Fox News Undercard Republican Debate: Live Coverage

So that wraps up our live blog of the undercard debate (check out our live blog of the main stage Republican debate). Tonight’s festivities may be the last undercard debate of this campaign, so it’s worth noting just how amazing it is that we had these undercard contests at all. Could any of the undercard candidates have made more of a run if they’d been given equal footing with the main-stage candidates in all these debates? That’s hard to say, and something that will likely be studied. But using national polls to relegate some candidates in a presidential primary isn’t exactly beyond reproach.

Twelve percent of all the questions asked at the undercard debate were variants on “isn’t it a little ridiculous you’re still in the race.” By my count, just over half were on policy, and many of the rest were on the state of the campaign.

President Obama’s approval rating is now 46.9 percent in the RealClearPolitics average, his highest figure since June 2013. His approval rating exceeds his disapproval rating in several recent polls, which has been a rarity for most of his second term. It’s probably just a random fluctuation, or a result of the solid jobs numbers recent. But who knows: Maybe Obama looks a little better in comparison to the unpopular set of candidates they’ve been seeing and hearing so much from lately.

Huckabee isn’t “feeling the Bern.” That shouldn’t be too surprising given that he is a Republican. What I’d like to know is who are the 13 percent of self-identified Republicans who had a positive view of socialism in a November 2015 CBS News/New York Times survey.

One reason Gilmore took so long — all his time before and through the bell — prefacing his call to not scapegoat Muslims with a condemnation of radical Islam: Many Americans have negative views of Muslims. An ABC News/Washington Post poll last month found that 28 percent of Americans think mainstream Islam encourages violence, double the proportion in January 2002. And 14 percent in the poll last month said Muslims experience discrimination that is justified.

Jim Gilmore mentioned early on in the debate that he’s the only one in the race with military service. That’s smart: According to the Pew Research Center, a candidate with military experience is more appealing to Republicans than he or she is for Democrats. Veterans are no strangers to the White House. Veterans Affairs has recorded that 26 out of 44 U.S. presidents served in the military, the most recent president to have served being George W. Bush, who was in the Air Force reserve during the Vietnam War.

Carly Fiorina’s I’m-the-only-other-woman-in-this-race tone has curdled a bit — this is the second debate in a row in which she’s talked a whole lot of smack about Clinton on a personal level. The moderators asked her why she made a snide comment last debate that at least she still liked hanging out with her husband (implication, Hillary Clinton doesn’t). Fiorina basically doubled down and suggested that Clinton stayed with her husband out of ambition and that she, Fiorina, would have left her spouse had he done the things that Bill Clinton did. Not exactly the highest tone for the debate.

“The woman should be prosecuted” was the midpoint of a long set of attacks on Hillary Clinton by Carly Fiorina. In the beginning, the crowd seemed a bit uncomfortable, but by the end, they were cheering heartily. This circles back to the question of whether a female candidate can mount a direct attack that includes a discussion of infidelity more easily than a man. What do folks think on that score?

Fiorina said, “Listen, if my husband did what Bill Clinton did, I would have left him long ago,” and most Americans agree. When Gallup asked if people would forgive a cheating spouse, 38 percent said they would definitely not forgive their partner, and an additional 26 percent said they would probably not be able to forgive the affair. Only 10 percent said they would definitely forgive their wandering spouse.

Don’t look now, but there are finally signs of Gilmentum. Through the first 40 minutes of the debate, Jim Gilmore is the most searched-for Republican candidate among the four of them on stage, according to Google Trends. We took a screencap to preserve the moment for history.

Santorum rails against the corporate income tax, which he says makes the U.S. uncompetitive. Lots of economists would agree. The U.S. taxes companies at a higher rate than most developed nations but then provides lots of loopholes that let corporations — especially big, well-connected ones — pay rates much lower than the statutory rate. A more sensible approach would likely be to lower the rate but provide fewer ways around it.

At the top of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ list of high-growth occupations: personal care aides. They make an average of only $20,440 per year. That speaks to two things: 1) the aging of America and the growing need for caregivers and 2) the low general compensation for caregiving, which has become the focus of analysts and organizers like MacArthur “genius” award winner Ai-jen Poo. What we’ve seen thus far in the debate includes many moderator questions framing the issue of jobs in the context of related issues, like taxation. We have not heard any candidates talk about the rising cadre of lower-earning workers in societally important fields like caregiving and how their fortunes will be affected by the policies in question.

