The fifth Republican presidential debate started and ended with barbed exchanges between Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, with neither likely to have moved closer to eclipsing frontrunner Donald Trump in the Iowa caucus next week.
The Florida governor condemned Haley for running “to do her donors’ bidding” and the former UN ambassador called DeSantis a habitual liar. The early tone in the Iowa debate matched prior Republican debates, which were frequently hostile, with candidates hurling personal attacks at one another.
Trump has repeatedly declined to debate his party’s opponents, and skipped this debate as well, instead participating in a town hall hosted by Fox News, also in Iowa.
Unlike the prior debates, this one was not coordinated by the Republican National Committee (RNC), which decided in December to stop hosting GOP debates for the rest of the primary season.
The RNC debates narrowed the field of Republican contenders to five, and CNN’s debate requirement that candidates poll at 10% in at least three national or Iowa-based surveys has left only Haley, DeSantis and Trump qualifying.
Chris Christie, Trump’s most vociferous critic among the Republican contenders, did not make the cut and announced on Wednesday he was ending his bid for president. Christie had polled low ahead of the first primary in Iowa, and said at a town hall in Windham, New Hampshire, that he would continue to try to make sure Trump would not “ever be president of the United States again”.
He was overheard on a hot mic before his event began criticizing Haley. “She’s going to get smoked,” he said in an audio broadcast on the campaign’s livestream feed. “She’s not up to this.”
He was also overheard saying DeSantis had called him, petrified, but the audio was cut before he finished the thought.
Christie leaves Haley, DeSantis, Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy in the race for the Republican nomination.
Ramaswamy, the rightwing tech entrepreneur who has billed himself as a youthful Maga answer to Trump and has peddled conspiracy theories, including claiming the January 6 Capitol riot was an “inside job”, did not qualify. Ramaswamy, who has spent the most time in Iowa out of all the candidates, has said he will instead participate in a Des Moines taping of a podcast with the rightwing commentator Tim Pool.
DeSantis and Haley appeared aligned on issues ranging from the economy to immigration, clashing mainly over foreign policy and denouncing each other’s records as governors. DeSantis, who has often appeared tense onstage, seemed more comfortable as the GOP debate progressed, painting Haley as insufficiently hawkish on China and calling into question her conservative record.
In response to an early question on the economy, Haley condemned pandemic-era spending bills, saying: “I think we have to acknowledge that Republicans and Democrats have both done this.”
“We have a spending problem in this country,” DeSantis concurred, claiming the IRS had been “weaponized” against Republicans. “There’s gonna be a new sheriff in town,” he added.
The candidates competed to put forward militant opposition to increased immigration, calling for a crackdown on so-called “sanctuary cities” and illegal immigration.
DeSantis attempted to distinguish himself from Haley, condemning her for a past comment calling for the humanization of immigrants and invoking the xenophobic and inaccurate idea that immigrants are dangerous criminals. A Haley presidency, DeSantis said, would be “like having the fox guarding the hen house”.
“They all have to go back,” DeSantis of undocumented immigrants.
DeSantis later called into question Haley’s 2020 Twitter post calling George Floyd’s death “personal and painful for many” and claimed that Iowans and others outside the state of Minnesota had “nothing to do with” the police killing.
Haley defended her words, acknowledging anti-Black violence in the US and defending her move as governor of South Carolina “to bring the Confederate flag down” after the white supremacist Dylann Roof opened fire on a Charleston Black church in 2015, killing nine congregants.
On foreign policy, DeSantis and Haley clashed over their positions on aid to Ukraine and Israel.
“You have to be a friend to get a friend,” said Haley, who said she supported continued military aid to Ukraine.
DeSantis, who has aligned himself with the pro-Trump segment of the Republican party’s increasing opposition to aid for Ukraine, called support for Ukraine a “UN way of thinking”, and decried the defense of Ukraine against Russia as a mission of “globalists”.
“You can take the ambassador out of the United Nations, but you can’t take the United Nations out of the ambassador,” DeSantis said, to jeers and applause.
On Israel, DeSantis, whose campaign dropped a staffer who shared neo-Nazi memes and has rejected calls to condemn neo-Nazi protests in Florida during his gubernatorial tenure, took a more hawkish posture.
“We gotta support Israel, in word and in deed,” said DeSantis, saying he would support the Israeli military’s campaign in Gaza regardless of concerns for civilian casualties and deaths raised by humanitarian groups and the Biden administration.
Haley took a similar position. “It has never been that Israel needs America. It has always been that America needs Israel,” she said.
Without Trump on stage, the candidates uneasily navigated questions about the former president’s role in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
“We saw some discrepancies in the 2020 election,” said Haley, who praised so-called “election integrity” bills to restrict voting access. But Haley strongly condemned the 6 January 2021 riot and said Trump would “have to answer” for his role in the attack on the US Capitol.
When asked if his view of the constitution differed from Trump’s, DeSantis replied that his “role model for how to do the constitution is George Washington” – but he did not denounce Trump’s repeated election lies or attempts to overturn the 2020 election, instead waving off the former president’s actions as mostly “word vomit” on social media.
DeSantis has thrown his campaign resources into Iowa before the caucuses, including visiting each of the state’s 99 counties.
“I’d be a better president as a result of going through this,” DeSantis said wearily during an Iowa press conference.
Meanwhile, Haley, who garnered the endorsement of the heavy-hitting, Koch-backed conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, could see a boost in Iowa as well. (The organization has promised to knock on doors for the former US ambassador to the UN every day ahead of the 15 January caucuses.)
If DeSantis and Haley are fighting neck and neck, it is probably for second place. Polls show Trump holding an increasingly commanding lead in Iowa in the weeks before the caucuses – despite putting fewer campaign resources into the early primary than his opponents.
If DeSantis fails to eat into Trump’s share of Iowa voters, his campaign – which has faltered repeatedly among gaffes and staffing shake-ups – could shutter before he sees another primary.
