It was an appropriately lively debate for a Saturday night. The Republican candidates were vicious to one another, the crowd was riled up, and the most important story of the evening — the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia — was largely drowned out in the noise.
As we’ve done after every debate, the FiveThirtyEight staff anonymously submitted grades based on how much we think the candidates helped or hurt themselves in the quest for the nomination. The highest marks went to Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, who each got a B+. Donald Trump averaged a C+ instead.
CANDIDATE
AVERAGE GRADE
HIGH GRADE
LOW GRADE
Jeb Bush
B+
A
C
Marco Rubio
B+
A
B-
Ted Cruz
B
B+
C
Donald Trump
C+
B+
C-
John Kasich
C+
A-
D
Ben Carson
C-
C
D
FiveThirtyEight’s Republican debate grades
But as I’ve said after every recent debate, it’s hard to assess what the viewers at home will think — perhaps especially after a brawl as wild and wooly as this one. For that matter, there wasn’t that much agreement among our staff about how well the candidates did. Two of our voters gave Bush an A, for instance, while another gave him a C. Trump’s grades ranged from B+ to C-. So we’re a little ¯_(ツ)_/¯ on this one. That doesn’t mean the debate won’t matter — it might matter a lot — but we’d like to see how the reaction plays out over the next couple of days, and how it interacts with the news about Scalia.
It’s worth remembering, however, that a lot of positions Trump was espousing in the debate, including his harsh critiques of George W. Bush and the Iraq War, and his defenses of Planned Parenthood and eminent domain, are not very popular with Republicans (although some would be smart positions to take during the general election). George W. Bush’s favorability rating among Republicans is 67 percent, for example, while just 8 percent of Republicans take an unfavorable view of him.
Trump’s performance tonight may help him with his base, but it won’t necessarily help him to expand his coalition, and perhaps the whole question the nomination turns upon is whether Trump can go from having 25 percent to 35 percent support to 50 percent-plus as other candidates drop out of the running.
If you watched the GOP debate tonight, you missed this:
https://twitter.com/ArashMarkazi/status/698718934405554176
Farai Chideya
Tonight we saw Trump not only get personal with charges against his opponents, but also respond to the charges that he is vulgar (for repeating the words of a supporter who called Cruz a misogynist term). Marco Rubio has made hay out of the issue, saying he couldn’t even discuss the word with his sons. But Trump’s closing statement stuck very much to his talking points about making America great — and was much calmer than the rest of his debate performance. I still believe the person who could most effectively take down Trump is Trump himself.
David Firestone
Apparently this is going to be the tone of the rest of the debates. They’ve already been through all the major issues in the previous hundreds of forums — how many times have we heard the same immigration tape loop, the same refrain on eminent domain and postcard tax returns? — but there are an infinite number of ways to insult each other and their families, an endless path to feigned anger over the latest ad or stray remark. To keep voters watching, and to stand out from the white noise, most of the candidates apparently feel they have to boil over on camera. Eventually, of course, that will become tiresome, too.
Clare Malone
My final thought is — how is Ben Carson still in the race? His low-single-digits poll number compatriots Carly Fiorina and Chris Christie have dropped out post-New Hampshire, his campaign seems from all accounts to be massively dysfunctional, and I guess I just find it striking, looking at this winnowed field on the debate stage, that Carson has remained.
Harry Enten
This was the nastiest debate in a while. Clearly, the candidates know the field will winnow and time is running out. I don’t know if this debate will upend Trump’s lead, but it’s not from a lack of trying from the other candidates.
Micah Cohen
The debate is wrapping up here. Final thoughts?
David Firestone
Strategy, Micah? This is about as pre-planned as an improv comedy night. Bringing up eminent domain on his own, without even being challenged on it? Choosing to ignore the mood of the crowd by taking a lefty view of the Iraq War and the Bushes’ role in it? He believes in running on instinct and gutting it out.
Micah Cohen
This Trump performance has been … Trumpian. Was this his strategy?
Nate Silver
One more thing on Trump. People seem to think he’s invincible and … um, well, maybe they have a point? But he was punished a bit by voters for his angry and somewhat uneven performances during the first two Republican debates, each of which slightly (although temporarily) lowered his numbers in national polls.
