The second GOP debate: September 27, 2023

Donald Trump remains the overwhelming favorite of GOP primary voters. But that hasn’t stopped other candidates from staying in the race for the Republican nomination in the hopes that they can somehow dethrone him.

The former president, who announced his candidacy in November, has been increasingly dominant, as evidenced by his polling and historic margin of victory at the Iowa caucuses. His closest competitors, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former United Nations Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, are each trailing him by more than 50 percentage points on average as of mid-January.

Tonight’s Republican primary debate is not a real event. It is a performance, a show, a pantomime: a shiny object with virtually no relevance to the outcome of the 2024 presidential primary.

Donald Trump is solidly over 50 percent in the national polling averages, and no one else in the primary field has anything that looks like meaningful momentum. No opponent has been able to find a line of attack that could hurt him; many of them aren’t even trying. The great GOP establishment hope, that Trump’s legal problems might torpedo his campaign, was a mirage. If anything, the four indictments helped him in the primary.

Donald Trump has long made it clear that he sees himself as not just the true voice of the working class, but also the rightful standard-bearer of the union vote. His rally Wednesday night in a Detroit, Michigan suburb just reconfirmed that. “Tell your UAW leadership — no problems with them — but they have to endorse Trump because if they don’t, all they’re doing is committing suicide,” he said. He was talking to a crowd of auto workers, some unionized, but mostly not, at a nonunion manufacturing plant about why he deserves both the union vote and the support of auto workers in general.

This is the crux of Wednesday’s rally: Trump doesn’t care about the specific demands of the striking United Auto Workers members — he wants their votes, and because he says he supports manufacturing jobs and opposes electric vehicle development, that should be enough to back him. But union voters, including in Michigan, have long sided with Democratic candidates — UAW’s leadership itself refused to meet with Trump but joined President Joe Biden 50 miles away a day earlier, when he became the first sitting president to join a picket line.

The second Republican debate, like the first, took place in a parallel political universe in which Donald Trump was an obscure figure of no serious importance.

The candidates who showed up at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, engaged in a largely vapid exchange of canned lines and talking points, repeatedly attempting to create “moments” that didn’t quite land.

For the first debate ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Republican candidates gathered on a 100-degree day in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during a heat dome gripping the Midwest. Early into the televised eight-candidate forum, Fox News moderators lobbed a question pressing the presidential hopefuls for their positions on addressing climate change, an issue of growing importance for young voters in particular: “Do you believe human behavior is causing climate change? Raise your hand if you do.”

None did. That the question came up at all was surprising; it remains unusual for a Republican debate to even attempt an acknowledgment of the climate crisis. What wasn’t surprising was that the discussion immediately devolved into distraction, denial, and misinformation.

Donald Trump’s absence from the debate stage Wednesday night ultimately meant little: This is still the former president’s nomination to lose, and despite a few moments of conflict and clarity among the eight Republican presidential hopefuls onstage, no candidate emerged as a clear alternative.

Still, without the former president, the eight contenders gathered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, were able to have a lively discussion on a range of issues: abortion bans, the reality of climate change, urban crime, K-12 education, immigration, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the rise of China. The differences between the candidates were clear, their varied experiences were on full display, and at certain points, you could see a flash of an old kind of pre-Trump Republican Party debate, deliberating over government spending, illegal immigration, and foreign policy.