The republican primary debates last held on August 23 in Milwaukee Wisconsin are set to resume today in California. Candidates from the prior debate included former Vice President Mike Pence, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, South Carolina senator Tim Scott, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Mr. Vivek Ramaswamy, North Dakota governor Doug Bourgum, and the former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchenson. The vast majority of these names are set to return for the second of the debates.
Each candidate was given set time limits to respond to questions surrounding US political and social situations, as well as refute what their opponents said if relevant. The Barstow debate team, however, had some critiques of the way the debate was run as well as of the decorum of some of the candidates.
Not all candidates went into the debate on equal footing. In Doug Burgum’s case, this was quite literal. That aside, there was a clear split between the more vocal candidates and the more reserved ones. Vivek Ramaswamy spent much of the debate talking over his opponents. Jayden Sampat ‘24, Vice President of Barstow’s National Speech and Debate Association chapter, notes, “…he would interrupt and yell about random topics while other people were getting asked questions.”
Ramaswamy was not alone in this regard, as DeSantis, Christie, and Haley were also willing to fight with one another. Haddie Schedler ‘25, an experienced junior, cites Christie and Haley as having the best “dunk” on another candidate with “Chris Christie calling Vivek Ramaswamy Chat GPT, and all the times Nikki Haley shutting Vivek down.” Aun Hathiari ‘26 so too cited Christie’s invocation of Chat GPT as the highlight of the candidates bickering.
While it is hard to make predictions for what will happen in California, it is clear that some candidates are ahead of their counterparts in multiple ways. People like DeSantis, Ramaswamy, and Haley were able to make their presences known, while Scott, Hutchinson, and Bourgum were forgotten as soon as the debates came to a close. Schedler notes that, “Nikki [Haley] and Ron [DeSantis] both had very extreme crowd reactions, and used common phrases that would gain a centrist majority, regardless of whether their policy would qualify as that.”
It is the crowd’s reactions that more or less define who wins and loses the debates, and they often only reach their limits for a select few candidates. In other words, this coming debate is a competition between DeSantis, Ramaswamy, and Haley.
Hathiari makes the claim that, “Vivek [Ramaswamy] said a lot of dumb things and the crowd cheered for him. He also got a significant lead in the polls… but Trump probably won, even if he wasn’t there.”
Trump, interestingly, is not set to return to the stage quite yet, with him just recently announcing a visit to Detroit due to the UAW strike on the date of the primary. His absence likely signals that this coming debate will be much like the former.
These debates are ultimately contests of personality, and if someone is not able to display one that holds the audience’s attention, they will fall behind. As Hathiari, Schedler, and Sampat all put it, “It wasn’t a debate, it was theater.”
