CNN Undercard Republican Debate: Live Coverage

This sequence of undercard debates says a lot about how people consume news. Most people will never watch these undercard debates. At best, they’ll read an article or see a post with a video clip. The question is: What is the value to most citizens of watching the undercard debate? And more broadly, does anyone measure the differences between debate-watchers and the non-debate-watching majority in terms of how they process the political race?

Less glibly: I’m curious why Mike Huckabee has made so little impact on this campaign, because he’s probably the only one of the four candidates on stage who had more than a 1 percent chance of winning the nomination when the race began. I don’t have a good answer to that question about Huckabee, but it’s an interesting question. He was a pretty good candidate in 2008 and started the race with reasonably high favorability ratings.