Unlike 24 million other Americans, I did not watch the Republican primary debate last Thursday night on Fox News. I was enjoying a fun cocktail party at the Santa Barbara Zoo as the fireworks went off on the debate stage in Cleveland. But it will not surprise anybody who knows me that I recorded the debate on my DVR and a lot of the “post-game” spin on various networks.
Let’s start by repeating this: there were 24 million viewers for the “main event” of the Fox debate. 24 million !! To put that into perspective, with the exception of a couple of NFL and college bowl games on ESPN, this was the most watched telecast in the history of cable television. This audience was bigger than Game 7 of the 2014 World Series.
Certainly the presence of a certain Celebrity Apprentice TV star and mega-billionaire had a lot to do with that staggering audience but there is clearly an enormous amount of interest in the upcoming presidential election and especially of the incredibly strong field of candidates. Even the “undercard” debate of the seven lowest-polled candidates had 6.1 million viewers, which is more than any primary debate on cable TV four years ago.
In that “undercard” debate, the absolute clear-cut winner was former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. This was a tough debate format. It was on the same stage as the main event but there was no audience. So the acoustics were odd and the whole event lacked energy. But of the seven candidates (who were not in the top 10 of recent polls and thus excluded from the big show), Fiorina shined. I’ve seen a lot of interviews with her in the last few months and have always been impressed with how fluent she is on all of the issues. She is tough as nails and the best candidate at delivering sharp critiques of Hillary Clinton. A prediction: Fiorina will have a massive bump in support when you start to see the post-debate polling. This was the moment that she needed, she delivered and will now be a legitimate top tier candidate for president. She has not polled in the top 10 of any of the polls; my guess is that she’s gone from “not in the top ten” to Top Five.
For the other six candidates at the “kiddie” debate, nothing bad but nothing great, no traction.
In the main debate, the Fox News moderators surprised many by being really tough on the ten candidates, with Donald Trump in particular. The first question to every candidate was a jab at one of their policies or previous statements that would not please either the Republican base or the general electorate.
Here are some quick thoughts on all ten, with the obvious caveat that The Donald predictably dominated all of the post-debate buzz.
Donald Trump: this was his first experience in an unscripted reality TV show and wasn’t really ready for it. He was thrown some really difficult questions, handled some well, others not as much. If he wasn’t a famous celebrity with enormous personal charisma, this debate would have sunk him. But the normal rules don’t seem to apply. My guess is that Trump will not lose any of his existing support based on this widely-watched debate but won’t gain any new converts either. If you ask his supporters, they’ll say he “won” the debate; if you ask his detractors, they’ll say he “lost.” More on Trump towards the end of this post.
Jeb Bush: he just doesn’t seem to have a lot of energy. He didn’t do anything wrong but he didn’t do anything right either. I really can’t remember anything noteworthy he said but he avoided getting savaged by Trump so I guess that was a win for him.
Scott Walker: he, like Bush, was unspectacular. Both he and Bush could be described as having had “slow and steady wins the race” or “do no harm” performance in this debate.
Marco Rubio: he had a very strong performance and foreshadowed a generational argument he can make against Hillary. He is young and he looked very young on this stage but he also appeared presidential. He was fluent on the issues and will be very appealing to younger voters. If you’re looking at this like a sports handicapper, he has the biggest “upside.”
Ted Cruz: he proved that he is a master at this format. If you give him one minute to answer a question, he will use all 60 seconds with a well-crafted response that doesn’t feel “cut off” when he runs out of time. He will remain very popular with “true” conservatives and will be the main beneficiary if Trump collapses or leaves the race. My guess is that he will rise in the polls
Dr. Ben Carson: I wasn’t particularly impressed. As a neurosurgeon, he’s obviously immensely intelligent and he’s really likable but don’t feel he has the full grasp of the issues that are required to be president. However he had a great one-liner at the end about how somebody “beat him to it” in Washington regarding removing half a brain in surgery. That one-liner might literally be worth a few points in the next polls.
Mike Huckabee: he did well in articulating his core beliefs but nothing spectacular and nothing that’s likely to increase his standing.
John Kasich: probably the least-known of the ten candidates coming in but the hometown favorite as the governor of Ohio, Kasich had a really strong performance but not a game-changing performance. He forecast what an appealing general election candidate he would be by his deft response to a gay marriage question in which he said he doesn’t support it himself but attended the gay wedding of a friend because we should “give unconditional love” to family and friends. But he’s still going to be dogged by having accepted Obamacare money to expand Medicaid in his state and thus I think his bump will be fairly small.
