What Went Down In The Second GOP Debate

Could Fiorina really have a second surge in her?

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The moderators are ceding much of the debate to the candidates. They aren’t cutting people off when they interrupt or keep talking, and, as a result, only 60 percent of comments in the first hour have been in response to questions. Twenty percent have been interjections, and 20 percent are the replies candidates get to make when mentioned.

Republicans are with John Kasich when it comes to defunding Planned Parenthood. According to a Quinnipiac poll out this month, the majority of Republicans (66 percent) are for cutting off federal funding to Planned Parenthood. The majority (53 percent) are also opposed to shutting down the government over funding for Planned Parenthood.

This debate is taking place at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, so according to the (admittedly imperfect) statistical ratings, which candidates are closest to Reagan ideologically? Carly Fiorina and Mike Huckabee.

First question for Huckabee! And it’s also the first domestic policy question of the night (it’s been all foreign policy and campaign details so far). Only Trump (4), Bush (3), and Fiorina, Paul and Cruz (2), have had more than one question addressed to them so far.

Repeating a thought from last time: Even if you’re giving them three hours total, it’s really hard in a field of 11 candidates to sustain any momentum if you’re only answering a question once every 20 minutes or so.

Huckabee still hasn’t technically gotten a question; he pre-empted the moderator to just talk. Trump just got his fourth.

Q: Has there ever been any studies on whether speaking over time or interrupting other candidates has a negative/positive impact on voters’ opinions? — Brian Roney A: I found this in the paper “Politeness Strategies in the 1992 Vice Presidential and Presidential Debates” by Edward Hinck and Shelly Hinck: “The debate between Perot and Gore over NAFTA on ‘Larry King Live’ revealed that a candidate’s willingness to be interrupted politely, as well as an opponent’s ability to interrupt politely, might play an important role in presenting a desirable image of leadership.”

Based on Google search traffic, Lindsey Graham led the JV debate for the majority of the program.

Huckabee is the only person who still hasn’t spoken since the introduction.

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I’m not quite so confident, Harry, that Trump’s temperament is a non-issue. Because how it comes across when he’s giving a stump speech, or in an interview, is different than when he’s on a debate stage, where there’s more of a level playing field and he has the potential to come across as more of a bully. The one little downtick Trump has had in the polls was after the last debate, in fact.

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It should again be pointed out that most people in the international community actually like us. According to the Pew Research Center, “across the 40 countries polled [in 2015], a median of 65% [of residents] say they have confidence in Obama to do the right thing in world affairs.” Moreover, “Obama remains much more popular globally than his predecessor, but opinions vary significantly across nations and regions.”

Of course, in the unlikely event that Trump wins the Republican nomination, he will have to accept other people’s money in the general election to fight the Democratic nominee.

Let’s put it this way, Micah: Trump’s favorability ratings have been climbing, as have his horse-race poll numbers. If GOP voters were that concerned with his temperament, he would either be stalling or falling. That’s not happening. Let’s see if it becomes an issue in the weeks and months ahead.

Harry, there’s a lot of talk about Trump’s temperament, and whether it would be dangerous in the White House, but don’t we have enough evidence that GOP voters like his temperament?

Just a reminder: Don’t listen when governors like Scott Walker brag that they balanced their state budgets. They’re required to by law.

Chris Christie knew what he was doing when he asked the audience members whether they were confident in the future of this country thanks to President Obama. Most Americans (69 percent) in a May George Washington Battleground poll said they don’t believe that the next generation will be better off economically. That includes 78 percent of Republicans.

The candidate I’m most interested in watching tonight — after Trump and Carson, anyway — is Marco Rubio. We’ve been fairly bullish about his chances for a long time here at FiveThirtyEight. His favorability ratings are strong among Republicans, and he seems to have avoided some of the negative media attention that other establishment candidates like Walker and Bush have had recently. And yet, there’s not been a lot of movement toward him in the polls, and he’s received very few endorsements so far.

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Despite not being in the first debate of the night, Donald Trump led all four debating candidates in Google search traffic until the end of the debate. Lindsey Graham and Bobby Jindal were the only others who really stood out.

