Seven takeaways from Wednesday’s GOP debate in Miami

The News

MIAMI, Fla. — While Donald Trump rallied in Hialeah, his top five rivals battled for the chance to confront him one-on-one before the race is fully over. The NBC News debate, moderated by Lester Holt, Kristen Welker, and Hugh Hewitt, focused on foreign policy for the bulk of its two-hour running time. Here’s what stood out.

Our View

Nikki Haley was the center of attention. There was only one moment that truly generated buzz out of this debate: Haley seething at Vivek Ramaswamy after he attacked her daughter for using TikTok. “You’re just scum,” she said. If you liked Haley’s feisty mom-oriented brand of conservatism in the last debates, you got more of the same in this one, and she kept her poise fending off more attacks from rivals. The foreign policy angle suited her strengths and she used Ramaswamy as a Trump stand-in to make the case for Reagan-y hawkishness over America First isolationism. “The world is on fire,” she said in her closing remarks, calling for a direct response to Middle East terrorism, Chinese communism, and Russian aggression.

Haley battled with Ron DeSantis over whose governorship was more solicitous of Chinese business. “She welcomed them into South Carolina, and gave them land near a military base, wrote the Chinese ambassador a love letter saying what a great friend they were,” he said. Haley shot back that DeSantis’ economic development agency had encouraged Chinese investment. Haley said DeSantis “opposed fracking” and “opposed drilling,” he said he sided with Floridians against drilling in the Everglades.

This might be Tim Scott’s last debate. The South Carolina senator just barely qualified for the Miami stage, after falling to fourth place in his home state polling and making an “all in” pivot to Iowa. With Mike Pence out of the race, Scott was the only candidate promising to sign a 15-week abortion ban, and was ready to draw a contrast with Haley from the right — she was “leaving conservatism behind” and “playing for the Never Trump lane,” he said at a weekend conference near Orlando. At the debate itself, he played up his religious values early and often: “We need a renewal, a great awakening,” Scott said. “We should reject the left’s valueless, faithless, fatherless society.”

But onstage, Haley got the better of him. Scott challenged her (and DeSantis) to “join me in a 15-week limit.” Haley pointed out, correctly, that Scott hadn’t co-sponsored a 15-week ban in the Senate, and didn’t endorse that position when he first entered the race. (He endorsed a 20-week ban, then, months later, a 15-week ban.) The senator muttered “that’s not true,” and the exchange was over.

By the end of the night, the biggest news around Scott was the public debut of his girlfriend Mindy Noce, who he’d never named before. Scott’s allies said that his clear answers on other topics — Social Security reform, military action against Iran, punishing schools and students who protested Israel — revealed a substantive, electable candidate. “I don’t think anybody followed what Nikki was saying,” said ex-Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, who chairs Scott’s super PAC.

Ex-Texas Rep. Will Hurd, who ended his brief campaign to endorse Haley, said that it was time for Scott to quit the race. Next month, the RNC will require candidates to poll at 6% in two national polls, or one state poll and one national poll, a threshold Scott wouldn’t have met if it was in place this week.

Ron DeSantis’ kitchen sink approach to Trump. DeSantis made his big pitch against Trump early, pulling together a number of separate themes: He’s losing his fastball, the party is faring poorly, and he didn’t accomplish enough in office. “Donald Trump’s a lot different guy than he was in 2016,” DeSantis said. “He owes it to you to be on this stage and explain why he should get another chance. He should explain why he didn’t have Mexico pay for the border wall. He should explain why he racked up so much debt. He should explain why he didn’t drain the swamp. And he said Republicans were going to get tired of winning. Well, we saw last night — I’m sick of Republicans losing.” So far, no single arrow has hit its mark, but the implied age attack — an increasing feature of the campaign — notably dovetails with the Biden campaign’s efforts to draw attention to Trump’s weirder comments. Wednesday’s example: Trump mixing up Kim Jong Un with Xi Jinping at his rally and saying there were 1.4 billion people in North Korea (pop. 26 million).

