CNBC Republican debate: news and updates

When Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy met in the first televised presidential debate in 1960, the tone was somber, the questioning deferential, and the format stilted.

If you missed CNBC’s Republican presidential debate on Wednesday, Stephen Colbert says you didn’t miss out on much.

“In some ways, it was impressive,” Colbert said on his late-night show. “It managed to thread the needle between confusing and boring.”

At Wednesday night’s CNBC debate, moderator John Harwood confronted Marco Rubio on his $4 trillion tax cut plan, noting that while Rubio’s rhetoric has focused on expanding opportunity to poor and middle-class families, his tax proposal would overwhelmingly benefit the rich. Rubio shot back, insisting that Harwood got his facts wrong and that his plan would in fact help poor households more than the rich:

The consensus among conservatives was that Rubio nailed it, that Harwood was straight-up lying about the facts, and that the whole exchange illustrated left-wing media bias more than anything else. And since the point of primary debates is to curry favor with the base, the fact that the exchange let Rubio look like the victim of an unscrupulous mainstream media reporter was a big win for his campaign, and a major reason many observers thought he won the debate overall.

It’s hard to find a clear, dominant contender in the third Republican debate — no matter how you splice the numbers.

Carly Fiorina, for example, spoke the most out of all the candidates — nearly a full minute longer than anyone else.

Wednesday night’s CNBC debate was a thrilling return to form for the GOP field. After CNN’s dull, overlong September debate, the candidates had recovered the weird screwball energy that made the first Fox News debate in August so compelling. Ted Cruz declared war on the moderators, Jeb Bush declared war on Marco Rubio, Donald Trump declared war on the contents of his own campaign website — it was truly great TV.

It’ll take a few days for poll results to trickle in, which will provide the closest thing to an objective answer of who actually won the debate. But in the meantime, here are the candidates, non-candidates, and abstract concepts that won and lost last night.

Has Donald Trump even read his own immigration plan?

After the third Republican presidential debate, it was a valid question. CNBC debate moderator Becky Quick asked Trump about calling Marco Rubio “Mark Zuckerberg’s personal senator” — a slam on both Zuckerberg and Rubio for supporting more visas for high-skilled immigrant workers. Trump was adamant: “I never said that. I never said that. ... Everybody is really doing some very bad fact(-checking).”

About a month ago, conservative commentator Erick Erickson wrote a post at RedState headlined, “Ted Cruz vs. Marco Rubio: This Is Where We Are Headed.“ Erickson predicted that eventually, “the more conservative elements” of the party would fall behind Cruz, while “the more establishment elements” would opt for Rubio. It was a bold statement, considering that both candidates were stuck in the single digits in the polls.

After Wednesday night’s third Republican debate, it’s much easier to see how it could happen.

During the CNBC Republican debate on Wednesday, Marco Rubio defended his less-than-stellar attendance record in the Senate. Then he got a follow-up question from a man who identified himself as “a constituent.”

That man was Jeb Bush.

Even Ben Carson has a hard time believing he could be president.

“Probably in terms of the applying for the job of president, a weakness would be not really seeing myself in that position until hundreds of thousands of people began to tell me that I needed to do it,” he said at the top of the Republican presidential primary debate on CNBC Wednesday night.

The third Republican debate featured a return to the feisty spirit of the first, but this time the most ferocious fights weren’t between the candidates, but between the candidates and the moderators.

The main losers in that dynamic were once-upon-a-time frontrunners Jeb Bush and Donald Trump who, for different reasons, were unable to feast at the table of anti-moderator zingers.

Carly Fiorina made an incredible-sounding claim about Barack Obama’s presidency at the CNBC debate Wednesday night: that nearly all jobs lost during his first term belonged to women.

Answering a question about equal pay, Fiorina claimed, “Ninety-two percent of the jobs lost during Barack Obama’s first term belonged to women.”

The CNBC Republican debate started with a simple question: What is your biggest weakness, and what are you doing to fix it?

The answers ranged from fuddled to self-complimentary to dodgy.

“The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media,” Ted Cruz said with considerable disgust. “This is not a cage match.”

Cruz ticked off the insults the CNBC moderators had lobbed Wednesday night at the assembled Republicans. “Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain? Ben Carson, can you do math? John Kasich, will you insult two people over here? Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign? Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen? How about talking about the substantive issues?”

At the CNBC Republican debate, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie suggested it’s more dangerous to be a police officer under the Obama administration — even though there’s nothing to support this claim.