If any of the Republican candidates were looking for any last-minute talking points for tonight’s debate, they could have done worse than to look up the government’s annual income and poverty report, released earlier today. In the first six years of Obama’s presidency, household income fell and poverty rose. I dug into the numbers in more depth earlier today, but the main takeaway is that more than five years after the recession, many Americans have yet to see any recovery at all. I’ll be interested to see whether any of the numbers from today’s report make it onto the debate stage tonight. Economic stagnation is a major theme, at least implicitly, in several of the candidates’ campaigns. Jeb Bush recently rolled out a tax plan he says will help boost economic growth. (I’m skeptical.) Marco Rubio has his own economic plan. And Donald Trump has tapped into a deep well of economic unease on the part of many voters. Yet economic issues were strangely absent from the first debate. They got a bit more attention in the “JV” debate earlier tonight, from Rick Santorum’s discussion of immigrants’ impact on wages to Bobby Jindal’s claim that “the idea of America is slipping away.” I’ll be watching to see if those themes carry over into the main debate tonight.

Micah, to Connor McGuire’s “what’s up with Trump?” question: Our basic theory of the race is outlined in our “Donald Trump’s Six Stages of Doom” article. It’s not that there’s any one barrier that’s necessarily insurmountable for Trump. It’s not that he’s necessarily going to go up in a poof of smoke. He could even retain some support through Iowa and New Hampshire. But there’s a long, long road between now and the nomination, and there are a number of hurdles along the road that are difficult for a candidate like Trump to overcome. He’s liable to trip on one of them. The most important one is probably the sixth hurdle, which is that Trump is not really a Republican, and that it’s the Republican Party’s nomination to bestow. Even if you believe that the influence of party elites has weakened, Trump is exactly the sort of candidate who the GOP establishment would fight to its dying clutches to avoid nominating. Not much has changed from when we wrote that article six weeks ago; the polls don’t magically go from being meaningless in August to meaningful in September. Maybe after Thanksgiving or so, when voters are thinking about who they might actually vote for instead of checking out the showroom, you can read a little bit more into them. But not now.

Graham and Jindal’s exchange over whether to shut down the government over Planned Parenthood funding illustrates the fundamental split within the Republican Party between pragmatists and ideologues. There are only a few legislative days left before the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, and a substantial group of House members seem willing to go to the brink to prevent Planned Parenthood from receiving any federal funding. Most Republican leaders in the House and Senate are trying to prevent that from happening. On Wednesday, a conservative Republican from California, Tom McClintock, resigned from the House Freedom Caucus over the group’s willingness to shut down the government over the issue, which he said would once again damage the party’s reputation. He said it would “alienate the public from the pro-life cause at precisely the time when undercover videos of Planned Parenthood’s barbaric practices are turning public opinion in our favor.”

A: How much revenue a flat tax would raise depends, of course, on where you set the tax rate. But at the levels discussed by most flat-tax proponents, the government would raise far less revenue than it does now. A flat tax is basically an extreme version of the common Republican claim that if we eliminated loopholes, we could lower overall tax rates. That’s true, but only up to a point. The problem is that under our current, progressive tax system, the wealthy pay a disproportionate share of total taxes. That’s true even after they take advantage of various loopholes and deductions. A flat tax, then, would either have to raise taxes on the middle class or generate far less total revenue (or, quite likely, both). As to your specific question, yes, there have been various independent estimates of the impact of a flat tax. A good place to start is the Tax Policy Center, which has concluded in the past that the only way for a flat tax to be revenue-neutral would be for it to raise taxes significantly on the middle class.

I can’t answer for Nate, Micah, but it comes down to a few important points for me. First, Donald Trump has yet to receive support from the party actors. There’s a reason FiveThirtyEight keeps track of endorsements from governors, members of the House and senators: They are fairly predictive of the outcome. No, you don’t need to lead in endorsements to win, but you should be on the board. Trump hasn’t gained any support so far. Second, it’s unlikely that Trump will gain much — if any — support from party actors. No one has been nominated in the modern primary era (since 1972) without holding elected office. Third, at some point, you have to figure that Trump’s recent liberal statements will eventually come back to haunt him.

