Live Coverage Of The First Republican Debate

Earlier I suggested it’d be interesting to see how aggressively the Republican candidates go after President Obama (and Hillary Clinton) for the anemic income growth that’s been a hallmark of the economy in recent years. Sure enough, Rubio comes right out with a comment on how the economy isn’t working for middle-income Americans. Inequality — not just an issue for Democrats.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich received a very large applause from this Ohio audience when he was introduced. We shouldn’t be surprised. He clearly led the GOP field in the state in a primary poll by Quinnipiac University with 19 percent in early June (before the Donald Trump surge). He also led Hillary Clinton 47 percent to 40 among all voters in Ohio. By comparison, neither Jeb Bush nor Marco Rubio led in Florida.

One reason Republicans booed Trump running for a third party is because he could hurt Republicans tremendously. Check out how much Trump could hurt the Republican nominee if he runs as a third party candidate. He greatly increases the chance of a Democratic president, if the election would otherwise be forecast to be a tie.

I guess it’s too late for one of those “what to watch for” posts. But one thing I’m interested to see is which candidates adopt risk-averse or more aggressive strategies. Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Rand Paul are two candidates whose position is a little vulnerable right now, for example. And Sen. Ted Cruz and Ben Carson might be looking at Donald Trump and hoping to produce a surge of their own. Jeb Bush and Gov. Scott Walker would seem to have an incentive to play it a little safer, by contrast.

Jeb Bush and Rick Perry might not deserve much credit for their states’ economic successes, but at least they have clear successes to point to. Gov. Scott Walker is in a trickier position. When he first ran for governor of Wisconsin in 2010, Walker promised to create 250,000 private-sector jobs. He missed that mark by more than 100,000. Under Walker, Wisconsin’s job growth has lagged that of both the nation and of nearby states such as Minnesota and Michigan. Personal income actually fell in the state in the first three months of this year. Wisconsin’s economy hasn’t been terrible under Walker. The state’s unemployment rate has fallen by more than 3 percentage points since he took office and, at 4.6 percent, is well below the national mark of 5.3 percent. Economic growth has been positive, though unspectacular — words you could also apply to the U.S. as a whole. Of course, just as you shouldn’t give governors too much credit for their states’ economic successes, you shouldn’t blame them too much for their failures. But fairly or otherwise, Wisconsin’s lackluster economic performance under Walker is likely to complicate his campaign.

Before the JV debate, I warned you not to pay too much heed to governors’ economic boasts. There just isn’t much that governors can do to exert control over their states’ economies, especially in the short term. That warning applies doubly to one of the candidates who’s likely to get a lot of attention in this evening’s main event: Jeb Bush. Bush has regularly touted Florida’s economic success during his time as governor, and he’s all but certain to talk about it again tonight. But as my friend Jim Tankersley recently wrote in the Washington Post, Bush owes a large share of his success to Florida’s housing bubble — the same bubble that later popped and left the state in a crippling recession. The housing bubble wasn’t Bush’s fault, of course. But he doesn’t deserve credit for the largely illusory economic success that Florida enjoyed as a result.

Google Trends put together an animated timeline of how candidates ranked in Google searches over the course of the 5 pm debate. At this point, it should come as no surprise that Carly Fiorina held the top spot for pretty much the entire time. It’s worth noting, though, that Sen. Lindsey Graham saw a tremendous amount of traffic during those minutes towards the end where he briefly took the lead. Searches for Graham spiked after he related a story about his parents’ deaths and his family’s subsequent dependence on Social Security.

OK, everyone, we’re now turning our attention to the varsity debate. Remember: We’re answering your questions on Twitter and in the comments to the right. The second debate should be even more fun than the first — after all, this time we’ll have Ohio Gov. John Kasich!

