What to watch for in Tuesday night's Republican debate
Tuesday night's fourth Republican debate in Milwaukee, hosted by Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. The primetime debate will be the smallest so far because Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee have been relegated to the undercard debate by poll numbers that didn't meet the hosts' threshold. Only eight of the 15 candidates will be there, with Trump and Ben Carson standing at center stage.
Here's what to watch for:
Will the questions around Ben Carson's life story come up?
Over the past week, he has endured a litany of questions into parts of his life story, including whether he was offered a scholarship to West Point, whether he threatened his mother with a hammer, whether he stabbed a friend or close relative, and whether an anecdote involving a class he took at Yale really took place. Carson told Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, "I'm very hopeful I will get a lot of questions about the economy, given who the questioners are going to be."
How will Jeb Bush recover from his sub-par debate performance two weeks ago?
Bush trotted out an attack on Marco Rubio's Senate attendance record in the last debate, only to have it ricochet back at him with a masterful response from Rubio, who cast Bush's attack as desperate, then rattled off the spotty attendance records of other senators who had run for president, including John McCain, whose campaign Bush has said he admired. Afterwards, Bush admitted his performance had been off and said he intended to "be better as a performer on the debate stage." He told reporters he would do less debate prep and intended to try more "being me" for Tuesday's debate.
How will Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee handle the lower-tier debate?
Going into the earlier undercard debate, both took the demotion in stride. Huckabee told "Morning Joe" on MSNBC, "We let national polls drive who gets to participate in the debate, and national polls don't mean a whole lot at this point," while Christie told CNN's "New Day," "If I do a good job tomorrow night, you're going to be talking about me Wednesday morning."
Will Marco Rubio be targeted by other candidates after his post-debate polling bounce?
Rubio's admittedly sloppy spending while he was speaker of the Florida State House came up during the last debate, and questions about a charge card he used while he was speaker remained until this past weekend, when his campaign released the records from the years in question. "It's more of an effort, particularly from the left and from those in the media, to distract from the central issue of this campaign," he said in an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity. Rubio's campaign, anticipating attacks from Jeb Bush, has also released a web video with a series of soundbites from Bush praising Rubio.
Will Donald Trump be doing the targeting?
Trump has been zeroing in on Carson and Rubio, telling a crowd of over 10,000 in Springfield, Illinois that neither one knows anything about running a business. "These are people that have never done it before, and they don't know what they're doing," he declared. He has brought up Rubio's charge card woes and also said of Carson, "If you try and hit your mother over the head with a hammer, your poll numbers go up." Trump has been slipping in the polls and is even trailing Carson in some.
How will the debate be conducted?
This is the second consecutive debate to focus on the economy, after CNBC's debate two weeks ago. But that debate was heavily criticized by many of the participants, who felt that the moderators emphasized "gotcha" or superficial questions and didn't let the candidates finish their answers. Fox Business anchors Maria Bartiromo and Neil Cavuto aim to moderate a different kind of debate, one that will focus more closely on economic issues. Cavuto told Politico he would try to "make myself invisible," so that the moderators would not take the attention away from the candidates.