Farai Chideya
An analysis by the Tampa Bay Tribune’s political director went point by point through Jeb Bush’s legacy as governor of Florida. Among the points it explores: how impressive Bush’s job creation numbers were (no better than the four preceding Florida governors’) and a rise in debt during his tenure from $15 billion to $23 billion.
Harry Enten
Everyone has his or her own view of who wins or loses a debate. We’ll have our final debate grades later on, but to me Bush has greatly improved in his one-on-ones with Trump. He clearly has gotten under Trump’s skin a number of times, and he even got a chance to talk about what at least in a 30-second sound-bite is a successful record as governor of Florida.
Clare Malone
Donald Trump has said several times in the last couple of minutes that he has not gone bankrupt. It’s hard to determine upon what razor’s edge of semantics Trump is treading, but he has filed for bankruptcy on four separate occasions; they were all Chapter 11 reorganizations, which he has spun to the service of his deal-making message — he was just bending the law of the land to his best business interest, he says.
Micah Cohen
Commercial break diversion! Check out our interactive map of where the candidates are earning Facebook likes:
Nate Silver
I’m seeing mixed reactions to Donald Trump’s performance from pundits, who are variously suggesting that tonight’s debate is a meltdown for Trump and claiming it could help him instead. My personal view, for whatever it’s worth, is fairly close to that of Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner. Trump’s attacks on the Iraq War and George W. Bush and his defense of Planned Parenthood and eminent domain may help him with his base. But these are unpopular positions among the broader Republican electorate and they may simultaneously lower Trump’s ceiling.
Ben Carson just spent some of his minutes on the national debt. He’s one of the few candidates to raise the issue this cycle; as my colleague Andrew Flowers wrote last month, no one seems to be talking about the deficit any more.
Donald Trump felt the need to defend himself after his opponents hit him numerous times on the issue of eminent domain. While eminent domain may not sound like a sexy topic, the final Des Moines Register poll in Iowa found that of all the issues tested, Trump’s eminent domain policy was the thing that bothered voters most.
Nate Silver
Well, Trump has gotten a lot of fire from Jeb Bush. And yeah, Cruz is finally getting into it with Trump now. But it still amazes me that Rubio has almost never had a bad word to say about the Republican front-runner, especially at a time when he needs to win back the confidence of the “establishment.”
Micah Cohen
So that Cruz attack on Trump was one of the first times someone has really gone after Trump, right?
Clare Malone
Well, Ted Cruz just got Donald Trump to give a good attack ad soundbite — Trump said that Planned Parenthood does a lot of good. In an election where it’s a basic refrain from candidates that Planned Parenthood should be defunded, that’s not nothing.
Gloves off. Trump calls Cruz the “single biggest liar.” Worth noting: Cruz hit Trump hard in an ad on the issue of eminent domain, also discussed in the debate. But that attack ad has been deemed partly false.
Farai Chideya
The political ad wars are heating up in South Carolina. Residents are seeing ads from Ted Cruz touting his legal record, from Marco Rubio attacking Hillary Clinton, and from Donald Trump — whose campaign has largely relied on media coverage as opposed to ads — attacking Cruz on immigration. A tool called the Political TV Ad Archive allows you to see the ads — here’s the Trump attack ad — plus how often they’ve aired and in which markets.
Farai Chideya
Cruz chose to make job creation the centerpiece of his response to a question on how to lift people out of poverty. U.S. workers have been hit by a one-two punch. Globalization means U.S. jobs are directly affected by offshoring, which Trump took on in his answer, and secondarily when our markets are responsive to other global financial indices, like China’s. Second, disruptive innovation by tech companies often includes automation, with some companies creating wealth rather than jobs and leading some analysts to posit there will be a “jobless future.” (Others vehemently disagree with that thesis.)
Micah Cohen
Bush did make a reference to mooning in an interview!
“I could drop my pants. Moon the whole crowd. Everybody would be aghast, except the press guys would never notice.”
Nate Silver
Someone — maybe us! — needs to do some further reporting on how these debate crowds are chosen. Tonight’s audience in South Carolina seems to be unabashedly pro-“establishment.” But remember that the state’s two senators, and by extension much of its political machine, are behind Bush and Rubio.
