CNN Undercard Republican Debate: Live Coverage

How do Americans want the Islamic State group defeated, and how far are we willing to personally go? Well, Harvard’s Institute of Politics polled millennials and found that a majority wanted to send troops to fight Islamic State, but only 20 percent would volunteer to serve.

If the Republican candidates’ comments in this undercard can be seen as anti-Islam, you won’t find many Republicans who mind. A YouGov poll out this week found that 75 percent of self-identified Republicans have an unfavorable view of Islam. What may be more surprising is that 45 percent of Democrats do too.

Graham thanked the more than 3,500 Muslims serving in the U.S. armed forces. That estimate appears to date to 2009 and, like other estimates of religious populations in the U.S., is rough. Some Muslim soldiers for the U.S. have faced challenges fighting in Muslim countries, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2009: “In Iraq and Afghanistan, Muslims serving in the U.S. military often use fake last names to avoid being singled out by insurgents as traitors and to prevent reprisals against their families elsewhere in the world.”

Lindsey Graham is really trying to extend an olive branch to American Muslims, talking about the Muslim-American service members, etc. It should be noted that post-9/11, President George W. Bush went out of his way to talk about how the teachings of Islam were peaceful. This is from a statement he made on Sept. 20, 2001: “I also want to speak tonight directly to Muslims throughout the world. We respect your faith. It’s practiced freely by many millions of Americans, and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends. Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah.” Obviously, post-Paris/San Bernardino, we’ve seen a different tonal response from the Republican party.

Lindsey Graham, like President Obama, is unusual for referring to the terrorist organization as “ISIL” rather than “ISIS.” We at FiveThirtyEight are unusual too, usually using the term “Islamic State” for the group in accordance with the AP style guide. About 95 percent of the Google search traffic for the terrorist group uses the term ISIS instead, however.

NAME	SHARE OF U.S. GOOGLE SEARCH TRAFFIC, 2015
ISIS	95.4%
ISIL	3.0%
Daesh	0.9%
Islamic State	0.6%

The NSA metadata program has been ruled illegal, but it continued for a time after the court ruling. There is disagreement among the GOP ranks about how much surveillance is warranted, with the more libertarian wing, like Rand Paul, coming out strongly against the metadata program; Mike Huckabee expressed some reservations; and other candidates — tonight and in the past — have expressed a strong preference for more active surveillance.

That’s a good point about younger voters, Hayley. But overall, Republicans didn’t think much of Muslims before the San Bernardino attacks, and so far polls suggest they like Trump’s proposal.

The candidates, when invited to bash Trump’s proposal to bar Muslims temporarily from entering the U.S., are spending more time bashing President Obama and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton for not doing enough to fight radical Islam. This line of argument is well-tuned to Republican voters, most of whom have a negative view of Muslims. Republicans appear roughly split in their views on Trump’s plan, according to several conflicting polls, some of which show a small majority supporting the plan that most candidates have condemned.

We’re seeing how much the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino are shaping the race right now — the teaser to this debate said it all, with soundbites of all the candidates talking about bombing the Islamic State group to kingdom come. As Ben noted earlier, what was once going to be an election about the economy is turning into a referendum on the messy state of the current Middle East and the U.S.’s role in it right now. This is going to extend to data-mining and privacy issues, immigration, etc. National security is touching everything right now.

Give Lindsey Graham this: He really has been talking about these issues since the start of the campaign. Until recently, it looked like this would be a race dominated by economic issues. After the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, attention has shifted to terrorism. Graham, though, has been there all along.

The candidates’ arguments against Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims are smart for any number of reasons — including appealing to younger voters. As Mona Chalabi wrote last year, younger Americans are more likely to have favorable views of Muslims, and Americans are especially likely to have a favorable view of Muslims if they know one.

Yeah, Leah, Trump isn’t debating in the undercard, but he’s being talked about a lot. The audience has been hesitant to applaud those who go after Trump’s Muslim immigration ban. There are a lot of poll numbers to back up why, but a Monmouth University poll out today makes the point well. While just 39 percent of Americans say Trump is “saying things that need to be said,” 68 percent of Republicans did.

It took five questions and 20 minutes before we got a non-Trump-related question. Even though the candidates are attacking him, when the moderators put him center stage, they’re feeding into his controversy->publicity->poll numbers cycle.

Most experts agree with George Pataki that Trump’s plan to ban Muslims is a bad idea. But they don’t necessarily think it’s unconstitutional. As law professor Peter J. Spiro wrote in The New York Times a week ago, courts have generally given far more leeway to laws applying to immigration than to policies dealing with people who are already in the U.S.

Sure, Micah, we had Lincoln Chafee, who ran as a dove in the Democratic primary this year, even though most of the other candidates were doves. You’ve had any number of anti-abortion-rights candidates on the Republican side (Gary Bauer, Alan Keyes, etc.). I guess what makes Graham stand out is he ran to stop Rand Paul, but Paul didn’t need stopping.