I don’t want to be snarky, but sometimes I wonder why some people think it’s a good idea to run for president. With the exception of Huckabee, all the candidates on this stage were blown out in their last run for statewide office. Santorum lost his 2006 race for Senate in Pennsylvania by 17 percentage points. Gilmore lost his 2008 race for Senate in Virginia by 31 percentage points. Fiorina lost her 2010 race for Senate in California by 10 percentage points.

A reminder: Governors don’t have much control over their states’ economic records.

Even though Gilmore isn’t getting as many questions as the other candidates, he is drawing lots of search interest on Google, along with Fiorina, dwarfing the other, more familiar candidates on stage with them. Meanwhile, the other candidates who have agreed to take the stage for the main debate later tonight are all being outsearched, as usual, by Donald Trump by an enormous margin.

Mike Huckabee says we’ve lost 5 million manufacturing jobs since 2000 — that’s true. But believe it or not, the federal government hasn’t grown in that time; in fact, federal government employment is down slightly since 2000. (Those weird spikes are temporary workers hired to conduct the decennial census.)

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Gilmore isn’t wrong to ask if he was skipped. He’s gotten two questions so far, half as many as Fiorina and Santorum (four each), while Huckabee just got number five.

The most memorable undercard moment: Fiorina emerging out of the first JV debate, then being really good in her first varsity debate, then pretty much disappearing. It was like when a 13-seed sneaks into the Sweet Sixteen and then loses to Kentucky by 46 right when everyone’s getting excited about them.

My favorite moments generally come from the candidates who just don’t care about winning. I’m talking about Lindsey Graham and Jim Gilmore. Graham, of course, had a lot more of those moments because he has been on the stage more. Yet, Gilmore hasn’t been afraid to attack Donald Trump tonight either.

I’m with Clare — Graham apologizing to the Muslim world because of Trump’s comments. On an uglier note: Fiorina mocking the Clintons’ marriage.

I’m not sure I remember any. No, I take that back. I think Lindsey Graham’s performance in the last one was notable — it was only a couple of days before he dropped out, and he was really taking people to task for being irresponsible and damaging the party with their rhetoric.

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.

Here’s an article from Wired that explains why it’s not as simple as Huckabee makes it sounds to remove ISIS from major social-media platforms.

Carly Fiorina just went after Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on the importance of climate change. That’s not really much of a surprise. Just 20 percent of Republicans think global climate change is a very serious problem, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey. That contrasts with the 68 percent of Democrats who think it is a very serious problem.

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Q:Historically speaking, what’s the lowest any candidate has been polling nationally at this point before coming back to win the nomination? — commenter Peter Nygaard A:Peter, looking it up, I believe the answer is George McGovern in 1972. He scored just 3 percent in a Gallup national primary poll a few weeks before the Iowa caucuses. Jimmy Carter was only at 4 percent at this point in the 1976 campaign.

Rick Santorum is raging against the machine right now. He’s pretty salty about being in this undercard debate, as he’s just told us in his opening statement, when the moderators asked him if he’s going to drop out after Iowa — I would say he definitely will if he loses. Iowa has turned into his Waterloo; he technically won the state in 2012, but that win was only declared 16 days after the Iowa GOP wrongly declared Mitt Romney the winner. Romney got the media bump and Santorum got bitter.

Santorum is right that the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll omitted him. So did two others since the start of the year, of 24 compiled by HuffPost Pollster. All 24 polls asked about Huckabee and Fiorina, but just 14 asked about Gilmore.

Q: Who else should we expect to drop after the first two contests? Fiorina? Carson? — commenter Dana Renee A: For what it’s worth, our forecast model calculates a dropout probability for each candidate. If this year is like the past, we probably won’t see very many dropouts before New Hampshire, but they’ll pick up significantly after that. Here are the chances it assigns each candidate of dropping out by the time of the Feb. 20 South Carolina primary.

