With just days to go until Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, the first contest of the 2024 Republican primary, presidential hopefuls Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley squared off in a CNN debate on Wednesday to convince voters why they, and not frontrunner Donald Trump, should be the next occupant of the Oval Office.
Quickly, the debate stage at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, became a battleground for the two contenders to bash each other as liars who are ill-suited for the presidency. They also both sought to walk the tightrope of criticizing Trump without antagonizing the voters that supported him over the last eight years.
“This is a time that we know that we need a new generational leader. We have watched our country be in disarray. We see the world on fire. And we need someone who's had executive experience. I've been a two-term governor … I was at the U.N. I dealt with Russia, China, Iran every day,” Haley said at the start of the debate. “But you're going to find out tonight, there's going to be a lot of Ron's lies that have happened.”
“The reality is Nikki Haley is not somebody that has been willing to stand in and fight on behalf of conservatives,” DeSantis responded, claiming Haley was a liar herself.
Haley entered the debate hoping to build on her polling momentum, with recent results showing her about even with DeSantis for second place in Iowa and pulling within spitting distance of Trump in New Hampshire, the next stage in the primary cycle. And DeSantis is still striving to be the main alternative to Trump, though he is hoping to exceed expectations in Iowa in order to propel him forward to better results in states down the road where he is struggling even more.
“You've campaigned for president in one state, you're invisible in New Hampshire, you're invisible in South Carolina,” Haley said to DeSantis. “You’ve gone down in the polls in Iowa. Why should we think you can manage or do anything in this country?
Wednesday’s debate took place on an already eventful night in the contest for the Republican presidential nomination, with former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a prominent critic of the former president, bowing out of the race.
Elsewhere in Des Moines, Trump skipped the debate and participated in a Fox News town hall, fielding questions from anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum as well as decided and undecided Iowa caucusgoers in a rare instance of the former president speaking directly with voters. As he pursues a second term in the White House, Trump has predominantly relied on large campaign rallies while investing millions in the Hawkeye state and deploying prominent surrogates to make his case.
Haley and DeSantis were featured in their own town halls with Fox News on Monday and Tuesday, respectively.
“When you look at Ron's numbers, he's practically out of the race. In fact, a lot of people say he's leaving the race after Iowa, because he's doing so poorly,” Trump remarked on the Florida governor. Earlier in the town hall, he said he agreed with an assessment of Haley from Christie — who was caught on a hot mic right before announcing his decision to drop out saying the former U.N. ambassador is “gonna get smoked. You and I both know that she’s not up to this."
“I know her very well. And I happen to believe that Chris Christie is right. That's one of the few things he's been right about, actually,” Trump added.
In Iowa polls, Trump clocks in at just under 52% on average, compared to DeSantis and Haley hovering around 17% each, according to the polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight. National polls show the former president up by around 50 percentage points. But in New Hampshire, where Trump is less popular, he is averaging around 42% support, compared to Haley’s 30%. Some recent polls have shown Haley within single digits of Trump there.
The Iowa caucuses are on Monday, Jan. 15. The New Hampshire primaries follow on Jan. 23.
Here are takeaways from Wednesday night’s debate:
Haley draws distinction from Trump on Jan. 6, while DeSantis jabs at his record
Both Haley and DeSantis have tread lightly when it comes to criticism of the former president, in part due to his polling lead and hold on the GOP’s base. But on Wednesday, both rivals tried to make their differences with Trump clearer to Iowa caucusgoers without overstepping.
Haley distanced herself from Trump on Jan. 6 and his legal case over presidential immunity while DeSantis offered measured criticisms of the former president, reiterating the areas he has continuously argued that Trump fell short on during his four years in the White House
Haley called the idea that a president would be protected from prosecution for ordering SEAL Team Six to kill a political rival if the commander in chief were not first impeached and convicted, “ridiculous.”
“That’s ridiculous, that’s absolutely ridiculous,” Haley said. “I mean, we need to use some common sense here.”
Trump’s lawyers made such a case during a hearing this week on whether the former president has immunity from his actions in office – a topic key to the federal case against him concerning his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The former South Carolina governor also drew a key distinction from Trump over Jan. 6, saying she sees it as a “terrible day” while the former president refers to it as a “beautiful day.”
“I think President Trump will have to answer for it,” she said.
“That election – Trump lost it. Biden won that election,” Haley said, referring to the 2020 presidential contest. “The idea that he is going and carrying this out forever to the point that he is going to continue to say these things to scare the American people are wrong.”
Asked about whether there is any meaningful difference between himself and Trump when it comes to the constitution, DeSantis leaned into saying he would uphold it without directly taking a jab at Trump.
“You can’t just terminate the constitution. I mean, I knew he does word vomit from time to time on social media,” DeSantis said of Trump before going on to change the subject and talk about the constitutionality of COVID policies.
In a post on social media in 2022, Trump called for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” in response to the 2020 election.
“It’s not going to be an issue with me because I am always going to follow the constitution and we’re gonna uphold the best traditions of the office,” DeSantis said of Trump’s legal cases. “And I’m going to be a president you can be proud of.”
Meanwhile, both candidates dipped their toes in criticizing Trump’s record, without fully going after the current GOP presidential frontrunner.
“I appreciated what President Trump did but let’s just be honest: he said he was going to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it, he did not deliver that. He said he was going to drain the swamp, he did not deliver that,” DeSantis said, also arguing he did not hold former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accountable or eliminate the nation’s debt.
Haley, on the other hand, said she wished Trump was on stage Wednesday night because “He’s the one that I’m running against.”
“He’s the one that I wish would be here,” she said. “He needs to be defending his record.”