The field (minus Vivek) agrees on Israel. Responding to the Israel-Gaza war that broke out since the last debate, the field was largely on the same page, telling Israel to fully take out Hamas and to count on their support while they did. “Finish them,” Haley said. ”I would be telling Bibi: Finish the job once and for all with these butchers” DeSantis said, who also boasted how he sent flights to Israel to retrieve Florida residents. The foil for their argument was Ramaswamy, who gently suggested Israelis don’t want to “depend” on the U.S.; that his rivals were too cavalier about getting the U.S. into another war like “the neocon establishment of the past”; and that Haley had too many ties to the military-industrial complex, citing her past position on Boeing’s board. He called her “Dick Cheney in three inch heels” and added the label applied to DeSantis. Ramaswamy also split from the field on how to respond to campus protests against Israel, saying cracking down on student groups they saw as antisemitic — as DeSantis has done in Florida, and others pledged to do — violated free speech principles and invited counter-attacks on conservatives. “We don’t quash this with censorship, because that creates a worse underbelly,” he said. “We quell it through leadership by calling it out.” Scott said that federal funding for schools — as well as student visas — were a “privilege not a right” that could be revoked.

The elephant was not in the room. Roughly 12 miles down the road, Donald Trump held his third debate counter-programming event: A MAGA rally, complete with his team’s version of a “spin room,” in Hialeah. The rally successfully pulled eyeballs away from the GOP debate — Biden’s campaign opted to focus more on Trump, with one staffer texting Semafor that the GOP debate was an “afterthought.”

But the debate wasn’t completely ignored: During Trump’s speech, his advisors kept an eye on the GOP stage, and senior advisor Chris LaCivita gave Semafor a yawn when asked what he thought of the rival event. “The first question out of the gate was, why would you be better than Trump? And there was nothing there, I mean, I couldn’t believe it,” LaCivita said. “It didn’t move the needle.”

Predictably, the former president took swipes at his opponents (though Trump himself wasn’t the main focus at the NBC event) and suggested at one point that his event was “a hell of a lot harder to do than a debate.” And he repeated a now-signature line that none of his rivals can use: “I’m being indicted for you,” he told the thousands of attendees.

A split on Social Security. Democrats fear Haley as a general election candidate — except when she starts talking about Social Security, which she did at length on Wednesday. Asked about entitlements, Haley reiterated her call to raise the retirement age as part of a broader plan to rein in costs. “Any candidate that says they’re not going to take on entitlements is not being serious,” she said. Chris Christie agreed, saying younger workers like his son would be given more than enough time to plan for a future increase. But Scott disagreed, saying it was unfair to expect farmers “working night and day” to continue doing physical labor any longer. And DeSantis said the conversation made little sense given the public health crises facing the country. “When life expectancy is declining, I don’t see how you could raise it the other direction,” he said. Trump has hit DeSantis for previously entertaining changes to entitlements since before the governor even announced his campaign, setting up an obvious flashpoint if Haley ends up the last candidate standing.

Abortion: Now what? The candidates met once again in a familiar position: Trying to explain recent Republican losses on abortion. Haley once again pledged to turn the temperature down, saying a 15-week national was unrealistic and that “consensus” needed to be the goal. “I don’t judge anyone for being pro-choice and I don’t want them to judge me for being pro-life,” she said. Scott said that was unacceptable. “Frankly I think it is unethical and immoral to allow abortions up until the day of birth” in blue states, he said. DeSantis said anti-abortion groups had “been caught flat footed on these referenda” but didn’t offer many specifics on how to counter them. Christie said he’d tolerate “morally reprehensible” state abortion laws like New Jersey’s as the price of federalism. And Ramaswamy, “speaking as a man,” said he’d force men to take more responsibility for children — and not let his own gender get in the way of talking about abortion. Trump spokesman Steven Cheung told Semafor that Trump had confronted the challenge of messaging around abortion earlier and more effectively than the rest of the field. “He hasn’t necessarily talked about the weeks, but he’s talked about exceptions, and what’s palatable for people,” he said.