Opinion | Winners and Losers From the Fifth Republican Debate in Iowa

Welcome to Opinion’s commentary for the fifth Republican presidential debate, held in Des Moines, Iowa, on Wednesday night. In this special feature, Times Opinion writers and contributors rate the candidates on a scale of 0 to 10: 0 means the candidate didn’t belong on the stage and should have dropped out before the debate even started, the way Chris Christie did; 10 means the candidate can head into the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary with the wind at his or her back.

Here’s what our columnists and contributors thought about the debate.

Jamelle Bouie Compare Nikki Haley with Ron DeSantis, and she comes across like a class-A national politician: someone with the capacity to compete and, in the right circumstances, even win. But if you ignored the other candidate on the stage and listened to just Haley, you’d quickly notice the extent to which she lacks one essential quality: a reason to be there.

Why, exactly, does Haley want to be president other than the fact that she has the ambition to be president? What is the driving theme of her campaign? What are the problems that demand her presence in the Oval Office? What are the problems, period?

In fairness to Haley, I’m not sure anyone running for the Republican presidential nomination has an answer to that last question. One of the most striking things about this debate was that while it was more substantive than previous episodes, it still wasn’t very substantive. You get no sense listening to either Haley or DeSantis that there are real, material problems facing tens of millions of Americans that can’t be solved by demagoguing against one group or another on a lazy susan of potential scapegoats.

Gail Collins Expected her to outdebate DeSantis, but they came in pretty even. So I guess she loses. Generally, their opinions were similar, and the theories on global warming were deeply, deeply depressing.

Michelle Cottle On balance, it was probably a shrewd move for her to come armed with the desantislies.com site to invoke whenever she wanted to charge DeSantis with misrepresenting her record or his own — certainly it saved scads of time — but it still got pretty darn annoying. Haley talked more substance than DeSantis, and she engaged with more of the tough questions. (She may wind up wishing she hadn’t been so honest about the need to raise the Social Security eligibility age.) She also tried repeatedly to focus the spotlight on Trump — “He should be here!” — and his presidential failures.

Ross Douthat She had a few good moments criticizing Trump that came long after the pattern of mutual destruction with DeSantis was established. She is still smoother than him and always will be, but after a while, her obsessive invocation of her campaign’s anti-DeSantis website became self-parodic and even “S.N.L.” worthy. She would have done far, far better replacing almost every impugnment of DeSantis with a sentence that began, “Here’s why you should choose me over Donald Trump.”

Robert Leonard Haley owned the stage. She was smart, quick-witted and knowledgeable, and her foreign policy expertise would serve us well. She’s also good in front of an audience of Iowans. Haley wants conservative solutions to our problems; DeSantis wants to impose his will. Haley is the most likely Republican to beat President Biden. Sadly, she may not be “Christian” enough for some Iowa evangelical Republican caucusgoers. In that world, a kind of purity test is always in play for their neighbors, friends and family, as well as for presidential candidates whose faith is suspect, and Haley was raised in a Sikh family. Remember Ted Cruz won Iowa. Not Trump.

Katherine Mangu-Ward This debate was like being at a dinner party with a couple on the verge of divorce. It was testy and unhelpfully repetitive. Haley once again edged out DeSantis as the more principled adult in the room. Asked about the proper role of the government, DeSantis said, “The proper role of government, if it means anything, is to protect our kids, and I’ve stood for the innocence of our kids,” and went on to defend picking fights and favorites in a series of culture-war battles. Asked the same question, Haley said, “Government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people.”

Daniel McCarthy Haley squandered some effective zingers by relying too much on the gimmick of her anti-DeSantis website. She was confident at the start but became vaguer and more prone to word salad as the night progressed. She seems uncomfortable with the G.O.P., not just with Trump, and while independents in New Hampshire might be reminded of John McCain, Republicans in Iowa and elsewhere won’t find her wholeheartedly on their side.

Ron DeSantis

Average: 4.4/10

Did better →

Jamelle Bouie It’s easy to forget, but Ron DeSantis announced his campaign for president in an audio chat with Elon Musk on what was then still Twitter. Not on a scenic Florida beach, not at the State Capitol in Tallahassee, not against the backdrop of a major Florida university — all choices that would have, in some way, reinforced the themes of his campaign.

I mention this because it encapsulates DeSantis’s fundamental flaw as a candidate for national office: He has no idea what normal people want. None at all. This was clear throughout the debate. There was his extended rant about “the woke.” There was his charge that Disney was in the business of “transing kids” (truly one of the most insane things I’ve heard from a candidate not named Donald Trump). And there was his strange decision to accuse his opponent on the stage of “ballistic podiatry” rather than just say she shot herself in the foot.

It’s weird! He’s weird! And while he has many other problems — the off-putting tone and cadence of his voice, his penchant for canned lines, his refusal to answer a direct question — they all pale in comparison with his fundamental weirdness. It is clearly good enough for Florida, but — and I say this as a Floridian by birth — c’mon, it’s Florida.

Gail Collins More articulate than anticipated, so he sorta wins. Iowa must be getting tired of being reminded he visited all 99 counties.

Michelle Cottle With just two candidates onstage, DeSantis got a lot more time and space in which to let his grating personality shine. Both contenders wasted too much energy sniping at each other, but DeSantis on offense is just so yappy, so nyah-nyah-nyah, so smarmy. He can’t help it. It’s who he is. He came armed with plenty of canned lines and cheesy insults, including some weird theme, repeated multiple times, about Nikki Haley flying the “pale pastel” flag of corporatism. And he shamelessly ducked any remotely awkward question. He obviously knows how to play to the base — smacking Anthony Fauci, boasting about flying migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, warning against evil leftists and elites and so on. Which might matter if Trump weren’t running.

Ross Douthat There were several moments late in the debate when DeSantis took on Trump directly — both over his record and for disrespecting Iowa voters by not actually campaigning — with the kind of arguments that should have pervaded the evening. DeSantis and Haley need to win many, many votes from Republicans who currently support Trump. Instead, the candidates spent most of the night tearing each other apart. DeSantis had slightly the better of it on substance, mostly because his record really is closer to the preferences of Republican primary voters. But peeling a few voters away from Haley gets him, at best, a distant second in Iowa, and so even a victory on points adds up to a strategic failure.

Robert Leonard I’ve been to numerous DeSantis caucus events in Iowa, and he is better on the ground talking with Iowans than he comes across on television — looser, more comfortable and less stilted. You could hear that in the positive responses he received from the studio audience. That said, he came across as stale, disgruntled and small. His knowledge of issues seemed shallow and his foreign policy weak-kneed. A man this petty and cruel shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office, especially behind the desk. We’ve already tried that.

Katherine Mangu-Ward Last night Trump answered a question about abortion on Fox News and shocked and confused a bunch of Republicans by being a squishy pro-lifer (again). I’m answering the question about DeSantis’s nomination prospects with news about Trump because that is, in fact, the answer to any question about DeSantis.

Daniel McCarthy After a slow start, this was one of DeSantis’s best performances: He sounded confident and in command of the issues, and he struck a chord with his remarks on veterans’ mental health. Emphasizing that the elite on Wall Street and elsewhere have betrayed Main Street is a strong finishing message with Republicans.