As Republicans take the stage for the second US presidential debate of the 2016 race in Simi Valley, California, on Wednesday, Donald Trump’s commanding lead over the field will once again place the bombastic real estate mogul front and center.
But even as support for Trump has only strengthened ahead of round two, a number of top-tier candidates will be looking to recapture some of the momentum after a sluggish summer dominated by outsiders.
While a glance at polling conducted in recent weeks might reflect Trump as formidable or retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson as on the rise, political observers have longed viewed the race for the Republican nomination as a battle predominantly between a triumvirate of candidates: former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Florida senator Marco Rubio and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker.
And yet since Trump entered the race, he has sucked up every ounce of media oxygen with his celebrity and an outlandish candor that rather than alienating supporters only endears him to them further.
Bush, Rubio and Walker, meanwhile, have each taken different paths in responding to the Trump phenomenon – but all have struggled to cut through the noise.
Wednesday night’s debate at the Ronald Reagan presidential library could offer a much-needed boost for the GOP’s top brass – or at the very least a reminder that they are the ones to watch in the long run despite the national fascination with all things Trump.
Here’s what to expect.
Marco Rubio
The senator from Florida will be looking for another strong showing after he drew praise in the first debate for offering substantive policy answers on issues ranging from education to immigration while positioning himself as the candidate best equipped to take on Hillary Clinton, who remains the Democratic favorite.
Unlike many of his fellow contenders, Rubio has mostly ignored the Trump show – a move that has spared him the sort of public confrontations that have thus far borne little fruit for candidates who’ve tussled with the Republican frontrunner, such as Jeb Bush and Rand Paul.
Rubio has only indirectly referenced Trump on the stump, when drawing attention to the Apprentice star’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, which Rubio has said misses the point. (The question is not whether America is great, but whether it can be even greater, the senator has argued.) In interviews, too, Rubio typically responds to endless Trump-related queries by pivoting back to his own campaign, which weaves his compelling personal story into an optimistic pitch on restoring economic opportunity.
Don’t expect that to change at Wednesday’s debate, Rubio spokesman Alex Conant said Tuesday.
“He’s not going to hit any of the candidates. He’s going to go out there and talk about his ideas, his agenda,” Conant told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer of Rubio’s preparation for the debate. “He’s going to talk about why he’s running for president.”
Although Rubio is polling in single digits, most experts agree that in previous years early numbers have not typically predicted the eventual nominee for either the Republicans or the Democrats.
“Rubio is better suited than any other candidate to be standing when the dust settles because he’s everyone’s second choice,” Republican pollster Frank Luntz told the Guardian. “The most important polling question right now is ‘Would you consider voting for Candidate X?’ More than 80% of the GOP electorate would consider voting for Rubio – more than any other candidate.”
The rise of outsiders such as Trump, neurosurgeon Ben Carson and businesswoman Carly Fiorina, Luntz added, “is a gut emotional reaction by Republicans to Obama, Clinton and even the Republican Congress.”
In a nod to the current “anyone-but-DC” sentiment among primary voters, Rubio has recently made subtle changes to his usual stump speech by casting himself as both an underdog and an outsider.
At recent campaign stops in early voting states such as Nevada and New Hampshire, the senator has begun playing up his upset win in the 2010 Florida Senate race over his establishment-backed opponent, then-governor Charlie Crist. He was told to wait his turn then, and the political establishment has again told him to wait to run for president out of deference to party elders, Rubio recalls in a thinly veiled reference to Bush.
“I didn’t know there was a line,” he then quips.
Rubio also criticized the establishment in both parties – including his own leadership in the US Senate – when Republicans last week failed to block Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran in a vote. His disillusionment with the status quo in Washington is part of why Rubio chose not to seek re-election to the Senate and to instead run for president, the senator said.
Rubio’s campaign declined to discuss its strategy, but last week released a documentary recounting his 2010 Senate victory to telegraph that he had been here before, and this time was no different.
“When he entered this race he knew he wasn’t going to have as much money or as much name ID as some of the other candidates,” Conant told the Guardian. “I would remind people that in every campaign he’s ever run, he’s started as an underdog and he’s never lost an election.”
Scott Walker
Leading up to his formal entry into the race, the Wisconsin governor had everything going for him on paper: he was a battle-tested Republican governor who in four years won three elections in a blue-leaning state, and a darling among conservatives for his fight against organized labor.
