Live Coverage Of The First Republican Debate

The first Republican debate is over; why aren’t you watching the last episode of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”? If only Stewart’s tenure could last one more day. What would he say about Donald Trump’s lonely hand-in-the-air refusal to swear off a third-party run? Or the Chris Christie vs. Rand Paul throwdown? We’ll never know, but as a balm, here’s Stewart anticipating tonight’s debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJdqIR4VonA Good night, everyone. Check back with us tomorrow for more post-debate analysis.

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The Fox News moderators managed to cover a lot of topics tonight. Foreign policy was the largest single category (10 questions), but social issues ranked second if abortion, gay marriage and a few miscellaneous questions are all counted together (eight questions total).

Nine other Republicans got a chance to share a stage with Donald Trump tonight, and while Trump remained the literal and figurative center of attention, he didn’t dominate the conversation to the same extent that he has in the past month. Below, I’ve compiled data from Google Trends on search traffic for the GOP candidates — both over the past month and during the two hours of the debate. In each case, I’ve benchmarked Trump’s search traffic as 100 and compared the other candidates against him. Overall during the past month, Trump has received about three times as much search traffic as the other nine candidates combined! In the debate Trump still led, but not by as much. Ben Carson got about three-fifths as much search traffic as Trump, for example. The Google search numbers didn’t totally square with how the journalists I follow on Twitter scored the debate. John Kasich was a big winner in the debate room before a home crowd in Cleveland, and also in the press file, but his search traffic was just middling. Carson, conversely, did well in search despite middling reviews from the media.

Bush had the most questions directed to him by the moderators tonight (I’m not counting interruptions, follow-ups and closing statements). Despite Carson’s complaints, he’s comfortably in the middle of the pack, while Paul appears to have needed his frequent interruptions to be heard.

One striking thing about tonight’s debate: how little of a role the economy played. Sure, there were scattered references to jobs and incomes, and there was a section of the debate that focused on economic issues. But in a sharp contrast to four years ago, the candidates often seemed eager to shift attention to other issues. On the one hand, that shouldn’t be too surprising. The economy is in far better shape than it was four years ago. Job growth has been consistently strong. (Tune in tomorrow for our regular, if bleary-eyed, coverage of the monthly jobs report!) The unemployment rate is quickly returning to normal levels. Corporate profits have been strong, and the broader economy has generally weathered the various challenges thrown at it, including a crisis in Europe and a slowdown in China. But on the other hand, Americans remain cautious about the state of the economy. Weak wage growth has left many Americans feeling that the economic recovery is leaving them behind. And although inequality has generally been seen as a Democratic issue, it seems like there should be an opening for a Republican willing to challenge President Obama’s record on the issue. I’d expected more discussion of the economy in this debate, and I hope we’ll see more the next time around.

I have thoughts about who won and lost the debate, but I’m not trusting myself on who will drop or get a bounce out of the debate. Why? As Lynn Vavreck pointed out, a key experiment out of Arizona State in 2004 showed that voters’ minds can be greatly shaped by who the media says won or lost the debate. So while it pains me to watch cable news, I’ll be paying attention to the talking heads tonight and over the next few days.

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Just check his glowing Twitter mentions from members of the press corps: The media horde is likely to declare John Kasich the winner of the debate. For viewers at home, he’s not as much of a standout, at least based on his middling Google search traffic. But the post-debate spin often matters more than the reality.

Rand Paul brags he has a balanced budget and says he wants to cut foreign aid to countries that “hate us.” That’s fine, but the two ideas have very little to do with each other. The U.S. spends less than $50 billion a year on foreign aid, less than 1 percent of the federal budget.

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Kasich may be smart to try to play a middle ground on gay marriage. While most Republicans are against same-sex marriage, my previous study indicated same-sex marriage was probably the second biggest reason why independents chose not to identify with the Republican Party. It’s a policy on which Republicans disagree with most Americans.

Marco Rubio just disputed Megyn Kelly’s assertion that he favors abortion rights in the case of rape. Most Republicans, however, say in poll after poll that abortion should be legal if a rape has been committed. In the 2014 General Social Survey, for example, 68 percent of Republicans said as much.

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).

Republicans love to claim the Affordable Care Act – you know, “Obamacare” – is killing full-time jobs. There’s precious little evidence to support that claim. The quick version of the argument is that under Obamacare, companies with at least 50 employees will have to start offering health insurance to anyone working at least 30 hours a week. In theory, that incentivizes companies to limit the number of employees working 30 hours or more. There’s lots of anecdotal evidence of that happening and, as I wrote earlier this year, some limited evidence in the jobs data, too. But let’s be clear: If Obamacare is having an effect, it’s a small one. The vast majority of hiring during the recovery has been in full-time jobs, as the chart below shows. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines full-time as 35 hours, not 30, so the chart isn’t a perfect measure of the law’s effect. But the big picture is clear.)

Can we please get a breakdown of how much America’s pimps have paid into the Social Security system?

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Chris Christie wants to raise the retirement age for Social Security, which could be electoral poison: 58 percent of Republicans over the age of 50 are against this. That’s a very big problem for a candidate who’s relying on doing well in New Hampshire, where 56 percent of Republican primary voters were over the age of 50 in 2012.

Jeb Bush got attacked by Democrats last month when he said Americans “need to work more hours.” But as I wrote at the time, he’s right that far too many Americans are stuck in part-time jobs. He reiterated that point tonight, but without the inflammatory “work more hours” language.

