Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Everything You Need to Know About the Third Republican Debate

The GOP's 2016 clown car is rolling into Boulder, Colorado Wednesday for yet another Republican presidential debate, the third of 11 ritual public floggings that the country will be subjected to before this long, weird primary season is over next spring. Two weeks after the Democratic candidates showed us what a wonky, substantive policy debate might look like, the remaining GOP candidates will take the stage tonight to confirm that theirs is the New Normal in American electoral politics.

The debate, subtitled "Your Money, Your Vote," is being hosted by CNBC, and will focus on economic issues like job growth, taxes, Social Security, and the tech sector. Because as one moderator pointed out, apparently seriously, the candidates haven't had the chance to give their positions on the debt ceiling.

But as much fun as it will be to listen to them shout at each other about retirement and Uber, the third GOP primary debate, like the ones before it, is really about the candidates—the nine men, and one woman who still think they can win the party's amateur cage-fight. With less than 100 days to go until the Iowa caucuses, the race remains wide open, having defied all political logic about how these things should go. And the candidates are becoming increasingly unhinged. Here's a guide to where they're at—and what to look for—going into tonight's presidential debate.

BEN CARSON
While Donald Trump will once again be center stage tonight, the attention will largely be focused to his left, on the sleepy ex-neurosurgeon who has suddenly pulled to the front of Republican polls. A New York Times/CBS poll released on Monday showed Carson with 26 percent support among Republican voters nationally, compared to 22 percent for Donald Trump. In Iowa, the doctor's numbers are even better, boosted by enormous support from the state's evangelical voters, a key voting bloc. And Republicans fucking love this guy. These numbers, from a recent Iowa poll, should show you how much:

Image via Bloomberg/Des Moines Register Poll

Carson's rise is bewildering for many reasons. As I've noted many times before, he is a renowned neurosurgeon who was the first person to separate conjoined twins from the head, and it's hard to imagine why he would want to tarnish that record with the humiliation of running for president. There's also the issue of his political views, which tend to fall somewhere between Rush Limbaugh and the Old Testament. In the past few weeks alone, Carson has called for intensifying the War on Drugs, said he wants to monitor and punish "extreme political bias" on college campuses, and claimed that Jews could have prevented the Holocaust had they been armed with guns.

In the past two debates, Carson has been mostly a non-factor, a friendly, extremely chill voice amid the squabbling horde. On Wednesday, though, he is likely to get more attention—including from Trump, who has become increasingly distraught by his opponent's success. Asked by NBC News anchor Chuck Todd whether he might be too "low energy" to put up a fight in the debate, Carson's answer was characteristically bizarre.

"I do have a tendency to be relaxed," he said, appearing on Meet the Press last Sunday. "I wasn't always like that. There was a time when I was, you know, very volatile. But, you know, I changed. As a teenager, I would go after people with rocks, and bricks, and baseball bats, and hammers. And, of course, many people know the story when I was 14 and I tried to stab someone."

No Dr. Carson. Many people do not know this story.

TRUMP
Having been replaced by Carson at the top of the field in Iowa, and now nationally, Trump seems to be cycling through stages of grief over the loss of his frontrunner status. First, he mocked the numbers. "Donald Trump falls to second place behind Ben Carson," Trump told supporters Saturday, pretending to read a headline. "We informed Ben, but he was sleeping."

But as the reality of his new second-place status sinks in, the orange-coiffed billionaire just wants to know why. "I don't get it," he said on MSNBC's Morning Joe Tuesday morning. "I'm going there actually today and I have tremendous crowds and I have tremendous love in the room, and you know, we seem to have hit a chord. But some of these polls coming out, I don't quite get it." Later that day, he implored Iowans to get their shit together and get him back on top: "Will you get the numbers up, Iowa, please?" he demanded. "This is ridiculous!"

Going into Wednesday's debate, Trump has shifted his Twitter attacks toward Carson, jabbing his opponent for his campaign's reliance on super PACS, and making weird comments about his religion. (Carson is a Seventh-Day Adventist.) "I mean, Seventh-day Adventist, I don't know about, I just don't know about," Trump said at a rally in Florida Saturday. The comment drew criticism, though, and by Sunday, he'd switched to a safer line about creating jobs:

JEB!
Any notion that Jeb! is the "smart" Bush brother has long been dispelled, evaporating somewhere around the time he couldn't remember the name of the space shuttle disaster he said he would "never forget." Sadly, it now seems no amount of exclamation points will be able to save his flailing presidential campaign. When Bush isn't making gaffes, he's spinning in confused circles, trying—and failing—to put on a sweatshirt.

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