I know that pretty much everyone, us included, is making a lot of the Google Trends data on the Republican debate. But it’s some very cool information: For the first time, we’re getting near real-time data on how many people are searching for the candidates on a minute-by-minute basis. Of course, it’s always possible that people are searching your name for the wrong reasons — it looks like Rick Perry’s search traffic spiked after his “oops” moment in a debate four years ago. But in a field with 17 candidates, many of whom are just hoping to remain in a conversation that’s been dominated by Donald Trump, making any news is generally good news. And the Google data provides some insight about what it actually looks like to make news in a debate. Below, I’ve compiled data on the amount of search traffic for the seven candidates who participated in today’s 5 p.m. JV debate, along with Trump and Jeb Bush as benchmarks. I’ve broken down the search traffic into three bundles: (i) the two hours before the debate started; (ii) the debate itself; (iii) the hour and a half after the debate finished. (Search levels are taken relative to Bush’s search traffic since 3 p.m. today, so a number of 5 means that a candidate was searched for five times as often as Bush.) During the debate, Carly Fiorina generated the most search traffic of any Republican on the stage (although still less than half as much as Trump during that time). But her edge wasn’t all that large over the second-place Lindsey Graham. After the debate, however, as a consensus formed that Fiorina had won, her search traffic continued to grow and was more than double what it was during the debate itself. Meanwhile, searches for Graham and the other Republicans declined significantly. I agree with that consensus that Fiorina did really well in the debate, by the way. Still, how the debate is interpreted afterward is often more important than what happens during the debate itself.

Q: Is there any good data on which candidate Independents favor? (Yes I know many Independents aren’t truly Independent). — Braydon Roberts A: At least among Republican-leaning independents, Donald Trump is clearly leading, with an average of 22 percent in recent polls (about the same level of support he has overall). What’s perhaps most interesting is that Jeb Bush is only at 9 percent among Republican-leaning independents. That’s far below the 16 percent he has averaged among self-identified Republicans in recent primary polls.

True facts: It wasn’t until the opening statements of the JV debate that I realized I left Jim Gilmore off my attacks spreadsheet. But he, like everyone except Jindal, didn’t take a single shot at any of the non-Trump competitors. Hope someone brings in the rage gas from Agent Carter for round two.

A:Rick Perry said Texas “moved graduation rates forward from 27th in the nation to second-highest” while he was governor. He’s made statements like this before, and as PolitiFact has pointed out, it’s not exactly true. The metric to measure graduation rates changed between 2001-02, when Perry claims Texas ranked 27th, and 2013-14, when Texas tied for second. If the yardstick had stayed the same, Texas would have ranked 22nd in 2012, the latest year for which comparable data is available.

Noah Millman of The American Conservative still has my favorite plan for how to assign candidates to debates:

Each group of candidates — inner circle and outer circle — votes for which candidate from their number should move from their current group to the other group (with voting for yourself being inadmissible). Whichever candidate gets voted out of the inner circle gets dumped down to the clown car for the next debate. But a replacement candidate gets promoted up from the clown car to the big leagues. Rinse and repeat.

I wonder who the second-tier team would have sent up to the majors?

We’re three days from the anniversary of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The number of times Brown, Ferguson or policing generally came up during the JV debate? Zero.

If you’re looking for something to do during the interregnum, take a listen to the latest “totally subjective odds” podcast, featuring Nate, Harry and special guest Katherine Miller of Buzzfeed. They handicapped both the Republican and Democratic primaries, and it doesn’t look pretty for all but three of the people who’ll take the stage at 9.

Find it on our site or in iTunes. Another thing you could do during the interregnum is go outside.

In the intermission between debates, we’ll still be answering a few reader questions if anyone has any. Wondering what Nate Silver eats during a Republican debate? Just ask.

Following in Giuliani’s footsteps, Pataki managed to say “I was governor of New York on September 11th” in two of his six answers.

The JV debate is over. Go grab some food, take a walk. We’ll meet you back here around 8 p.m. as we prepare for … Trump!

Rick Perry is the only candidate to mention any of the JV debaters by name. One compliment for Carly Fiorina (as a better negotiator than John Kerry) and one more compliment (for himself): “And I will suggest to you nobody’s done it like Rick Perry has done it over the last eight years.”

B E N G How long it took for first mention: 76 minutes A Z I

https://twitter.com/micahcohen/status/629415079868502016

I thought about keeping stats on evasions, but there are too many questions like, “Carly Fiorina, can you inspire this nation?” for that to be a reasonable thing to tally.

George Pataki defeated Mario Cuomo in 1994. To give you an idea of how long ago that was: Marco Rubio wasn’t even old enough to be a member of the House of Representatives in 1994.

OK, these guys aren’t statisticians, so normally I’d be nice, but they seem to have trouble counting to “one” when asked about their “first” executive order. Unless they’re drawing inspiration from Banach–Tarski.

For what it’s worth, 56 percent of women overall have a favorable opinion of Planned Parenthood, according to a recent YouGov poll.

