The Trump-less GOP debate was a mess — and Democrats are smiling

For two hours on Wednesday evening, eight Republican candidates not named Donald Trump did their best to convince GOP voters that — well, it’s really not quite clear what they were trying to do.

If one thing was clear at the end of an often explosive first Republican primary debate for 2024, it’s that Trump has little to fear from anyone who actually attended the debate. In fact, we may be looking at one of the weakest Republican primary fields in a generation, united only in their near-universal commitment to support Trump even if the former president is running for office from prison.

Wednesday’s exercise in frustration at the Fiserv Forum revealed a GOP that is only a shadow of its pre-Trump self. Americans would be hard pressed to find a single serious policy mind in the bunch, save perhaps former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who seemed completely out of place amid her colleagues’ incoherent pledges to invade Mexico (Gov. Ron DeSantis), end foreign aid to Israel (Vivek Ramaswamy) and fire between 10 and 75 percent of non-defense federal workers (DeSantis, Ramaswamy, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and former Vice President Mike Pence).

In place of any meaningful policy discussion stood the Republican Party’s new export commodity: cultural grievance.

The candidates made political hay out of pledges to ban transgender athletes from competing in womens’ sports and fighting the bogeyman of liberal “wokeness.” DeSantis earned one of his only big cheers of the night after recounting how Florida “eliminated Critical Race Theory […] and gender ideology from K-12 schools.”

The presidential hopefuls weren’t so eager to talk about abortion, perhaps because a majority of Americans — and nearly a third of Republicans — believe abortion should remain legal. Fox News even acknowledged the dire situation GOP lawmakers face, conceding that Republicans have lost every single effort to restrict abortion by ballot measure since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Far from the fire-and-brimstone abortion language that was so common at Republican debates past, the candidates ducked and dodged direct questions about whether they would support a federal ban on abortion at just six weeks. At one point, Haley even chastised her fellow Republicans for vilifying women who seek abortions. The debate audience met Haley’s attempt at balanced statesmanship with icy silence — a sign that, whatever Republicans might have said in the past, abortion access is now a millstone weighing down the party’s political hopes.

Only three of the party’s presidential hopefuls managed to make any impression at all on the rambunctious audience of rank-and-file Republican voters: Haley, Pence and billionaire investment bro Ramaswamy. It’s hard to imagine any political oddsmaker would have marked those three out for success ahead of the evening, and each managed to appeal to a different element of the Republican psyche. Unfortunately, none of those three have a meaningful chance at dethroning Trump unless the field narrows quickly and sharply.

Ramaswamy clearly owned the evening, drawing consistent cheers — except when Haley cornered him on his unpopular plan to end foreign aid to Israel. Ramaswamy came prepared with all of the polish of a guy whose job involves selling you investment packages, and he even felt confident enough to compare himself to former President Barack Obama during his opening remarks.

But if Ramaswamy oozed charm when delivering his canned lines, he proved easily derailed when Pence and Haley peppered him with specific, policy-related follow-up questions. Pence latched onto that weakness early on, repeatedly interrupting Ramaswamy and drawing out the political neophyte’s nasty side. Pence, usually mocked for being phlegmatic, seemed to relish finding a rival he could really slap around.

If Ramaswamy won the Milwaukee audience, Haley positioned herself to steal the thunder once reserved for DeSantis — along with the megadonors who have until now mostly stayed out of the race. Haley was the clear adult in the room, owning the foreign policy section of the debate and providing some of the only coherent analysis of Russia’s devastating war in Ukraine. She also pulled off an almost unheard-of feat in the modern GOP: criticizing the Republican Party’s high-spending Trump years without catching a single boo from the MAGA-sympathetic audience.

“The truth is that Biden didn’t do this to us; our Republicans did this to us when they passed that $2.2 trillion COVID stimulus bill,” Haley said, adding that Trump “added $8 trillion to our debt, and our kids are never going to forgive us for this.”

Even though Pence surprised with his lively and impassioned performance, it’s clear the former vice president is still figuring out who, if anyone, his campaign is talking to. Ten years ago Pence may have been a formidable contender on the national stage. Now the lure of fiscal conservatism has vanished from the GOP, and Pence is too stained by his criticism of Trump to ever be taken seriously by the MAGA voters who once chanted for his public execution.

A functional Republican Party would be rallying around Nikki Haley as a dream challenger to President Joe Biden. Fortunately for Democrats, the modern GOP is anything but a functional party. In the current MAGA-fied GOP, Ramaswamy’s bombastic infomercial style has a better chance of perking Trump’s ears than any of Haley’s boring policy talk. That’s just fine with Team Biden.

Max Burns is a Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies, a progressive communications firm. Follow him on Twitter @themaxburns.