The undercard debate is over. The main stage debate is about to begin. Move on over to our main stage Republican debate live blog (please).
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.
https://twitter.com/ABCPolitics/status/676934107008532480
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.
I agree with Leah — the candidates clearly wished they could argue with people other than each other. Instead they competed to sound the most hawkish and the most mawkish about protecting their descendants and yours.
Well, this debate didn’t do much to ease Americans’ fears about Islamic State — we had several allusions to attacks being planned at this very moment. I think it mostly just added to the general atmosphere of paranoia that’s dominating the GOP primary.
I would have enjoyed this debate more if Rand Paul hadn’t made it to the main stage. This was a competition to see who could say “I will kill them” most often, and it would have been more interesting with someone taking the other side of the issue.
Final thoughts on the undercard debate? Or thoughts on the final undercard debate? Because if this is the final undercard debate, my thoughts are that I’m happy.
Final thoughts on the undercard debate?
Ben, you’re right about illegal immigration overall, but Santorum was talking specifically about unaccompanied minors, whose immigration has spiked in recent months, which is worrying since it usually slows in the fall and winter. Not only does that create a burden on shelters, it will also add to the growing backlog of pending cases in U.S. immigration courts.
Lots of talk about how we can’t screen refugees, which isn’t quite true. Here’s a look at an overview of the process of vetting refugees who come to the United States — it’s a pretty rigorous look. That said, right now, the U.S. doesn’t look at the social media presence of say, people who come to the country on a tourist visa. There are certainly gaps in intelligence. But back on the point of refugees, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, there’s no real connection or historical evidence that being a refugee means that you’re going to be a terrorist once you come to the U.S. It’s pretty unlikely.
Rick Santorum says we’ve “created a magnet” for illegal immigration. But the real magnet was the strong labor market of the 1990s and 2000s — and once that ended, immigration slowed dramatically. According to the Pew Research Center, more Mexicans are now leaving the U.S. than entering it. And net illegal immigration has fallen more or less to zero in recent years.
Rick Santorum’s assertion that there are “four times as many acts of violence against Jews than there are against Muslims, and I never hear the president talk about that” raised eyebrows in the office, but he’s basically right. The FBI logged 648 victims of anti-Semitic hate crimes in 2014 and only 184 victims of anti-Muslim attacks.
Excuse my New York City-centric viewpoint, but Mike Huckabee just implied in the debate that the Upper East Side of Manhattan is a liberal bastion. He’s wrong. In the 2013 mayoral election, Democrat Bill de Blasio lost the Upper East Side to Republican Joe Lhota, despite de Blasio’s winning by 49 percentage points citywide. I believe Huckabee was referring to the Upper West Side, which de Blasio won by 49 percentage points.
If George Pataki sounds out of touch with contemporary Republicans … it may be because his part of the country has shifted away from the GOP as much as pretty much anywhere else in the U.S. In 1980, when Pataki was first elected mayor of Peekskill in Westchester County, New York, Westchester County voted for Ronald Reagan by 19 percentage points over Jimmy Carter. In 2012, Westchester County voted for Barack Obama by 25 percentage points over Mitt Romney. And in Peekskill itself, Obama won the 2012 election by 44 percentage points.
Life expectancy in Syria has fallen 20 years since the start of fighting, from a robust 74 years just three years ago. This photo speaks to the level of desperation on the ground — giving context to the reason people are fleeing.
The vast majority of Republican governors — but not Democratic ones — agree with Santorum and Pataki that the U.S. shouldn’t accept refugees from Syria under the current refugee-vetting system.
The debate over how the U.S. negotiates with terrorists who have taken hostages has been a really sore point with the Obama administration, and Huckabee just got that question. This Lawrence Wright piece in The New Yorker covers in depth (very in depth, it’s about 20k words!) the struggle behind the scenes by various families to save their children — all of them died — by trying to semi-circumvent the U.S. policy on negotiating with terrorists.
Bowe Bergdhal, who is charged with deserting his post and is facing a court-martial, is also the subject of the new season of record-shattering podcast Serial. Now some analysts are questioning whether the rollout of the podcast will affect his military court case.
Dan McLaughlin pointed out on Twitter that Graham is the only candidate in this undercard debate to win an election since 2002. That, of course, is a sign of their political stagnation. Let me just add that Graham won just 56 percent in the 2014 South Carolina Republican primary for Senate, which is quite weak for an incumbent senator.
