A former Republican strategist laments the party’s “zombie” debates

WHEN NIKKI HALEY, Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie and, perhaps, Vivek Ramaswamy mount the stage in Tuscaloosa, Alabama on December 6th, it won’t be the last Republican primary debate, but it may as well be. In the party of Donald Trump, the nominee was always going to be, well, Donald Trump.

These debates were supposed to give Republican primary voters a look at the policy positions and debating skills of the candidates vying to take on the Democratic candidate—still presumed to be President Joe Biden—in the November 2024 presidential election. In this election cycle, though, they have become a hollow Kabuki dance: formal, scripted and full of expressions of loyalty—not to some conservative ideal or philosophy, but to the MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) base of the Republican Party. The opening and closing statements, terrible jokes, swipes at other candidates and canned rebuttals have mostly been about giving as little offence to Mr Trump and his groupies as possible.

The debates simply don’t move the needle against Mr Trump. In averages taken during November, he is the favoured candidate of around 60% of Republican voters; he leads his rivals nationally by an average of 46.5 percentage points. In the states that will hold early caucuses and primaries—Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina—he is dominant. In the states that will follow he leads by crushing margins.

For now, every candidate has, in the parlance of the consultant class, picked a lane. Ms Haley and Mr DeSantis are battling it out in Iowa, hoping to pick up its socially conservative voters. Mr Christie hopes to play to New Hampshire’s quirky, iconoclastic politics by positioning himself as a truth-teller and the antithesis of Mr Trump.

But after the first three states, the game will be over. Mr Christie’s appeal in the states that follow is all but nonexistent; New Hampshire will be his Waterloo. None of the candidates taking on Mr Trump has the time, money or staff to build political operations, run ads or stage effective visits—those involving rallies or other major voter events—in the Super Tuesday states set to be contested on March 5th.

On that date Mr Trump will pick up Texas (where he presently polls at 66%), California (59.6%), North Carolina (51%) and Michigan (50%). Two weeks later he’ll crush Ron DeSantis, the politically snakebitten and personally awkward governor of Florida, in his home state, where Mr Trump presently leads him by 37 points.

Mr Trump’s primary rivals are, in short, zombie candidates. Why, then, do they continue their wanderings around the apocalyptic wasteland of fruitless debates?

The Horserace Industrial Complex—a phrase coined by Tim Miller, a political consultant—is part of the problem. For America’s political press, covering campaigns is good for eyeballs, clicks and ad revenue even when everyone knows the outcome. Blanket coverage is part of the business model.

The breathless coverage of what looks like a Republican primary resembles past campaigns: challengers and champions, blows landed and missed, gaffes and howlers, and endless media ads and rebuttals. It’s all very exciting—as long as you’re prepared to ignore the orange elephant not in the room.

The Horserace Industrial Complex demands ups and downs, regardless of how far ahead the front-runner is. In the past six months we’ve been through the DeSantis Bubble, the Christie Bubble, the short-lived Tim Scott Bubble, the tiresome Ramaswamy Bubble, and now we’re in peak Haley Season.

Last week Ms Haley won the endorsement of the powerful political network led by Charles Koch, a billionaire. Some see that backing as a potential game-changer. But it won’t scare Mr Trump. The Koch messaging machine appeals mainly to free-market, limited-government types, and the MAGA crowd has long since abandoned such principles.

The Republican establishment and others in the party opposed to the populist-in-chief had hoped the debates would matter. But the three held so far have done little to recruit members to the anti-Trump club. “Never Trump” voters make up only around 7-11% of the party, with a larger pool of softer “Please Not Trump Again” voters representing another 15%. (The latter group does not favour Mr Trump but will vote for him if, or rather when, he becomes the nominee.)

When this race grinds to its sad, inevitable end, the media and the Republican donor class will see Mr Trump’s utter dominance and control of the party extended to every level. In truth, the primary mechanics, from the Republican National Committee down to the state parties, have been corrupted and controlled by his loyalists from the start.

Mr Trump’s dominance of the party and process also means voters struggle to see the GOP as a party of arguments and ideas, framed by a philosophy. In debates before the Trump era, candidates came armed with a vision, not merely with lame gags and canned attacks. The debates were typically robust: they gave voters an opportunity to watch candidates work on their feet and to see how they performed under pressure. That model went out the window in 2016, replaced by Mr Trump’s crude japes, game-show-host affectations, schoolyard bullying and proud ignorance of Republican policy, history and principle.

Mr Trump’s decision not to participate in the debates is strategic. It is rooted not in fear of attacks from rivals, but in a calculated understanding that his absence reinforces the debates’ inability to alter the campaign’s trajectory. The primary is over. It’s just that nobody on the debate stage, hoping for a last flicker of attention, wants to admit it. ■

Rick Wilson is a political commentator and former Republican strategist. He is the co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a conservative coalition that campaigned against Donald Trump.