A: We crowdsourced alternative criteria and got over 800 responses. One of my favorites was from Kate in Boston, who wrote:

I would host two segments of a debate and invite all 17 candidates. Candidates would be randomly drawn into one of the two segments, with one segment having eight participants and the other hour having nine. The drawing would occur immediately before the debate, so no one would know who they were debating against until just before they start.

This seems pretty fair, arbitrary, and contains just enough mystery and madness to keep everyone on their toes. Endorse.

Perry is the first candidate to trigger the bell for going over time, and the first to give a (backhanded?) compliment: “I would a whole lot rather have Carly Fiorina over there doing our negotiation than John Kerry.”

Jindal and Pataki both dodged criticizing Kasich by name, even though both said they disagreed with his choice to accept funds to expand Medicaid in Ohio. Still at zero interruption or criticisms by name of other bottom tier candidates. Candidates would rather complain about Hillary Clinton (4 times), Obama (3 times), Trump (twice), or crony capitalism (you do you, Pataki).

https://twitter.com/topofthehill/status/629407425704165376 A: Pretty much everyone uses the Internet now, although Americans over 65 and those with very low incomes and education levels are the most likely to be exceptions. There don’t seem to be big differences in Internet usage by political party, however. But to some extent, this isn’t the question we should be asking. The principal audience for this debate isn’t rank-and-file Republican voters but rather party elites and the news media, and those are Internet-savvy groups.

Most Republicans view the Iran agreement in a negative light — among those Americans who heard the news, 75 percent of Republicans disapproved, according to a July survey from Pew Research Center. Among conservative Republicans, 68 percent say they have no confidence that Iran’s leaders will uphold their side of the agreement.

Moderator Bill Hemmer just said that Republicans can’t win without winning Ohio. That’s been the case historically, but the reverse isn’t true: Winning Ohio doesn’t guarantee winning the election for a Republican. Richard Nixon won Ohio in 1960 and lost. George W. Bush won Ohio in 2000 and lost the popular vote. If we shifted all the states 2.98 percentage points to the right from their 2012 result (i.e., the margin Obama won Ohio by in 2012), Obama still would have won the popular vote, the Electoral College and the presidency.

Politicians of both parties are obsessed with manufacturing jobs. It’s true factory jobs are generally pretty well-paying, although that’s far from universally true. But the U.S. economy is increasingly dominated by the service sector, and that isn’t going to change. Politicians would do well to focus more on how to encourage the growth of good-paying service jobs rather than pining for the lost days of an economy dominated by manufacturing.

Carly Fiorina may be winning, but she starts from behind. Remember, the next debate, sponsored by CNN, is on Sept. 16 and will also include the top 10 polling candidates in the main debate. The potential problem for Fiorina is that CNN will include polls released between July 21 and Sept. 10 in its average. Fiorina hasn’t polled above 2 percent in any survey that will be included in the CNN average so far.

Is Carly Fiorina winning this debate? Through the first half-hour, she’s generating the most interest so far on Google Trends, which now provides estimates of search traffic in near real-time.

These immigration discussions always feel like they’re stuck in the 1990s. Undocumented immigration has been trending down since the mid-2000s, and the U.S. now gets more new immigrants from Asia than from Latin America.

At the first commercial break, none of the debaters have attacked or interrupted anyone who’s sharing their stage. Among the other GOP contenders, only Trump has been specifically criticized, and both of those put-downs came in response to a moderator’s question. After general, slightly insulting opening questions, the two topics that Fox felt deserved the opening spots were ISIS and Trump. (The two greatest threats to American democracy?)

This debate stage has the whiff of yesteryear. Candidates on this stage who were governor in 2001? Three. Candidates on this stage who are governor now? One.

Pataki talked about the sweeping conservative policy changes he implemented as governor. At some point during this debate, someone from Fox News is bound to remind the audience that he has also been pro-abortion rights, pro-gay rights (though he opposes gay marriage), pro-environmental protection, and even expanded the state’s Medicaid program. He represents a diminishing wing of the Republican Party.

This debate needs more Trump.

We noticed that there are lots of people with GOP debate bingo cards. So we thought we’d make one of our own! FiveThirtyEight doesn’t make endorsements, but we’ll make an exception for any candidate who scores a bingo on our card tonight.

Rick Perry just said that Giuliani was leading in the polls at this point in the 2008 contest partially because of his celebrity. Yet, Perry thought that Giuliani was a good enough candidate to endorse him.

Donald Trump is such a force he’s even dominating the “JV” debate.