CNN Undercard Republican Debate: Live Coverage

I’ve seen a lot of glib comments about this undercard debate, in our comments section, on Twitter and elsewhere. The glibness, in my opinion, is a manifestation of two facts: This campaign is about to go into overdrive after the Christmas/New Year’s break, and these four candidates, combined, are earning less than 5 percent. It’s unlikely that anything in tonight’s undercard changed that. Outside of Huckabee or Santorum winning back born-again/evangelical Iowans they won in 2008 and 2012 respectively, none of these candidates stands much of a chance to be any sort of player in this presidential race for much longer.

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?