Republicans are going after Obama and how he is viewed internationally. While there are different ways to measure how effective Obama’s foreign policy has been, a 2015 Pew Research Center survey found that “a median of 65% [of residents of different countries] say they have confidence in Obama to do the right thing in world affairs.” Pew goes on to note that “overall, Obama remains much more popular globally than his predecessor.”

Harry and Nate, it’s been a while since we’ve talked about Trump, and we got a question from Connor McGuire on Facebook: “Why does Trump only have a ‘5% chance’ of winning the primary, according to you guys?”

Rick Santorum, along with Ben Carson, is one of the few Republican candidates who support raising the federal minimum wage — though only to $8.75 an hour over three years, far below the $10.10 proposed by President Obama, let alone the $15 supported by labor activists. “How are we going to win if 90 percent of Americans don’t believe we care about them?” Santorum asked. Interestingly, though, in 2012 Santorum opposed Mitt Romney’s proposal to index the minimum wage to inflation. At the time, he said he supported raising the wage when it fell “below a certain level,” but he argued that automatic wage increases would drive up inflation.

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Rick Santorum is the only Republican in favor of raising the national minimum wage, and there’s a good reason for that. In a late July Marist College poll, only 37 percent of Republicans were in favor of raising the minimum wage. Santorum, however, is in agreement with most Americans (68 percent), who want the national minimum wage to be increased.

Well, Micah, the only candidate who really has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the nomination is Jindal. It’s not much more than a snowball’s chance, but it’s a better chance than what Pataki, Santorum or Graham has, and it would start with a very strong performance in Iowa. So are Iowa Republicans liking what they’re hearing from Jindal? Or does he convey the impression that he’s trying a little too hard? I don’t know. Jindal does seem to be getting decent Google search traffic from Iowa, but that’s undoubtedly a small and very noisy sample.

Nate, anything stand out to you so far?

Pataki joins Trump and Bush in calling for an end to the carried-interest loophole, which primarily benefits investment managers. And like many Republicans, he wants to eliminate deductions in order to bring down overall tax rates. That’s an idea many economists could get behind — deductions tend to go primarily to the wealthy, and they create distortions in the economy. That said, it’s pretty much impossible to close enough loopholes to bring the top tax rates down as much as Pataki and other candidates propose. To make the numbers work, you either need to keep rates higher or you have to raise trillions less in taxes.

Bobby Jindal is going after his fellow Republicans for confirming John Roberts to the Supreme Court. When Roberts was confirmed in 2005, not a single Republican senator voted against Roberts’ confirmation. And it wasn’t just an establishment vote, either. In a Pew Research Center poll from September 2005, 68 percent of Republicans nationwide were for confirming Roberts. Just 8 percent were against it.

Graham just won the debate.

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George Pataki may seem like a liberal when he says Kim Davis should have issued those same-sex marriage licenses. The ABC/Washington Post poll found that a majority of Republicans, 51 percent, believed that the “county clerk should” have issued the marriage licenses, however.

Unlike the previous JV debate, when Carly Fiorina was drawing far more Google search interest than other Republicans, there isn’t much of a front-runner this time around: Graham is drawing a bit more traffic than Jindal, and Jindal a bit more than the other two. But Trump is being searched for far more than all of them despite not even being on the stage!

Even George Pataki, who tried to come up with a practical alternative to ending birthright citizenship, didn’t mention that the concept happens to be in the Constitution. (Specifically, the 14th Amendment.) It’s still not clear how the many Republicans who want to end this form of citizenship would do so. A constitutional amendment is unlikely to get through Congress, where Republicans do not have two-thirds control, or past 38 states. (Republicans currently control only 31 state legislatures.) Donald Trump has spoken vaguely about how some lawyers believe there is another path to ending birthright citizenship, but only a few legal scholars support the notion. At the moment, it’s a popular talking point on the GOP circuit that has little chance of happening.