Farai Chideya
Trump is still leading in South Carolina. But the state has a strong cohort of evangelical voters, and I’ve spoken to some who find Trump’s language and ad-hominem attacks offensive. The polls will show whether Trump’s numbers go down, and the exit polls from the South Carolina primary will also let us know if evangelical voters broadly reject or embrace Trump.
The candidates are discussing immigration through the lens of who should be deported. But there’s another issue on the table — H-1B visas for skilled workers. And there, the differences between candidates are possibly more profound. Rubio and Cruz both favor expanding the number of H-1B visas, while Trump wants to raise the wages for these workers, bringing their salaries more in line with domestic skilled workers, such as computer coders, and presumably pushing companies to hire more domestic workers.
Harry Enten
Bush — because unlike Rubio he hasn’t abandoned his original comprehensive immigration reform position. Trump is what he is. Cruz is further right than Rubio. Kasich? I don’t know … maybe. Carson is never becoming president, so there’s that.
Micah Cohen
What Republican left in this race is most likely to sign comprehensive immigration reform legislation?
Jody Avirgan
I miss the Rand Paul that never actually materialized: principled, fiery and willing to take on Trump.
Clare Malone
Chris Christie for his crackling humanity (and by that I mean doing stuff like calling out Marco Rubio for repeating his stump speech over and over).
Micah Cohen
Commercial break lightning round! We now have just six candidates on this stage — which departed candidate do you miss most?
Harry Enten
Yes, I would think that expanding Medicaid may hurt Kasich in this primary. A 2014 YouGov poll found that just 35 percent of Republicans were for expanding Medicaid. On the other hand, 55 percent of Republicans were opposed.
Nate Silver
John Kasich, who ran explicitly as a moderate in New Hampshire and who is defending his expansion of Medicaid tonight, is not a terribly natural fit for South Carolina. But with an open primary, the state’s electorate isn’t quite as conservative as you might think. In 2012, 32 percent of Republican voters in South Carolina identified as moderate or liberal, placing it exactly halfway in between Iowa (17 percent) and New Hampshire (47 percent).
CORRECTION (10:14 p.m.): An earlier version of this post incorrectly said that Kasich defended his expansion of Medicare in Ohio. He expanded Medicaid, not Medicare.
Farai Chideya
I’m stuck comparing two very different men: Herman Cain, the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza who led the GOP pack in October 2011, and Ben Carson, who also once led the Republican race, but whose poll numbers fell quickly after he fumbled a response to a debate question about the terrorist attacks in Paris. Carson’s poll numbers are now languishing in the single digits; he’s had a series of staff shake-ups; he was rumored to be dropping out but has not yet.
So in two election cycles, black Republican candidates have peaked early and then fallen far. The question is why? Is there a desire in the GOP electorate for a more diverse field? I don’t have the answer, but you can’t avoid the question.
Nate Silver
I’ve noticed that the conservative Republicans in my Twitter feed seem to think that Rubio has been doing reasonably well, while the liberals are still making Rubio robot jokes. The truth is I don’t think he’s stood out that much in the first 45 minutes — Trump vs. Bush has been the lead story instead. So the question becomes whether Rubio needs a big moment tonight or whether passing through with an average debate would be helpful enough to him.
Clare Malone
I would agree with Harry that it’s a lot easier to fall flat on your face in a debate — which is pretty much what Rubio did the other night. We were all so shocked by it because we seem to expect that they’ll all be so rehearsed and polished by the time they take the debate stage. When the practiced moments are punctured, like they were last week by Chis Christie, we are all reminded that this is on some level very much theater, and we find it a bit unsettling.
Farai Chideya
Rubio has plenty of opportunity to make up ground if Trump falls after this seemingly troubled debate performance. But I think Cruz may also gain ground.
Harry Enten
It’s much easier to have a blunder than a great moment in a debate, in my opinion. We remember the blunders more than the strong moments. That said, my answer is always the same: Wait for the polls.
Micah Cohen
Rubio has seemed pretty solid so far. Does a good debate performance get him back to where he was before his pre-New Hampshire debate debacle? Or is it only a first step?
Clare Malone
John Kasich talking about homelessness and prisons and the working poor not getting health care is doing what I believe our fearless leader, Nate, called compassionate conservatism 2.0. Kasich has been a pretty popular governor in swing-state Ohio, winning 86 of 88 counties, partly by working this very look.
