the third primary on the GOP schedule, and a major social conservative organiser there, Dave Wilson, argued that this was the best explanation for why they did what they did: because American people need to know who they are.
Among Republicans, there is a less than charitable theory that the other contenders are repeating the error their 2016 rivals made by ignoring Trump during debates. Everyone else in the primary contest avoided directly hitting Trump, instead vying to position themselves as the frontrunner who would profit most from his eventual demise.
The field of Trump challengers this year appeared to many viewers of the first 2024 debate to be engaging in similar wishful thinking, if not running solely to increase their prospects of being chosen as Trump’s vice presidential contender.
Trump’s opponents have little to show for their submissive behaviour towards him in the first debate if they are serious about winning the nomination. It appears that Trump’s historically enormous lead in national polls has grown slightly.
Just as illuminating has been Trump’s behaviour. After the debate, he sent clearer signals that he was already positioning himself for a potential general election rematch with incumbent President Joe Biden. That’s the conclusion reached by Texas Republican Party strategist Matt Mackowiak, in his opinion.
AWN reports that Trump will be making campaign stops in South Carolina this week and Iowa on Sunday, but at a slower pace than his rivals. His decision to forego the debate in favour of a speech to blue-collar workers in Michigan on Wednesday provided a glimpse into his shifting priorities in a state that is expected to play a more significant role in determining the winner of the general election than the winner of the Republican nomination.
More illuminating still were his remarks on abortion made during a recent interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” It may be argued that much of the coverage exaggerated how much Trump departed from GOP orthodoxy; his answers still strongly suggested he would sign a national abortion ban if taken at its value. Not whether, but at what stage of pregnancy he would accept a national restriction was the issue he didn’t answer. The president predicted that the two sides will eventually agree on a time frame of “a number of weeks or months.”
However, Trump did voice his opposition to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s restriction on abortions beyond six weeks. Notably, Republican governors in Iowa and South Carolina have also signed such a “heartbeat” restriction, and these three early voting states generally determine the winner in GOP nomination elections.
Trump’s pointed statements sounded like a calculated gamble and a testament to his supreme self-assurance in his ability to win the nomination. Both Iowa and South Carolina contain large populations of evangelical Christians who tend to vote Republican. However, it is in Iowa where the most socially conservative contenders have found success, such as Mike Huckabee (2008), Rick Santorum (2012), and Ted Cruz (2016). It looked to many that Trump was willing to risk losing the Iowa caucuses in order to strengthen his position for a hypothetical general election, as he denounced the state’s six-week abortion ban. Mackowiak says, “At this time, it appears that way to me.”
How much his statements on abortion may cost him among the social conservatives now in his camp is unclear, given that Trump’s relationships with his fans are established more around concerns of racial identity and anti-elite populism than conventional social issues. Wilson adds that while his words have outraged some conservative pro-lifers, he doesn’t think they’ll have much of an effect on the average voter who supports Donald Trump. They are staunch Trump backers, full stop.
Trump’s remarks on abortion, at the very least, appear certain to lead to greater assaults against him on Wednesday than he faced during the first debate. Most of Trump’s opponents, and DeSantis in particular, are considerably more at ease attacking him from the right as insufficiently conservative when they do vary from Trump. They have a golden opportunity to attack Trump by accusing him of undermining the anti-abortion movement.
Defining themselves to Trump’s right on abortion is a tough topic for Trump’s opponents, notably DeSantis, because it’s unclear whether they would gain or lose more even in a GOP primary. That might be an enticing position for DeSantis to take during this week’s debate. Florida’s governor has already begun employing the same tactic that helped Huckabee, Santorum, and Cruz triumph in Iowa. DeSantis, like them, has immersed himself in Florida politics to the extent that he has become a state senator. Like them, he has focused his campaign on winning over social conservatives and evangelical Christians.
DeSantis (or, less likely, someone else) might amass support late and sneak past Trump in the caucus, despite Trump still holding a massive advantage in most Iowa surveys.
The problem with that tactic is that Huckabee, Santorum, and Cruz still failed to secure the Republican nominee despite winning Iowa. As I’ve already mentioned, none of them won even a dozen states. They all had to deal with the same fundamental challenge: having made their names as the defenders of evangelical Christians, they found it difficult to win over Republican voters outside of that group. This problem was immediately obvious in the next primary election, in New Hampshire, which had a considerably smaller percentage of evangelical voters than Iowa. Trump’s campaign may be banking that even if DeSantis manages to outpoll him in Iowa with the help of Huckabee, Santorum, and Cruz, he would eventually run into the same resistance that Trump did.
It’s both easy and difficult to defeat Trump, according to Murphy, who thinks doing so requires merely winning in Iowa and New Hampshire. That rules out running the Santorum campaign in New Hampshire, where it would be fatal. You should win both if you want to beat him.
Haley, who gained the most momentum from the first debate, may be the most intriguing candidate to watch this week if the predicted downsides of DeSantis’ Iowa-first plan come to fruition. (Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy also garnered significant attention the previous time around, but his hectoring performance likely contributed as much to reduce the upper limit of his potential support as to increase its lower limit.)
Haley isn’t likely to win the Iowa caucuses because of her moderate stance on abortion. (She is against abortion but has said several times that she does not think Congress has enough support to implement a nationwide prohibition.) But if Haley does well enough in the Iowa caucuses to gain momentum, she may have a better chance of beating Trump in the crucial next two states on the calendar.
Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster, adds that Haley, unlike DeSantis (or most of Trump’s other challengers), is better positioned to carry a successful Iowa performance into a strong showing in New Hampshire. This is because she is not as branded as a cultural fighter. “If Haley came in second in Iowa, or even a strong third, then you go onto New Hampshire and it’s a totally different ballgame,” adds Ayres.
According to a recent poll conducted by the American Research Network and the University of New Hampshire, DeSantis, Ramaswamy, and Christie are all tied for second place behind Trump, with Haley now joining the fray. And if Haley does well in New Hampshire, she will find a ready-made constituency in the next state on the schedule, South Carolina. Haley, who was governor of South Carolina from 2011 to 2017, jumped to second position in a Fox News poll taken after the first debate, behind only DeSantis.