Live Coverage Of The First Republican Debate

To my eye, the Republican candidates have been pretty sharp as a group in the first portion of the debate tonight. But it seems like it might be hard for any of them to gain much momentum when they could go 20 minutes or half an hour between answers. It might be better to divide the Republican field into smaller groups, as some of our readers have suggested.

Chris Christie can talk all about how things were bad before he came in as governor of New Jersey, but New Jersey Republicans are still very lukewarm about him. Only 50 percent of Garden State Republicans think he would make a good president, according to a recent Rutgers-Eagleton poll. Moreover, he trailed Donald Trump in a Republican primary poll in his home state.

New Jersey’s unemployment rate was 6.1 percent in June, well above the national mark of 5.3 percent, but down from nearly 10 percent at the height of the recession.