Walker also began the summer as a strong favorite in the early-voting state of Iowa, where voters seemed inherently drawn to his midwestern persona and retail politics – which have often included traversing from one county to the next on a Harley Davidson.
But Walker’s fall over the course of August was arguably the most striking of the GOP’s top-tier candidates, with a number of dust-ups raising questions over his preparedness for primetime, and his once dominant presence in Iowa all but disappearing.
It took Walker several tries, for example, to clarify where exactly he stood on birthright citizenship – an issue injected into the race by Trump. The governor also raised more than a few eyebrows for saying the idea of building a wall along the Canadian border was a “legitimate issue”. And on some issues – such as Syrian refugees and the gay-marriage controversy over Kentucky clerk Kim Davis – Walker has declined to take a specific side, despite being pressed by reporters.
Walker has looked to steer the conversation back toward policy and on Monday announced a plan to rein in the power of labor unions, shifting back into the terrain that first catapulted him into the national spotlight. Aides to Walker said to expect a similar focus on policy in the second debate, where the governor will look for opportunities to highlight his record in Wisconsin and to tout his plans for labor and to repeal and replace Obama’s signature healthcare law.
The governor will seek to contrast himself not only with the likely Democratic nominee but also with the other Republicans on the stage – for example with his vow to terminate the Iran deal on day one, a Walker aide told the Guardian.
And while he was fairly subdued in the first presidential debate, this time Walker had plans to “step it up and be more aggressive”, the aide said.
“I really hope to be aggressive and make the case that we’re ready to wreak havoc on Washington,” Walker told CNN on Sunday.
Walker, like Rubio, has also sought to dispel the notion that he is an insider and recently denied that he was a career politician despite having served in public office for the majority of his adult life. The governor has increasingly voiced his frustration at Republicans in Congress and pledged to take on the establishment, even if that means members of his own party.
“They want people who will take on Washington, who will shake things up, and I agree with that,” Walker recently told Fox News. “Heck, I’m an outsider. I was one of the guys who took on the Washington-based power structure right here in the state of Wisconsin. They tried to come after me in the recall election [of 2014]. They failed.”
Jeb Bush
The former Florida governor was, in many ways, supposed to be as inevitable to Republicans as Hillary Clinton was to Democrats. After moving quickly to form an exploratory committee in December, Bush amassed a record fundraising haul prior to the formal announcement of his candidacy in June as pundits began to frame the election around another Bush-Clinton match-up.
And despite a few hiccups leading up to the official launch – most notably his inability for days to definitively say whether or not he would have gone to war in Iraq knowing what we know now – Bush remained a consistent second only to Trump in most polling in the early months of summer.
But on a crowded debate stage last month, Bush’s performance was described as dull and lacking in any memorable moments. The former governor has also struggled to contend with Trump’s shadow over the race, landing in hot water over his use of the controversial phrase “anchor babies” and offending the Asian American community while attempting to clarify his comments, reflecting the perils of engaging with Trump on the issue of immigration.
Bush has nonetheless upped the ante against Trump, repeatedly going after his authenticity and even attacking him in Spanish, which Bush speaks fluently. Team Jeb has also sharply questioned Trump’s conservative credentials by highlighting his prior support for Democrats and changing policy positions, while Bush promised to pull no punches at the second debate.
“If someone comes at me, bam! I’ll come back at ‘em,” Bush said while campaigning in Salem, New Hampshire, this week, according to Reuters. “I’ll campaign hard.”
George Gonzalez, an associate professor of political science at the University of Miami, said Bush’s increasingly aggressive posture is the most effective way for him to reclaim his position as the Republican frontrunner.
“There’s this sense that he’s not meeting expectations, and so his campaign says, ‘Let’s fight this. We’re not supposed to be one of the dark horse candidates,’” Gonzalez said. “We’re supposed to be the frontrunner, and unless we act like it people are just going to peel away.”
And even as his poll numbers have plummeted of late, Bush’s command over policy and campaign war chest leave him safely positioned to ride out the outsider wave.
“If there’s going to be one person who’s raised enough money that they can survive to wait and see if Carson and Trump both implode, it would be Jeb,” said Steve Geller, who served as the Democratic state senate leader in Florida when Bush was governor. “Jeb has a lot more money in the bank, Jeb is better known, and Jeb has a deeper reservoir of support.”
