Here’s the latest from the 2024 campaign trail:
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- Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley debated on CNN at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Jake Tapper and Dana Bash moderated the debate, which took place five days before the GOP caucuses.
- Former President Donald Trump skipped the debate. Instead, he appeared at a televised town hall from Des Moines on Fox News.
- Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who didn’t qualify for tonight's debate, livestreamed a town hall appearance with right-wing podcaster Tim Pool from Des Moines.
- Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie dropped out of the presidential race.
- President Joe Biden's campaign attacked the Republican field's stances on abortion rights ahead of tonight's events.
In the end, the debate seemed to be a wash.
Haley played it safe and didn’t build on her potential momentum from Christie’s dropping out today. DeSantis, though, also failed to put Haley away as he’s potentially betting his candidacy on Monday’s outcome.
Haley plugs anti-DeSantis website a dozen times
The final DeSantisLies.com tally from tonight's debate? Twelve.
Haley mentioned the website throughout the evening, saying it rebuts DeSantis' attacks on her.
Haley's anti-DeSantis website pops in Google Trends
Say what you will about Haley’s incessant repetition of her website DeSantisLies.com, but it has succeeded in getting people to look it up.
Google Search Trends shows that the phrase and ones like it make up eight of the top 10 rising searches related to the debate, meaning a lot of people Googling Haley’s and DeSantis’ names are also Googling “DeSantis Lies.”
DeSantis criticizes Trump for response to 2020 protests
DeSantis, asked about Trump’s suggestion that he might try to stop violent crime by deploying American troops to Democratic-led states and cities, criticized the former president's response to protests in 2020 in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.
“He was president during the worst rioting in the modern history of this country,” DeSantis said of Trump. “He sat in the White House and tweeted ‘law and order,’ but he did nothing to ensure law and order. As your president, I will never let our cities burn.”
On a night when Haley was set up for a big boost, aided by Christie’s departure from the race, she didn’t seem to seize the opportunity to put DeSantis away. They appeared to be relatively on par with each other. That’s not to say she won’t beat him in Iowa or compete with Trump in New Hampshire. But there aren’t a lot of big-spotlight moments, and this was a squandered chance to push DeSantis off the stage. She kicked and missed.
Haley turns to the general election in her closing statement to make a case that she’s the electable one because of polling that shows her beating Biden.
Interesting, given the way this debate went, that Haley in her closing said Trump would be “four more years of chaos” but did not say the same of Biden.
Interesting that they both refer to the racial justice movement by the initialism “BLM,” maybe because it’s awkward to be critical of “Black Lives Matter”?
Haley just couldn’t bring herself to say something more than “I think he’s been a good governor” when asked to say something she admires about DeSantis.
That was a long, silent pause that lingered as she made it clear that was the extent of her answer.
And DeSantis cheekily used his response to say nice things about South Carolinians. (Does there happen to be an important primary there, or something?)
Haley is talking a lot about states’ rights tonight, right in the shadow of her failure to cite slavery as a cause — the cause — of the Civil War.
Where does she draw the line on when state law is wrong and should be superseded by the federal government? That’s not clear after months of campaigning on states’ rights and weeks of talking about the surprise issue of the 2024 campaign: the Civil War.