Fox News Undercard Republican Debate: Live Coverage

This may be the final undercard debate of this campaign (if Iowa winnows the field, as we expect it will); so, what’s been your favorite moment of the undercard debates so far? What’s been the most influential?

Huckabee said candidates can’t win Iowa “unless you go out and talk to farmers and housewives and welders and unemployed truck drivers.” That doesn’t really describe Iowa’s economy these days: “Nearly 40 percent of Iowans now work in finance, in real estate or for companies involved in professional services such as health care, law and accounting,” about 10 times the proportion who work in agriculture, Daniel Lathrop wrote on our website last month.

Rick Santorum, unsurprisingly, spent a lot of time talking about “radical Islam” in response to a question about terrorism. But what you might not realize is that he’s also made it a focal point of his campaign. When we saw him in Iowa a few weeks ago, he spent two-thirds of his remarks talking about foreign policy with most of the focus on ISIS and Iran. One way to interpret this: Islam is the new “culture war” issue on the right, as much as abortion or gay marriage. That may be why Santorum and Mike Huckabee are cozying up to Donald Trump.