Ron Paul: he was the one person who took on Donald Trump and also had a memorable bout with Chris Christie about NSA surveillance. His supporters will still love him but I doubt he got any new converts.
Chris Christie: I personally like the New Jersey Governor’s combative style and he reminded everybody why they liked him four years ago. Unfortunately, that was four years ago and his star has faded. My guess is that, in the next debate on CNN (Wed, Sept 16th), he’ll be the one bumped by Fiorina and will no longer be in the top 10 for the main event.
To me, the number one winner on Thursday night was Fox News itself. The network has a (deserved) reputation of having a Republican bias. Many folks on the left like to say that Fox News is not “real news.” If you actually watch Fox News, you know that’s not true but it is a widely held belief on the left. Most of the network’s commentators of course are conservative but there is also a full-time news department of journalists and producers who deliver real news, yes real, actual news. The three moderators the network chose for this debate (Bret Baier, Chris Wallace, and Megyn Kelly) are Republicans: this is obvious to me as an intelligent observer. But they also the three people on the network who come closest to Fox’ “fair and balanced” mantra.
There has been widespread condemnation on the internet that Fox News deliberately went after Donald Trump in particular, attempting to use this debate to cut him down to size. Baier started the debate by asking all of the ten nominees to raise their hands to pledge that they would not run as a third-party candidate and they would support whomever the party chose as its nominee. Predictably, Trump raised his hand and declared (amidst robust boos) that he was not prepared to renounce the possibility of running an independent campaign, which would of course split the Republican vote and deliver the presidency to Hillary Clinton.
Fox chose to open the debate with a very obvious Trump-targeted question but it was the number one question on the minds of Republicans like myself who want the GOP’s nominee to win. Anyway, that got Trump’s night off to a poor start. As the debate rolled on, the three moderators asked Trump many other very pointed questions but they asked very tough questions to all of the candidates. In fact, the first questions to all ten contenders were specifically designed to explore one of that candidate’s chief vulnerabilities.
The fact that Fox’s moderators were praised in The New York Times and criticized by Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives tell me that they did their job well for a broad audience.
“It was riveting. It was admirable. It compels me to write a cluster of words I never imagined writing: hooray for Fox News.”
— Frank Bruni, columnist for the New York Times
On the most-watched program in the network’s history Fox News showed the world that, despite it’s obvious partisanship towards the GOP in general, that it was not going to just let the party’s candidates spew their pre-planned talking points. These candidates were under fire from the moderators more than from each other and, in my view, nearly all of them are better off for it.
Now, that’s not to say that Fox News has not received some collateral damage from the questions to the candidates, in particular Trump. I think it’s clear to any fair observer that The Donald did receive the toughest questions from the debate moderators. Considering that he was the front-runner coming into the forum, that’s not unreasonable but Trump thought it was, calling the debate patently unfair and he attacked moderator Megyn Kelly in particular afterwards.
(there’s a whole ugly sideshow to the Trump-Kelly-Fox feud, just Google “Trump Fox Debate Kelly” and you can read all about it)
Anyway, after the debate, Fox was deluged with email from viewers who were upset about the treatment of the The Donald. While I and many others called Fox a “winner” in the debate, many (including former Fox News contributor Dick Morris) called Fox the “loser” essentially for the sin of abandoning their normal championing of all things Republican.
“Their anti-Trump bias was obvious. The questions were way too negative and often too personal. The network, which is built on being fair to conservatives, was manifestly unfair to them tonight.”
— Dick Morris
What Morris and the critics are missing here, in my opinion, is that Fox used the biggest platform in the history of the network to show the world that the entire network is not based on just waving pompoms for the Republicans and their candidates. The questions were tough but they were not unfair. If you’ve seen other interviews by Baier, Wallace and Kelly (I have seen hundreds over the years), you already know this. The three of them are almost universally tough in their questioning of their subjects on tough issues when those tough questions are relevant.
What happened last Thursday is that Fox reached an audience that only knows the Jon Stewart, Bill Maher or MSNBC interpretation of Fox as a network filled with GOP puppets and that audience and that’s a win. The three anchors should be proud of their work and most of the candidates should be proud of how they handled the hardballs they were thrown.