Live Coverage Of The First Republican Debate

John Kasich’s biggest problem isn’t his record but how he talks about it. We already saw Megyn Kelly ask Kasich about expanding Medicaid in Ohio and Kasich defending it. As I wrote about previously, Kasich is seen as far more moderate than even Jeb Bush, even though his overall record is about equally conservative. Check out this data from YouGov on how voters view the candidates with 0 being the most liberal and 100 being the most conservative.

At the end of the opening round of questions, there have already been more interruptions (Paul of Trump, Trump of moderator) than in the entire JV debate. No assault or battery yet, but after that question on independent runs, you know they’re all thinking about it.

John Kasich just discussed how prisons are being used as ersatz drug-treatment facilities. Criminal justice reform being raised at all in this debate is a really big deal. The U.S. leads the planet in incarceration, but it wasn’t so long ago that a politician suggesting any whiff of reform ran the risk of being slapped with a “soft-on-crime” scarlet letter. And there is actual bipartisan reform brewing in Washington: Reps. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and Bobby Scott (D-Va.) are sponsoring a bill in the House, and Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) one in the Senate, that would limit mandatory minimum sentences, broaden the use of probation, and increase judges’ discretion in sentencing drug offenders. But insofar as any of the candidates are interested in getting U.S. incarceration rates in line internationally, it’s going to take a lot more than that. Nevertheless, the criminal justice conversation has shifted tectonically since this debate in 1988, for example, where Michael Dukakis urged “a real war, not a phony war, against drugs”: