After a chaotic and opaque journey to qualify, eight Republican presidential candidates will take to the debate stage for the first time in the 2024 cycle Wednesday night in Milwaukee.
The eight who qualified were announced late Monday night by the Republican National Committee, which set donor and polling thresholds to winnow the large field of hopefuls and long shots.
But the man those eight candidates are aspiring to beat, former President Donald Trump, announced Sunday he will not be there, citing his substantial polling lead nationally and in early primary states.
What You Need To Know
- Eight Republican presidential candidates will take to the debate stage for the first time in the 2024 cycle Wednesday night in Milwaukee.
- But the man those eight candidates are aspiring to beat, former President Donald Trump, announced Sunday he will not be there, citing his substantial polling lead nationally and in early primary states
- The eight contenders are Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy
- They will battle for oxygen with each other and the former president’s counterprogramming: a pre-taped interview on Twitter with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, according to multiple reports
- The debate airs Wednesday at 9 p.m. EST on Fox News, Fox News Business, Fox News’ website and streaming services, and the right-wing video streaming website Rumble
“I'm kind of wondering what's going on, why he's turning down these opportunities to speak to the American people,” Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum, one of the debate’s two moderators along with fellow host Bret Baier, said on the network’s “MediaBuzz” on Sunday. “On the one hand, that has me curious. On the other hand, I think that it makes a huge opportunity for all of these other candidates because, if he's not there, they're gonna have a lot of space to really make themselves heard. And some of them will start to chip away at his numbers. There's no doubt about it.”
The eight contenders — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy — will battle for oxygen with each other and the former president’s counterprogramming: a pre-taped interview on Twitter with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, according to multiple reports.
And then, even if they land a rhetorical punch or two on the debate stage and make headlines, the candidates will almost immediately be overshadowed by Trump’s fourth arrest on Thursday, this time in Georgia on 13 felony charges related to efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss in the state.
In the first two months of 2023, DeSantis trailed Trump by as little as 2 percentage points on average, according to the FiveThirtyEight’s polling aggregator. On Tuesday, he stood at a distant second, trailing the former president by an average of 37 percentage points.
Wednesday will present a key opportunity for the governor and his fellow non-Trump candidates to make a direct appeal to a national audience, particularly Republican primary voters, on the Fox News broadcast.
“We got the first debate in this whole shebang we're gonna be able to do, which should be a lot of fun,” DeSantis said at a rally in Florida on Monday. “2024 is our moment of choosing. We are not going to get a mulligan on this one. The Democrats are playing for keeps. The time for excuses for Republicans is over. We must get the job done. I will get the job done.”
A super PAC pouring tens of millions of dollars into supporting DeSantis posted hundreds of pages of debate strategy last week for its preferred candidate on the website of a consulting firm run by Jeff Roe, a longtime Republican strategist working with the committee, Never Back Down PAC.
Super PACs are legally prohibited from coordinating with campaigns but often discreetly — yet publicly — publish opposition research and other advice for the candidate they support to make use of on the campaign trail. Never Back Down’s chief, Ken Cuccinelli, later claimed the strategy memos, first reported by the New York Times, were posted accidentally.
DeSantis told Fox News on Sunday he hadn’t read the memos and “it’s just something we have and put off to the side.”
In an overarching document summarizing the super PAC’s advice published by the Times, DeSantis is advised to attack President Joe Biden three to five times, lay out his “positive vision” two to three times, “take a sledge-hammer” to Ramaswamy and “defend Donald Trump in absentia in response to a Chris Christie attack.”
“Trump isn’t here so let’s just leave him alone,” the memo advises DeSantis to say in response to a Christie attack on the race’s frontrunner. “He’s too weak to defend himself here. We’re all running against him. I don’t think we want to join forces with someone on this stage who’s auditioning for a show on MSNBC.”