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John Kasich just hit on a very important point when it comes to economic growth. He wanted to help people “in the shadows.” As we might remember, Mitt Romney had a big empathy problem in 2012. Yet, this is actually more of a Republican problem than a Romney problem. In every election since 1984, more voters have said the Democratic candidate cared more about them than the Republican candidate.

Jeb Bush says his economic success in Florida shows how he can achieve 4 percent annual economic growth as president. How credible is his 4 percent pledge? In two words: Not very. (See folks, not that hard.) Back in the 1960s and 1970s, 4 percent growth was pretty common in the U.S. But that was during a period when women were still joining the workforce and baby boomers were entering their prime working years, among other major demographic and social changes. Today, those trends are working against the economy rather than for it. The last time the U.S. experienced 4 percent growth was during the Clinton administration, in what we now recognize as the dot-com bubble. Still, even if 4 percent growth is unlikely, Bush is right about this much: Economic growth has been consistently disappointing under Obama. That’s especially true given the deep recession, which historically should have led to a strong rebound.

John Kasich started the night justifying expanding Medicaid in Ohio, saying he wanted to get treatment to the mentally ill and people being released from prison. It’s a reasonable justification: More than half of inmates have mental health issues, and before the Affordable Care Act, an estimated 70 to 90 percent of inmates were uninsured when they were released. National estimates before Obamacare was implemented said 57 percent of inmates would be eligible for Medicaid or subsidies under the law.

Google searches in the first 50 minutes of the debate, relative to Donald Trump who we’ve indexed at 100: Trump is still clearly ahead, although not by nearly as large a margin as he is on an ordinary evening. Cruz and Carson seem to be doing better on the Internet than in the debate room; the reverse is true for Kasich. Scott Walker has been very, very quiet.

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Jeb Bush has been having to explain his support for Common Core, which some think will hurt his presidential bid. It should be pointed out that most Republicans in Iowa, home to the first contest in the primary season, don’t seem to mind a candidate who favors Common Core standards. In a February 2015 Marist College poll, 57 percent of Iowa Republicans said a Common Core candidate would be acceptable.

Rand Paul may not be hawkish on foreign policy, but he’s the most pugilistic speaker on stage. He’s made three times as many interruptions as the rest of the candidates combined (Trump and Walker have each interrupted the moderator once).

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Tomorrow I’ve got to find out if the 4th Amendment has ever before been the subject of an argument in a presidential debate. But I’d be surprised if it has.

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Rand Paul just went after Chris Christie for hugging President Obama, after Hurricane Sandy and just before the 2012 election. He’s speaking to the Republican base. While many point to when the Bridgegate story broke in late 2013 as the moment at which Christie’s decline with Republicans began, it actually started a year earlier. His net favorability rating among Republicans dropped by 16 percentage points between 2012 and 2013. Part of that may have been his poorly received Republican National Convention speech, but some of it is likely because of his embracing of Obama.

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Two out of seven candidates in the JV debate were asked about their immigration policies. In the prime-time debate, more than half (six of 10) have been asked about immigration so far. And the big league questions have been more detailed than the “What would you say to a deportee?” open-ended question of the first debate. Tougher moderators or Trump’s presence forcing the issue front and center?

Rubio just made a nice pivot to legal immigration from illegal immigration. It should be noted that 50 percent to 60 percent of Republicans are in favor of keeping legal immigration levels the same or increased. This is the opposite of immigrants who are here illegally, who most Republicans do not want to give citizenship.

Both Huckabee and Santorum have now suggested they would simply defy the Supreme Court on abortion. Huckabee went further than most candidates I can recall by saying he would invoke the 5th and 14th Amendments and take some kind of executive action to overturn Roe v. Wade. It’s an interesting contrast to repeated criticism of Obama for his executive actions. And a sharp contrast with Pataki, who said Roe was settled law and shouldn’t be changed. Wonder if the other candidates will eventually have to take sides on whether the Supreme Court is truly supreme.

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We’ve written repeatedly about how opposition from the Republican Party establishment will ultimately make it difficult for Donald Trump to win the nomination, even if it helps him capitalize on anti-elite backlash in the short term. But Fox News — if it’s relationship with the GOP is more complicated than some observers might acknowledge — is a part of the Republican establishment too in many respects and is highly trusted by most Republicans. How it covers Trump will play an important role in how viable his campaign might remain over the next weeks and months, and if tonight is any indication, that coverage could be pretty tough.

Earlier I noted that the immigration debate often seems stuck in the 1990s. Donald Trump’s comments are a perfect example: He’s talking about building a wall to keep out undocumented immigrants from Mexico, at a time when illegal immigration has slowed and the U.S. is now getting more new immigrants from Asia than from Latin America. Jeb Bush, meanwhile, makes a point that’s often lost: Many undocumented immigrants are visa-overstayers, meaning they entered the country legally but didn’t leave when they were meant to. A 2006 Pew report estimated that 40 percent of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. initially came here legally.

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”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9_pRmRlzY4&t=1m7s

Q:What’s the over/under on Cavs comparisons to a participant? — Dylan Z Gioia A:Here’s the best statistical comparison between the Cavaliers and the GOP debate lineup I can think of: lining up the distribution of the candidates’ most recent RealClearPolitics polling average against the Cavs’ Value Over Replacement Player ratings compiled during the 2014-15 regular season: The distributions are pretty similar. Trump is LeBron James, Jeb Bush is Kyrie Irving, and Scott Walker is Kevin Love. Finals darling Matthew Dellavedova finished the season outside the team’s top 15 (he was below replacement level, in fact), so he’d have been relegated to the JV debate field if he were a GOP presidential candidate.

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.