The studies that Rick Santorum cited to defend reversing the policy that integrates women into elite combat units included one that found that 85 percent of those surveyed in U.S. Special Operations Command opposed letting women into their jobs — for reasons including, but not limited to, “I think PMS is terrible, possibly the worst. I cannot stand my wife for about a week out of the month for every month. I like that I can come to work and not have to deal with that.”
The party, not deciding:
https://twitter.com/RalstonReports/status/676926120021909508
I think these are also previews of what these notable Republicans and those like them might say if they end up campaigning for the ticket, speaking at the convention or even, long shot, running as VP.
Rothenberg is right that this undercard debate will have little effect on the horse race, but I think Clare is also right: It is an interesting measure of where the Republican Party stands on these issues. A couple of years ago the GOP seemed like it was becoming more dovish. That seems like a long time ago listening this evening.
Farai, I think this debate’s merit in some ways is the amount that the candidates are hammering away on Syria, the ground troops question, etc. They’re digging into it in a non-soundbite way, I think (at least by debate standards). So, it’s a food for thought hour and change, maybe something for the Big Debate moderators to question the real candidates with.
So, just to get meta for a second, following Carl … what does this debate do, FiveThirtyEight team, and for whom? Will this be the last undercard? Thinking of:
https://twitter.com/StuPolitics/status/676923246521024512
To follow up on the question Harry answered before: Based on the formula we use in our Senate forecasts, Cruz’s strongly conservative views would cost the Republicans a net of about 5 percentage points relative to a more moderate, Mitt Romney-esque Republican. That’s a pretty big deal, but not so much that Cruz couldn’t overcome it if national conditions were really poor for Democrats.
Lots of talk of bullies today: ISIS is a bully, Huckabee said, that could be intimidated by being the strongest kid in grade school; Vladimir Putin is a bully, George Pataki said, who could be thwarted with a metaphorical punch in the face. Americans can get behind an anti-bully campaign: In a Rasmussen Reports poll last year, 55 percent of Americans said bullying was a bigger problem than in the past; just 17 percent thought the problem had diminished.
In a taste of things to come (probably) with Cruz leading some polls in Iowa, Graham has really gone after Cruz and Paul tonight, calling both out by name three times so far:
“Now everybody’s on board except Sen. Paul. Sen. Paul and Sen. Cruz are are isolationists. They both want to restrict the ability of the NSA to do the following. Find out if somebody overseas is calling into America.”
“We need to fight the war over there. To the people in my party to believe you can withdraw from the battlefield like Sen. Cruz and Paul and we would be safe, you don’t understand this war.”
“To my good friend Ted Cruz, please ask him the following question. You say you would keep Assad in power I will tell you that is the worst possible thing that could come out of an American leader’s mouth. It would be disastrous. His favorite movie is apparently ‘Princess Bride.’ Ted, getting in bed with Iran and Russia to save Assad is inconceivable.”
https://twitter.com/LeahLibresco/status/676924037382209538
Based on live data from Google Trends … the four candidates on stage, combined, have gotten less search traffic over the past hour than Donald Trump.
Does it feel like you’ve seen these same guys over and over during the undercard debates? That’s not exactly right. August’s undercard didn’t include Huckabee, who got the main stage. It also featured Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina and Jim Gilmore. By September, Gilmore had dropped off the debate rosters, Perry had dropped out of the race entirely, and Fiorina had jumped alongside Huckabee and the rest of the main debaters. The undercard stayed steady in October: Santorum, Jindal, Pataki, Graham. Last month, Huckabee and Chris Christie dropped to the kids’ table — yes, this post is an excuse to use lots of synonyms for the undercard debate — while Pataki and Graham got the night off. Since then, Jindal has dropped out and Christie has moved up, making room for Pataki and Graham to take the spots that it feels like they’ve always occupied in these debates.
When asked about Putin and Assad, Graham said, “I blame Obama for ISIL.” A March Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 34 percent of Republicans ranked Obama as an imminent threat, ahead of Putin (25 percent) and Assad (23 percent).
Crude oil exports — which are currently banned — are shaping up to be a big issue in Congress, and based on Huckabee’s comments, could be an issue in the general election campaign too. But the surge in U.S. oil production has already done plenty to destabilize global oil markets. Oil has tumbled below $40 a barrel, and the U.S. is importing less oil than it has in decades.
Natural gas exports, by the way, are legal, and Cheniere Energy is set to start shipping liquefied natural gas from a newly constructed Louisiana terminal early in the new year.
