Live Coverage Of The First Republican Debate

I asked the FiveThirtyEight staff who they thought was winning the debate, and there were mostly crickets in the room, with tentative votes for Kasich and Rand Paul. Google search traffic seems to be pretty equivocal on that question too. But it’s likely that the conventional wisdom will settle around one or two names between now and 11:30 p.m. or so; the media won’t like the narrative that the debate was a draw.

I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear a question about entrepreneurship in a presidential debate. To read most media coverage, you’d think the U.S. was in the midst of an entrepreneurial boom. But the economic data tell the opposite story: The rate at which Americans start businesses has been falling for decades. Marco Rubio’s answer focused on regulations, including Obamacare. Truth is, economists aren’t sure why the startup rate is falling, but the decline has mirrored similar trends in labor participation, job turnover and geographic mobility (how often people move between cities). Economists worry that suggests the U.S. economy is losing the flexibility that helped fuel its past growth. There’s probably no single policy that would help reverse those trends. But it’s good to see the problem entering into mainstream political discourse.

Half of the field has gone on talking past the buzzer. Bush, Christie, Huckabee, Kasich and Trump are the offenders, each breaking the rules once. (Nine out of 10 may feel that Trump’s campaign is a continuous interruption of the GOP primary).