Midway through the Republican debate the party’s top candidates weren’t faring well. Ben Carson, who recently began polling in first place, flubbed a question on combatting Islamic State (Isis) and radical jihadist groups, saying the answer is to “make them look like losers”. The other top hope for the presidency, Donald Trump, essentially told the only woman on stage to shut up.
“Why does she keep interrupting everybody?” he said, when Carly Fiorina tried to make a point while another man was talking. It wasn’t a good look for the Republicans’ frontrunners, and it didn’t go over well with the audience.
In fact, Trump’s Fiorina shushing was the first time a candidate was booed. At another point, John Kasich and Jeb Bush teamed up to call Trump out when he glibly called for the deportation of 11 million immigrants.
“Come on folks, we all know you can’t pick them up and ship them back across the border,” Kasich said. “It’s a silly argument, it’s not an adult argument, it makes no sense.”
Bush stepped in to make a more nuanced one, showing precisely the kind of serious-politician bonafides that led donors and prominent Republicans to expect big things from him earlier in the year.
It was the sort of debate candidates like Bush, Kasich and Rand Paul hoped could turn the election in their favor, frequently erupting into heated policy exchanges around what modern conservatism should look like, what its approach to immigration and military spending should be, and what form intervention abroad should take.
At one point, Marco Rubio even made that point explicit, as he tried to differentiate his notion of what comprises the conservative base.
“This election is about the future,” he said. “And the Democratic party and the political left has no ideas about the future. All their ideas are the same tired ideas of the past.”
Paul quite clearly had his best debate night of the election, marked by the moment he schooled a bumbling Trump about how China is not actually in the Trans Pacific Partnership. He also engaged Rubio in an intelligent exchange of his plan to expand tax credits, calling into question the younger statesman’s conservative values.
“He’s talking about giving people money they didn’t pay, it’s a welfare transfer payment,” Paul said of Rubio’s plan. “Is it conservative to have a trillion dollars in transfer payments, a new welfare program that’s a refundable tax credit?”
For once, the younger Paul came off as calm, reasonable and collected – not that there’s much reason to believe it will matter. His campaign was pronounced “flailing” as far back as June, and he was recently quoted clinging to a poll showing him at 5% as evidence he’s “moving in the right direction.”
It wasn’t just that Paul and Rubio did well, or even that “serious candidates” in general had a moment. This was also the debate where Trump, aside from the occasional bad one-liner, all but disappeared. Carson roughly kept pace with his previous mediocre performances.
Yet it’s hard to imagine there will be repercussions at the polls for these guys. After all, it isn’t the first time Trump has said outrageous things to women or Carson has been woefully ignorant of world politics. Still, these outsider candidates continue to rise.
Meet the conservative base: they have candidates who know a lot about policy, but they don’t seem to care about actual policy. And they have candidates who have thought about what the face of the movement should look like, but they don’t appear to want to have a face. And they’d prefer not to have politicians running the country!
It’s clear the Republican frontrunners performed poorly – Trump got the biggest booing of the night. But the overarching question is: will it actually matter?
If Trump can dismiss a female moderator by saying she’s bleeding out of her “wherever,” and Carson can call Obama a Muslim and insist the pyramids were used to store grain, why would a mediocre debate performance like this make the difference?
It might not this time but, as we get closer to the election, conservative voters may well come back down to earth. Tonight’s debate was a step, however small, in that direction.