Dropout probability by South Carolina

CANDIDATE	DROPOUT
Santorum	62.6%
Christie	57.1%
Paul	56.8%
Fiorina	56.8%
Huckabee	52.7%
Carson	45.0%
Kasich	41.1%
Bush	29.5%
Rubio	23.4%
Cruz	22.5%
Trump	5.9%

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America, tonight you are in for a treat. Tonight you get to meet Jim Gilmore. He is a bona fide Republican candidate for president, and to prove it, he has a television commercial that NBC let him air after Donald Trump hosted “Saturday Night Live.” I’m sure the footage will prove useful, since I’m guessing you have no idea what he looks like. Gilmore is a former governor of Virginia — he ran the state from 1998 to 2002 — a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and … a former presidential candidate! He dropped out early on in the 2008 cycle because of fundraising trouble. This time around, Gilmore decided to come in hot. He joined the race on July 30, becoming the 17th person to do so, with a 10:47-minute video oh-so-subtly shot in front of a portrait of fellow Virginian George Washington. And that was pretty much the last time anyone heard from him. It was almost as if he had lingered on the opening lines of his announcement video and thought better of his bid: “With so many candidates already in the race, some may ask why i’m running. That’s a fair question.” Gilmore is a former intelligence agent for the Army, a fact that I’m sure he will mention during the debate, since the few times he’s gone on the record these past few months, he’s spoken about global security threats. In an interview with MSNBC today, he spoke of veterans’ health care and generally hammered home the point that he’s held real, tough jobs in the public sector — which he has. Gilmore has a pretty solid political résumé; it’s just that, well, his presidential bids aren’t as solid. “My job,” he said, “even in the undercard [debate], is to shape the race differently.” I, for one, am looking forward to seeing how he will do that, given that he didn’t make the ballot in big states like Ohio and Illinois. (To be fair, Gilmore has made the ballot in places like New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and Tennessee). Say what you will about Gilmore, but the man certainly does not suffer from imposter’s syndrome: He charmingly still believes, “I should be the president of the United States, I’m going to be the president of the United States.”

Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore has stuck with the race, and some pollsters have kept asking about him even though the vast majority of the time he gets so little support that his share of respondents rounds to 0 percent. Finally, his stick-to-it attitude has paid off: Gilmore got 1 percent in a Fox News poll last week, good enough to qualify him for tonight’s undercard debate. It’s his first appearance on a debate stage since the first Republican debate almost six months ago, also on Fox News. HuffPost Pollster has compiled 275 polls of the Republican national primary. Gilmore has been included in 102 of them, the least of any Republican candidate, including the ones who’ve already dropped out. That’s partly because he didn’t formally enter the race until late July, but even since his entry, Gilmore has been asked about less often than any of the candidates who are still in the race. One big reason: Gilmore polled at 1 percent or above in just 14 percent of the polls that asked about him. (Our collection of national primary polls omits Gilmore.)

Given Gilmore’s persistent inability to register with poll respondents, it’s surprising not that so many pollsters have dropped Gilmore, but that more haven’t. “All media pollsters have struggled with how to ask about a list of candidates in the double digits,” Mark Blumenthal, head of election polling for the online-polling company SurveyMonkey, said in an interview. “There is no good way to do it, particularly on the phone. A lot of these names are unfamiliar to a lot of voters, and they can’t hold that many names in their head to get an answer.” Gilmore’s best results have come in online polls — Fox News’s poll was the first conducted with live telephone interviews in which he registered as high as 1 percent.

Welcome to our live blog of the Fox News undercard debate, featuring Carly Fiorina, Jim Gilmore, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum. If you’re a sentimentalist, pay special attention to Huckabee and Santorum: Tonight may be the last time you see either on a national stage this campaign (although they’re going to Donald Trump’s event afterward). Santorum and Huckabee have bet it all on Iowa: They’re No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, in the number of campaign events held in the state. Their all-in-on-Iowa strategy is perfectly reasonable; Santorum won the caucuses in 2012, and Huckabee carried the state in 2008. But neither has caught on this cycle. Huckabee has only 2.6 percent support, according to the FiveThirtyEight Iowa polling average, while Santorum has less than 1 percent and so doesn’t even appear on our chart. It would take something miraculous in tonight’s debate, or in the few days before Monday’s caucuses, for either to have a chance of winning or even coming close. Meanwhile, neither is doing well in New Hampshire or South Carolina. Santorum and Huckabee are polling at about 2 percent or worse in both states. So there’s really no path for them after Iowa. Huckabee has said that he’ll drop out if he finishes outside the top three in Iowa; the same is probably true for Santorum. Enjoy their company while you can. If you have a question or comment, leave it here or tweet us @FiveThirtyEight.

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