An interesting poll from Five Thirty Eight. Significant sample size of several thousand likely voters (registered preferred, likely is second best) with two waves, pre and post debate.
We also asked debate watchers who they thought performed best and worst on Wednesday night. The results were similar, with 29 percent saying that DeSantis did the best and 26 percent saying Ramaswamy did. Despite Haley’s high performance score, though, not as many people thought she was the strongest performer — just 15 percent.
— Twenty-nine percent of debate watchers believe DeSantis performed the best. Ramaswamy is close behind at 26%, followed by Haley at 15%. No other candidate receives more than 7%.
— Republicans (34%) are more likely than independents (21%) to believe that DeSantis performed the best among the candidates. In contrast, Haley performs better among independents (22%) than Republicans (11%).
— When asked who performed the worst, Chris Christie (22%) was the most selected candidate. At least ten percent of respondents say the same of Asa Hutchinson (14%), Mike Pence (13%), and Ramaswamy (11%).
3. DeSantis, Ramaswamy and Haley also had the highest performance ratings among debate watchers.
— Fifty-eight percent rate DeSantis’ performance as either excellent or good. Close behind are Ramaswamy (55%) and Haley (50%).
— Tim Scott (38%) led the second tier of candidate performances followed by Pence (27%) and Christie (24%). Both Doug Burgum (15%) and Hutchinson (11%) are below 20%.
This is about what I anticipated.
DeSantis didn’t push for showy moments, but he did have a couple of instances where he got aggressive. He didn’t damage himself and looks to have attracted some independents without compromising his positions. DeSantis is more reserved, but still has grit, though less patience for the theatrics of it than some of the others on the stage.
As I said last night and on air today, Haley and Pence both over-performed and found some favorability with moderates and some independents. For the old-school GOP Haley ticked all the boxes but her zeal on Ukraine will ever take with grassroots. Pence began to lose the plot towards the end.
I think this debate effectively ended Tim Scott’s candidacy. He’s not particularly charismatic made worse by his inability to get past the salutations portion of an answer to outlining real policy.
Ramaswamy was the male version of Tracy Flick. Trump’s stalking horse falters on foreign policy and tried to offset an inability to dive deep on foreign policy and other issues by accusing everyone else of being bought off. The Big Pharma Bro who tried to sell his digital vax passport with a financial stake in his company suing over mRNA tech? The guy with Chinese subsidiaries and a BlackRock portfolio? Huh? The reason he’s being “attacked” (the word people sensitive to disagreement use to protest being criticized, no matter how legitimate) is because he chose to start targeting others and they began responding. This is only going to get worse as more people dig into this unvetted candidate’s history.
Christie looked too angry but — and as I said on air, I’m angry that I’m being put in the position of liking something he did — one of the most memorable moments was when he rattled off “Vivek GPT” and called him out for plagiarizing Obama’s ‘08 debate opening line.
Burgum got on stage with gift cards and Hutchinson, why was he there?
Trump had a good discussion with Tucker Carlson but the 200 million views is a bunk number. Here’s why: Twitter/X defines a “view” as an autoplay video that plays for two seconds with most of the video’s box in view. This means when you’re scrolling past a video if it plays for one second before you can scroll past the viewer, that is a view whether it really is or not. Carlson still racked up a ton of views.
Fox reportedly had 12.5 million viewers last night; we’ll see how this progresses as the field narrows, which it will after tonight.
Pence was consistently and obnoxiously interrupting everyone. This annoyed me and I was yelling at my TV, SHUT UP PENCE!
I wish that there was someone fun running for President...like John Kennedy of Louisiana. His comments would have been smart and hysterical, not to mention sarcastic. That would have been very refreshing. Oh well.....