You heard Graham just defend George W. Bush. That’s smart. According to an October CBS News poll, his favorable rating among Republicans was 67 percent. His unfavorable rating was just 8 percent.
The willingness of candidates like Pataki, Huckabee and Graham to send ground troops to fight the Islamic State is a reminder of the promises made by national leaders at the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to fight the enemy regardless of the cost. That cost turned out to be immense: more than 4,400 U.S. military deaths in Iraq and more than 2,100 in Afghanistan. And at least $1.7 trillion spent on Iraq and $1 trillion for Afghanistan. Virtually none of the cost was “paid for” in the usual sense of the term; it was largely added to the deficit, with the bill handed to future generations. Pataki just said the fight against Islamic State would not be a “function of years” because the enemy was right out there in the open. You could practically hear the military snorting at the notion that yet another military venture in the Middle East would be a cakewalk.
Q: Ted Cruz is probably the most far-right presidential candidate in many decades. Could someone that extreme actually get elected? — Brendon Nelson
A: Sure. I think, generally speaking, being that extreme ideologically makes winning more difficult, but it’ll be hard to beat the Republican candidate if Obama’s approval rating is at 40 percent. If it’s closer to 45 percent, then Cruz’s extreme ideology compared to the median American voter could cost the Republicans the election.
How big should the U.S. military be to fight the Islamic State? It was determined, in the past, by the idea of a “two-front strategy,” or the idea that the U.S. military should be able to simultaneously fight two wars in different battle theaters. But terrorism is not conventional war. The tactics of the Islamic State can be more like a flash-mob than standard battlefront formations. It’s unclear whether a return to the two-front standard would sharply shift the nation’s military staffing, let alone priorities.
https://twitter.com/mollyesque/status/676921388511424512
“Another 9/11 is coming as sure as I’m standing here,” Graham said before the commercial break. “They’re planning it tonight. The ISIL leadership wants to hurt you and your family.” Americans fear another terrorist attack more than they have at any other time since Sept. 11, 2001, partly because of candidate comments such as Graham’s, but also because of similar ones by FBI’s Director James Comey.
Santorum and Graham are an interesting tag-team tonight. Santorum has spent some time trying to explain the Islamic State’s death-cult ideology (they think that they are fighting to fulfil a prophecy that sees them doing battle with the enemy in Dabiq, a town in Syria), which is actually something Obama tried to do in his address last weekend, and Graham, for his part, is doing naming and shaming; he called out Paul and Cruz for not wanting to put boots on the ground in the Middle East. They’re the ones that are putting the most meat on the national security debate. He’s also mentioned his numerous Middle East trips — 36 times! — at least three times so far.
https://twitter.com/gerrymullany/status/676919471366369280
For those who say this is an incredibly weak GOP field: It’s interesting that neither the guy who finished in third place in 2008, Mike Huckabee, nor the guy who finished in second place in 2012, Rick Santorum, is among the top nine candidates this time around.
Have you forgotten that Pataki is on stage? He and Huckabee have spoken only half as often as Santorum and Graham. Those two are eking out bonus time by calling each other out and getting extra replies.
Q: Having an “undercard debate” persists in highlighting the unfairness and idiocy of this year’s Republican political process.
Each of these forums (they’re not really debates) should’ve been managed by random selection: a fairer process and one that would mix up who gets to challenge whom. — Commenter Matthew Bond
A:
It’s tricky: I’m not a huge fan of having so much of the debate lineups determined by polling, but I’m also not a huge fan of making America listen to Jim Gilmore for two hours at a time. In my perfect world, I suppose you’d have had more debates but also more liberal rules about what form they take. Some could mix and match the candidates, some could invite a smaller group, some could use a “Survivor” format, or what have you. Perhaps those extra debates would have helped to winnow down the field more by now.
Santorum and Huckabee are too socially conservative and economically liberal (or populist), and the Republican nominee isn’t likely to be a social liberal. Pataki is too liberal. Graham has his own problems.
I’d agree on Graham, but his net favorability isn’t great. Huckabee’s is best, but he’d only work paired with the right top of the ticket.
I’d go with Graham out of these. If I had to choose. Single-issue veep — going door to door solemnly intoning that people are coming to kill you, but he is personally going to kill them first.
Let’s assume these undercard candidates can’t win — would any of these guys make a good VP choice? Do any seem like a plausible VP pick?