Harry, have we ever had a single-issue candidate — a la Lindsey Graham — who has run on a single issue — in Graham’s case, foreign policy — that all the other candidates mostly agree on?

Pataki cited today’s shutdown of the L.A. schools after the call-in of a terrorist threat as the fault of “radical Islam” and says Hillary Clinton has “continually lied to the American people” about terror. But New York City got the same threats as L.A., decided it was a hoax and didn’t shut down the schools. Pataki is, of course, the former governor of New York. But he didn’t mention the difference in reactions, or the idea of threat-as-hoax.

Doesn’t look like 2016 is shaping up to be the Year of the Governor. Of the nine current or former governors who were once in the GOP race, three (Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal and Rick Perry) have already dropped out. Two others (George Pataki and Mike Huckabee) have been relegated to the JV debate. Jim Gilmore is technically still in the race but isn’t polling well enough to make either debate. Only three (Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and John Kasich) will be on the main stage later tonight.

Well, although pretty much no one knows who Pataki is, he’s taking on Trump’s ideas about banning Muslims from America in his opening statement. I’m wondering who else might do that directly throughout the night. Something to look for.

Why don’t most people care about this undercard debate? It could be because three of the candidates on stage (Lindsey Graham, George Pataki and Rick Santorum) are polling below 1 percent nationally. Mike Huckabee is leading the undercarders with … 2 percent.

https://twitter.com/Tmbv93/status/676903934070493185 A: It depends on what you mean by “serious.” Chris Christie is the only one of the three whose trajectory seems to point upward. He’s probably next in line to get a look if Rubio is perceived to be a flop. But he also comes with serious ideological baggage, and perhaps other sorts of baggage too. John Kasich has a good résumé on paper, but he’s run a poor campaign and away from his conservative credentials. And Jeb is somehow perhaps both less electable and less conservative than Rubio. Shorter answer: Rubio may have a bit of rope to hang himself with, because the alternatives aren’t that great, but Christie seems like the most viable of the three.

Tonight’s debate will take place in a physical symbol of the influence that one man and his money can have on the political process: the Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, owned by Sheldon Adelson, who in 2012 spent more money on a single year’s elections than any individual in U.S. history. Adelson gave at least $98 million that year to about 34 campaigns and super PACs, according to ProPublica, virtually all of which supported Republicans, including $30 million for a super PAC supporting Mitt Romney. The $20 million he gave to the super PAC backing Newt Gingrich helped keep Gingrich alive in the primaries long past his expiration date. (He is also reported to have given tens of millions more to dark-money groups that don’t have to disclose donations.) Adelson hasn’t been nearly as profligate so far this cycle, and he has not publicly settled on a candidate. Earlier this month, all but one of the Republican presidential hopefuls paid homage to Adelson at a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition, of which he is the principal benefactor, each topping the other to express support for Israel, one of Adelson’s principal concerns. (An exception was Donald Trump, who seemed to drop out of the Adelson primary by not calling Jerusalem the undivided capital of Israel.) But Israel isn’t Adelson’s only political interest, and that’s where the ornate Venetian plays a role. He also wants to preserve the drawing power of his casino empire by pushing politicians to outlaw or restrict online gambling. (Officially, he says that online gambling would undermine family values, notwithstanding the large number of families that walk past his casino floors each day.) So far, two Republican candidates have signed on to a bill that would essentially outlaw Internet poker and other forms of Internet gambling: Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham. Rubio, in fact, has been eagerly courting Adelson and his potential support, meeting with him repeatedly and talking up his enthusiasm for Israel and against online gambling. If he brings either issue up tonight, not far from Adelson’s slot machines, it won’t be a coincidence.

One of the candidates on stage tonight will go on to face the Democratic nominee in the 2016 general election, and they’ll probably want to think about how their message plays with Latino, black and Asian-American voters. So what might a Republican victory in the Electoral College look like if the GOP nominee makes inroads with those groups? Use FiveThirtyEight’s Swing-O-Matic to see how changes in party preference and turnout by different demographic groups would affect the outcome: Will black voters return to pre-Obama levels of turnout and partisanship? How important is the Latino vote? How much of an overall shift from 2012 would it take for Republicans to win? Change the settings based on how you think each Republican candidate might fare among different groups and see the results.

It’s an hors d’oeuvre — compliments of the chef. Sure, you didn’t order it, but it’s on the table, so you may as well take a bite. Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s live blog of CNN’s Republican debate, undercard edition. Follow along with us as Rick Santorum, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee and George Pataki scrape for relevance. Then, after a brief amuse-bouche — just go take a walk — we’ll have a separate live blog for the main-stage debate. Have a question you think our politics team can answer? Leave it in a comment, or tweet it to us @FiveThirtyEight. But to get us started, here’s Nate Silver, Clare Malone and Harry Enten previewing tonight’s debate:

We’ll be responding to questions and comments all night — tweet @FIVETHIRTYEIGHT or leave a comment.