Can the second GOP debate amount to more than a race for second place?
Candidates will face higher financial stakes
The second Republican presidential debate without former president Donald Trump is missing the front-runner’s star power, but the performances of his rivals Wednesday are still expected to be deeply consequential — forecasting whether the 2024 field of Republicans will consolidate around a single Trump alternative.
For months, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has been the chief challenger to Trump. But the governor’s downward slope in the polls — some surveys in the early states of New Hampshire and South Carolina have shown him dipping to third place or worse — have provided a potential opening to wrest that title from him for the rest of the field at Wednesday night’s debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California.
Among those watching at home will be some of the Republican Party’s biggest donors who have so far held out from backing any of the candidates. Major contributors are planning to watch the second debate carefully, according to people in contact with several of them, in order to see who, if anyone, they might rally behind in the coming months.
All seven candidates at the debate are facing the dual-track challenge of trying to emerge as a singular rival of Trump without letting the former president entirely run away with the contest before that happens. His criminal indictments — now at 91 counts across four jurisdictions — have not slowed his momentum, with each week bringing new surveys showing Trump above 50 percent nationally among Republicans, and no rival registering even half that level of support.
Those who have qualified for Wednesday’s debate are DeSantis; former governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina; Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina; former vice president Mike Pence; former governor Chris Christie of New Jersey; businessperson Vivek Ramaswamy; and Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota. Trump is skipping the debate to travel to Michigan for an event with union workers.
The most immediate stakes of the debate are likely financial. The last major public fund-raising deadline before voting in the primary begins is at the end of September. Few events can generate waves of small donations — or help fence-sitting multimillionaires pick a candidate — quite like a powerful showing on the debate stage.
After landing some lines at the first debate, Haley boasted of raising more than $1 million in the next 72 hours. DeSantis raised $1 million in 24 hours, his campaign said. And Scott, who struggled for airtime, was among those not to say anything about his post-debate haul.
For DeSantis, a superlative showing could quiet the chorus of critics who worry he doesn’t have what it takes to stop Trump, despite a $130 million super political action committee and his standing as the nextmost-popular Republican candidate. For others, like Haley, whom some of the party’s most influential donors are said to be taking a fresh look at after the first debate, it is a chance to try to supplant DeSantis’ persistent second-place standing.
“You need the field to narrow, so this debate and every debate is important, because people are getting to see the options they have,” said Jay Zeidman, a DeSantis donor and fund-raiser in Texas who hosted a recent event for the governor.
Zeidman’s father, Fred, a veteran fund-raiser in several presidential races, has been an early backer of Haley, underscoring the divide among donors who would like to see an alternative to Trump as the nominee.
“Nobody really paid attention to her or knew who she was until the first debate,” said the elder Zeidman, a fixture in GOP fundraising circles who was appointed by President George W. Bush as chair of the US Holocaust Museum.
“I was with her in New York at a fund-raiser last week, and it was a room packed with major New York donors who were really hearing her for the first time,” he added. “This is a pivotal week.”
Still, there are questions about how much money will even matter in a race that Trump leads by so large a margin that many GOP donors have grown fatalistic about the final result.
Campaigning in South Carolina on Monday, Trump said his opponents “ought to stop wasting their time.”
He added, “They’re wasting a lot of time with these ridiculous debates that nobody’s watching.”
Another key factor in shaping the size of the field will be the Republican National Committee’s debate criteria. Candidates must hit a 3 percent polling threshold to be on the stage in California and have amassed 50,000 donors. One candidate at the last debate, former governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, failed to qualify Wednesday.
The debate thresholds will rise to 4 percent in polling and 70,000 donors for a Nov. 8 debate in Miami.
Haley has ticked up in the polls in both Iowa and New Hampshire in recent weeks, but that rise could be as much about a television advertising blitz from her super PAC as her showing in the first debate.