Christie said:

When CNBC debate moderators asked Donald Trump why he insulted Mark Zuckerberg in his immigration plan, Trump had an answer that befuddled moderator Becky Quick: “I never said that.”

But actually, Trump really did call out Zuckerberg in his immigration plan. His plan says, as stated explicitly on his own campaign website, “This will improve the number of black, Hispanic and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in favor of the H-1B program. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities.”

Ted Cruz has built a career decrying what he sees as a liberal establishment, whether it’s the media or the “Washington cartel.”

That’s exactly the Cruz we saw on the debate stage today — in what may be his strongest campaign moment yet. “The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media,” Cruz said. “This is not a cage match. You look at the questions — Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain? Ben Carson, can you do math? John Kasich, will you insult two people over here? Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign? Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen? How about talking about the substantive issues?”

Update: Tonight’s debate has concluded. Here’s the schedule for the next debates.

The third Republican presidential debate started at 8:15 pm Eastern tonight, and is being aired live on CNBC. It will also be livestreamed on CNBC.com — but to view the livestream, you will have to log in to with cable account information. The earlier “undercard” debate, with four candidates who didn’t poll well enough to make the primetime stage, began at 6 pm, and has since concluded.

The third Republican presidential debate airs Wednesday at 8 pm Eastern time on CNBC and will be moderated by three CNBC television personalities: Becky Quick, John Harwood, and Carl Quintanilla. Quick and Quintanilla both host their own business news shows on CNBC, while Harwood is the network’s Washington bureau chief and a columnist for the New York Times. Harwood is also the subject of considerable criticism in conservative media circles for his allegedly too-liberal writing and tweeting on political issues in recent months.

According to Google’s data, the moderator people are most interested in is Becky Quick, and they would really like to know if she is open to marrying them. She is also the host of Squawk Box, CNBC’s markets-focused morning show.

Update: Tonight’s debate has concluded. Click here for the schedule for the next debates.

The third Republican presidential debate was scheduled to begin Wednesday at 8 pm Eastern — though it actually ended up starting at 8:15. It is taking place at the University of Colorado Boulder, and being aired on CNBC. But unfortunately, the network is only making an online live stream available to people with access to a cable account.

If you’re planning to watch tonight’s Republican presidential debate at 8 pm on CNBC (being taped from the University of Colorado Boulder), you probably need these: Vox debate bingo cards. As usual, we’ve made two versions so you can play with a friend.

Find a friend, pick a card, print it out (or draw big circles over the squares in Microsoft Paint), and enjoy.

The Republican primary debates are quickly turning into the Donald Trump debates.

A Vox analysis shows that the field of candidates — both those in the primetime debate and those in the so-called “JV” round — mentioned the real estate mogul five times more between the first and second debates. They talked about him more than about Hillary Clinton — and just as much as Barack Obama — as he continued to rise in the polls.

Two weeks ago, Donald Trump laid out an ultimatum. If CNBC — the host of tonight’s Republican debate — didn’t limit the event to two hours and allow the candidates to give opening and closing statements, he wouldn’t show up. Ben Carson soon joined him in this boycott threat.

So on October 16, CNBC caved on both. The network agreed to cap the debate to two hours, and reportedly plans to feature 30-second closing statements from each candidate, and give them each 30 seconds to answer an open-ended question at the very beginning of the debate. Appropriately, Trump crowed on Twitter:

Eli Stokols’s account of the summit offers a powerful picture of a campaign that has enormous strengths but is also floundering and dangerously close to losing the support of its key backers. Bush’s campaign is suddenly facing fundraising woes and finds itself slashing staff salaries and other expenses. If that leads to departures, defections, or even just anonymous complaints in the media, it could further fuel donor doubts.

A vast family network rallied around him as soon as he threw his hat in the ring, but there’s more to politics than personal loyalty, and Bush has a huge problem in the form of former protégé Marco Rubio, who simply looks like a more skilled politician at this point. Bush and Rubio are very similar ideologically, so a trickle of support flowing from the former to the latter could turn into a flood at a moment’s notice.

Rand Paul is confident that he’ll qualify for the primetime stage at CNBC’s GOP presidential primary debate next month, the Kentucky Republican told Vox in a brief exchange Wednesday night.

As my colleague Andrew Prokop explains, Paul would be relegated to a second-tier debate if he doesn’t average at least 2.5 percent in national polls released by six media outlets between September 17 and October 21. He is in the most peril of dropping from the main stage to the “JV” debate because his average in the four polls released since September 17 is 2.75 percent.