Republican 'Reckoning': GOP Must Win Over Undecided Moderates to Clinch 2024 Victory

The non-Trump candidates competing for voter attention at the Republican debate Wednesday largely failed to make their key points most likely to resonate with voters, as they focused on poorly-researched attacks on each other and furious debate over “culture war” issues, an analyst told Sputnik.

Republicans held their fourth presidential primary debate on Wednesday evening, in which candidates vying for the GOP’s nomination as their presidential candidate in November 2024 argued it out over a variety of issues.

The debate was hosted by News Nation in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and featured four of the five GOP candidates: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, New York-based tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, former UN Ambassador and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

Physically absent from the debate stage was former US President Donald Trump, the far-and-away leader of the pack of candidates, although he was repeatedly invoked by the other candidates during the debate.

Trump has boycotted the GOP debates thus far, but holds a commanding lead in the race for the nomination, with 58% support among Republicans in a poll published on Wednesday. Behind him is DeSantis with 18% support, Haley with 12%, Ramaswamy with 4%, and Christie with 2%.

The candidate who wins the nomination in the July 2024 Republican National Convention will face off against the Democrats’ candidate, which at the moment seems likely to be US President Joe Biden, plus any Independent candidates, in the 2024 election.

Political commentator Robin Biro told Radio Sputnik’s Fault Lines on Thursday that nobody stood out in the debate, in large part because they failed to adequately prepare for the event.

“My takeaway was that Donald Trump - Voldemort, if you will - didn’t even need to be in the room because Vivek Ramaswamy was his puppeteer. It seems like Donald Trump was pulling the strings and Vivek was saying everything that you would expect to hear from Donald Trump. So it was a lot like having a surrogate, hitting on anyone that former President Trump would have an issue with.”

“It was interesting to see them all gang up on Nikki Haley,” he said. “She sort of held her own, in a way. I think Chris Christie had his chivalrous moment of going to bat for her, I think that’s probably going to help him - it’s actually going to hurt her, I would say, because you don’t want to be in that position where a man is coming to defend you and you’re just kind of standing there.”

“I think that did really hurt when he asked Nikki Haley to name [three Ukrainian] provinces and it was just dead air,” he said, referring to a challenge on foreign policy that Ramaswamy made to the other candidates.

He said that during debate prep, candidates are “taught to have a few succinct lines that maybe seem like cheap shots, but they’re true and they sting, and you want to just have a few very memorable moments. If you can strike out three very memorable moments in a debate then you’ve pretty much won that debate.”

“I watched, one by one, when DeSantis had his moments. Unfortunately for him, when they did the debate prep, they didn’t really do all of the research, because one of the three was his cheap take on Chris Christie, talking about how he signed into law some transgender issue. And while that was technically true, there was a vote and it passed under the prior governor, so Chris Christie was just signing legislation that had already passed, this was not his bill, so I thought it was cheap.”

“Nikki Haley didn’t really get her moments in; Chris Christie got his moments in hardcore. My favorite Chris Christie moment was, the very first time out of the gate, he came up swinging and said ‘it’s been 17 minutes in this debate and you all are talking like one of you is going to be the president? Nobody’s mentioned Trump and that’s the bad guy in the room and that’s the problem, and he just said that he would be a dictator ‘on day one’ and no one’s mentioned it, and when all of you raised your hands saying that you would support him if he was convicted of federal crimes, that’s weak.’ We needed that, it needed to be said.”

Biro said that accusations of corruption against Haley by Ramaswamy could land with voters “because Republicans hate that. They hate to hear about money in politics. Money and power corrupt and Nikki Haley has both of those."

"One thing I think is going to have the opposite effect of what he said is he called her ‘bankrupt,’" Biro said. "I think that she had $100,000 in the bank after her term as ambassador. I mean, who among us would consider having $100,000 cash in the bank ‘bankrupt’, I mean, I would be really happy to have that.”

“She should’ve hit harder on that. She should’ve said ‘you are out of touch with everyday Americans if you think having $100,000 in the bank is bankrupt. You’re speaking from a point of privilege.’ She really missed an opportunity there.”

“But will these charges land? With some of the far-right, they hate the big people of influence - the Kochs, they just supported Nikki Haley, I mean, that’s going to endear her to some of the machine, the Bush-Cheney machine from back in the day, they’ll love that. But the Donald Trump-type voters, they’re going to recoil at that.”

“It would be really easy to win right-wing votes, hard-right votes, but just saying a few things - going after the LGBTQ community, talking about deportations and stuff like that - but what’s hard to do is to strike the balance that you need to capture the 10% of undecided voters. And I think that any one of the people on that stage, with the exception of Vivek, I think have a better opportunity of doing that than Donald Trump. So Republicans kind of have to do a reckoning and see, if we want to actually win this, we’re going to have to get some of the moderate votes.”