The memo also advises DeSantis to offer a personal anecdote about his family while “showing emotion.” And it cites a quote from disgraced former Fox News executive Roger Ailes, describing his “orchestra pit theory,” encouraging DeSantis to avoid costly aesthetic errors that will overshadow his policy and political arguments.
“You have two guys on stage and one guy says ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?” Ailes said in a 1988 interview after helping orchestrate George H.W. Bush’s successful presidential campaign.
One man who will attempt to trip up DeSantis and his other rivals is Christie, the former New Jersey governor who went from helping Trump conduct debate prep — and being hospitalized with COVID-19 because of it — to denouncing the former president and launching a presidential campaign in direct opposition to Trump’s pursuit of the Republican nomination for the third time.
“Surprise, surprise… the guy who is out on bail from four jurisdictions and can’t defend his reprehensible conduct, is running scared and hiding from the debate stage,” Christie wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, responding to the news that Trump planned to skip the debate. “Trump - certified loser, verified coward.”
Hutchinson also plans to go after Trump, saying in an MSNBC interview last week that he planned to prosecute the former president “whether he’s there or not” and that “he will be a focal point of issue, both what happened on Jan. 6, but also how he will not lead the Republican Party well into the future.”
The only candidate on the debate stage who has participated in a GOP presidential primary before, Christie famously helped derail Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 campaign by belittling him for repeating himself and using what appeared to be a practiced, canned answer in a February 2016 debate.
“I've got a very simple debate strategy,” Christie said on CNN last week. “I'll listen to the questions, answer them directly and honestly. And if someone up there says something that I believe is dishonest, to call them out on it. That's it.
“I think all the people are going through all these strategy memos stuff and coming up with canned lines and all the rest of it,” he added. “I've watched that canned line thing. It doesn't work all that well.”
Ramaswamy — a 38-year-old entrepreneur new to elected politics who has found himself third in national polling in a race that includes governors, senators and a former vice president — posted a video on X on Monday of what he described as “three hours” of debate prep: him playing tennis shirtless.
In an interview with the Post and Courier, a South Carolina newspaper, Ramaswamy said his debate prep might just entail reading a newspaper beforehand. Instead, he said talking to voters will be his warm-up.
“Maybe I’ll regret that,” he told the paper.
Haley, the former South Carolina governor who served as U.N. ambassador in the Trump administration, said Sunday she had a similar debate strategy: “debate prep for me was the 80 town halls I did in Iowa and New Hampshire, where we let everybody ask whatever question they wanted.”
“We’re going to talk about our vision, our vision for America,” she said on Fox News Sunday. “Our vision of making sure that we stop the spending and lower inflation. Our vision of making sure there’s transparency in the classroom. Our vision of securing our borders. And our vision of a national security that protects all Americans.”
And Haley’s fellow South Carolinian, Scott, said he wants to share his “positive, optimistic message” with the primary audience, stating, “Republicans are ready for conservative leadership with a backbone, one that will crush the cartels, stand up to China and protect the America we all love.”
Burgum, the little-known North Dakota governor, will work to introduce himself to voters, he said on a Politico podcast last week. Morning Consult, which surveys Republican primary voters every day, found that 61% said they never heard of Burgum when asked over the weekend, by far the highest number of any candidate who qualified for the debate.
“So there's a little bit of just sort of solving the ‘Doug who?’ problem,” Burgum said.
And Pence, who served as vice president for four years and is polling around 5%, hopes to reintroduce himself to the GOP electorate, while making the case he’s a Trump Republican whose only major disagreement is over his old boss’ efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
“I feel like I've been preparing for this first Republican presidential debate my whole life,” Pence said on ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday. “As Karen [Pence, his wife,] and I have traveled all across the country, one of the things we've come to realize is that I'm well known, but I'm not known well. Most people know me as that loyal vice president who fought alongside President Trump until the day came that my oath to the Constitution required me to stand apart.”
The debate airs Wednesday at 9 p.m. EST on Fox News, Fox News Business, Fox News’ website and streaming services, and the right-wing video streaming website Rumble.
