In first 2024 presidential debate, 8 GOP hopefuls mostly target Biden and each other

MILWAUKEE – Like a chorus line awaiting its leading man, eight Republican presidential hopefuls opened their first debate Wednesday night without the party’s main attraction, hoping to show they can solve a puzzle that has bewildered GOP politicians for eights years: how to get past former President Donald Trump.

For most of the first hour of the two-hour confrontation, however, the candidates largely tried to ignore Trump’s dominating presence. Instead, it was the campaign’s political newcomer, Vivek Ramaswamy, who quickly became the center of attention, rebutting accusations by former Vice President Mike Pence that he’s unqualified.

“We don’t need to bring in a rookie,” Pence said, the first of several time during the debate’s opening hour in which he focused on the 37-year-old entrepreneur, who has risen in recent polls.

A few minutes later, as Ramaswamy declared himself the “only candidate not bought and paid for,” former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie fired back.

“I’ve had enough already tonight of a guy who sounds like ChatGPT,” he said.

It was not until nearly an hour into the debate that the focus turned to the man who is currently far ahead of all other candidates. Moderators Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum asked the candidates about whether they would support Trump and whether Pence had done the right thing in refusing to go along with Trump’s request to block the count of electoral votes in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021. That act has won him widespread praise, but more from Democrats than his own side. Many Republicans view him as a betrayer.

“President Trump, I believe, was the best president of the 21st century,” Ramaswamy declared, sticking to his pattern of defending Trump at all times.

Christie drew sustained boos from the debate audience as he denounced Trump.

“Donald Trump said it was OK to suspend the Constitution,” Christie said, referring to a comment Trump made this year. The presidential oath, Christie said is “to preserve, protect and defend, not suspend.”

As the sustained catcalls made clear, the former president, who skipped the Fox News debate, inspires fierce loyalty among about 3 in 10 Republican voters.

But he also causes dread and deep antipathy in other wings of the party and will enter the primaries facing 91 criminal charges in four separate indictments brought by three prosecutors.

His eight rivals face a singular task: how to capitalize on Trump’s problems without alienating his supporters.

Some analysts see that assignment as hopeless. They point to Trump’s iron grip on his core supporters and the difficulty of uniting the party’s factions behind a single rival.

Others see an opening. They note that a large majority of Republicans say they are at least considering rival candidates.

“I think he’s beatable,” said Republican strategist Alex Conant, whose Washington, D.C.-based firm recently surveyed Republican voters. About a quarter of Republicans will vote for Trump no matter what, another quarter oppose him, and “you’ve got 50% in the middle that like Trump but are open to an alternative,” he said.

A rival would have to “consolidate the quarter that is not going to vote for Trump and chip into his margins among the half who are open to someone else,” he said. For that to happen, one candidate will have to emerge early as the plausible Trump alternative.

A breakout performance at the debate could be a critical first step.

The choice facing the eight rivals boils down to actively trying to beat the 77-year-old Trump or aiming to cultivate his voters in hopes of becoming his stand-in if something, such as his age or the criminal charges, renders him unavailable.

The challengers, only one of whom has run for president before, offered very different answers to that central strategic question.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Ramaswamy have pitched themselves to the pro-Trump wing of the party as fellow admirers of the former president.

DeSantis has sometimes obliquely criticized Trump and has tried to outflank him to the right on policy, but has largely not responded to Trump’s repeated attacks even as the governor’s standing has dropped in polls.

With Ramaswamy rising as DeSantis declines, the likely collision between the two has been a major sub-theme leading up to the debate. Earlier this month, a memo became public from the super PAC that supports DeSantis advising him to “hammer Vivek Ramaswamy.”

At the other extreme, Christie and Asa Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor, have chosen to run squarely at Trump. They don’t have much to show for it. Their presence has largely served to demonstrate how much the Republican electorate resists direct criticism of the former president.

The other four candidates have arrayed between those polls, with Pence alternating praise for Trump’s presidency with denunciations of his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, and the two South Carolinians in the race, Sen. Tim Scott and former Gov. Nikki Haley, doing their best to avoid talking about Trump unless forced.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, almost unknown outside his home state, has mostly focused on introducing himself to voters. The 67-year-old governor participated in the debate while on crutches after tearing his Achilles tendon in a pickup basketball game Tuesday.

The session also highlighted fissures in the party on issues. That’s true even though televised face-offs aren’t often forums for deep thoughts on governance. Debate coaches urge candidates to aim for viral moments, not policy discussions.

The two most prominent divides involve support for Ukraine and opposition to abortion.

Trump’s friendliness toward Russian President Vladimir Putin has pulled a large share of the party into opposition to Ukraine. DeSantis and Ramaswamy both have expressed skepticism about additional U.S. aid to Kyiv. By contrast, Pence and Christie, who both have traveled to Ukraine in recent months, and Haley, who served as Trump’s U.N. ambassador, have stayed with the party’s pre-Trump hawkish internationalism.

On abortion, the GOP has struggled ever since last year’s Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe vs. Wade and ended the national guarantee of abortion rights. The decision suddenly transformed Republican opposition to abortion from rhetoric to policy, a shock to many voters, who have responded angrily in a series of state elections, most recently in Ohio, where the antiabortion position lost badly in a referendum this month.

That’s left the party caught between its large and influential bloc of antiabortion voters and its desire to appeal to swing voters. Antiabortion groups have demanded the candidates support a nationwide ban, an idea embraced by Pence and Scott. Other candidates, including Trump, DeSantis and Haley, have tried to avoid being pinned down to a policy, while giving rhetorical support to the antiabortion cause.

The candidates showed their differences on the issue early in the debate as Pence and Scott stressed their support for a nationwide abortion ban.

“A 15-week ban is an idea whose time has come,” Pence said.

Scott echoed that, declaring that “We cannot let states like California, New York and Illinois have abortions on demand.”

“We must fight for life,” he said, calling for a national 15-week ban.

Haley disagreed, calling herself “unapologetically pro-life,” but saying that the anti-abortion side is nowhere close to having enough votes in the Senate to pass an abortion ban.

“Don’t make women feel like they have to decide on this issue,” she said, alluding to the political peril that abortion may hold for Republicans. “A Republican President can’t ban abortion.”

Nationwide, about 3 in 10 Republican voters consistently say in polls that they will support Trump and no one else. That gives him a solid base from which to build, as well as a powerful threat to wield against any party leader who challenges him.

Trump combines that solid base with a large share of voters who are less enamored of him, but still find him acceptable. He has the backing of just over half the voters in nationwide polls of Republicans, according to the average maintained by the FiveThirtyEight website. No one else is close.

An additional 25% to 30% of the party’s voters oppose Trump, either because they see him as a lawbreaker or because they think he would lose to President Biden and cost other Republicans their seats.

The task for rival candidates is to find a way to unite those anti-Trump Republicans with enough soft Trump supporters to put together a majority. From the day Trump erupted onto the political scene, no Republican has managed that feat. The debate will provide early clues to whether the latest group of hopefuls has come up with a better way.

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(Mehta reported from Milwaukee and Lauter from Washington.)