Haley jabbed the former president for allowing the nation’s debt to grow under his watch and his approach to foreign policy.
“He didn’t deal with China when it came to stealing intellectual property, the fact that they gave us COVID,” Haley said.
“He didn’t do enough to make sure that we were really standing with our friends,” she said.
“If it’s Donald Trump, it will be four more years of chaos and we can’t be a country in disarray,” Haley said in her closing remarks before arguing polls show she is the only GOP candidate who can soundly beat President Joe Biden.
Race, gender and government: Culture wars on full display
The center of the debate moved into DeSantis’s wheelhouse — the culture war, and how Republican values have shifted in pursuit of that moving target.
When asked how his retaliation on Disney’s opposition to an education bill squared with traditional conservative views that "small, limited government is best," DeSantis practically rubbed his hands.
"The proper role of government, if it means anything, is to protect our kids, and I’ve stood for the innocence of our kids," he said, planting Florida’s changes to curricula — including streamlining book challenges and banning discussions of human sexuality and gender issues — as feathers in his cap.
He also proudly supported his stance against Disney (which he says he "won"), saying that Disney is involved in "transing" the kids.
"We need to stand up for the people and not bow down to woke corporations," DeSantis said.
Florida, he said, "believes in empowering parents" and setting standards for what’s "age and developmentally appropriate," saying that it’s "wrong to have pornographic materials in fourth or fifth grade." (The lists of books banned in some Florida schools, however, are broad — more than 1,600 books were banned pending review in Escambia County, Florida, as of December, including reference books like dictionaries and encyclopedias.)
Haley responded that government "was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people — it was never meant to be all things to all people. What we don’t need is government politicizing anything."
Her stance on gender transition, though, is that medical transition should be banned before the age of 18 — "just like we don’t have tattoos before the age of 18."
When the topic of abortion came up, DeSantis essentially said that both Haley and Trump are to his left, and he attacked Haley for the "trope" that conservative governments want to put women seeking abortions in jail. "No one I’ve ever met thinks that that’s something that’s appropriate," he said.
Haley countered that her own home state of South Carolina has proposed the death penalty for women who have abortions, much less jail.
"These fellas don’t know how to talk about abortion," Haley said. "Democrats put fear in women on abortion and Republicans have used judgment. This is too personal of an issue to put fear or judgment."
Later in the debate, DeSantis criticized both Haley and Trump for their acts during the racial uprisings of 2020, precipitated by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Haley, he said, was "virtue signaling to the left" for a tweet that said Floyd’s death should be "personal and painful for every American."
Haley responded by noting that her state is no stranger to racial violence, recalling the 2015 murder of Walter Scott by a "dirty cop," and the racially-driven mass shooting in Charleston, S.C., in which nine Black parishioners were killed during Bible study.
"We never had to deal with riots… because when we had both of those shootings, we were able to pull people together," Haley said, also noting that the Confederate flag came down in the South Carolina state capitol during her tenure.
Harder lines on immigration
As president, Donald Trump promised that he would build a border wall — and he would have Mexico pay for it.
That didn’t happen, as DeSantis and Haley acknowledged.
But DeSantis claims that he will make Mexico — or, at least, Mexicans (and other immigrants) — pay for it, by charging "fees on remittances that workers send to foreign countries." He also promised to "enforce the rule of law" in the United States, something he says that the Biden administration is negligent on.
He also referenced a Haley quote from 2015 that had been pressed on repeatedly, in which she said that undocumented immigrants should not be called "criminals."
She backed her quote — which, in full, said that migrants are families desperately seeking a better life — and described a multi-prong immigration policy. A Haley administration would defund "sanctuary cities," return to a "remain in Mexico" immigration policy and move from "catch and release" to "catch and deport."
"That’s the only way we’ll stop the incentives of these illegal immigrants coming across," Haley said.
DeSantis pushed back on the idea that immigrants are "families," suggesting that "terrorist cells" have come in from across the border. (Though a "growing number of individuals on the terror watchlist" have attempted to enter the U.S. through the Mexican border and been intercepted by Border Patrol agents, there is only evidence of three foreign-born terrorists entering the country through the U.S.-Mexico border — and they entered as children between 1 and 5 years of age, per the Cato Institute. Zero Americans have been killed or injured in terror attacks from illegal migrants or asylum seekers through the southern border.)
DeSantis also added that he disagrees with states making policies on undocumented migrants, saying he believes that the U.S. "should not let states provide benefits."
Trump, as he has repeatedly over the last year, promised in the dueling town hall “the largest deportation effort in the history of our country.”
Candidates spar over Ukraine, take jabs over Israel-Hamas war
Haley and DeSantis sparred over the wars in Europe and the Middle East, drawing stark distinctions on Ukraine and quarreling over one another’s record on Israel.
Haley, who has been a strong backer of continued support to Ukraine in its war against Russia, made the case that the U.S. must provide equipment and ammunition to the war-torn country, but not cash.
“Dictators always do what they say they're gonna do,” she said. “China said they were gonna take Hong Kong, they did. Russia said they were going to invade Ukraine. We watched it. China said Taiwan is next, we better believe them.”
The former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations went on to say it is all about “preventing war” as Russia’s invasion of a NATO country would put Americans troops in combat.
“This is a pro-American, freedom loving country,” she said of Ukraine. “And we got to remember that you have to be a friend to get a friend, and we needed a lot of friends on Sept. 12.”
DeSantis called Haley a “carbon copy” of Biden on the issue, who has delivered urgent pleas for Congress to pass additional aid to Ukraine. A portion of Republicans, particularly in the House, have pushed back on continued U.S. aid to the country, with the divide within the GOP on the issue on full display on Wednesday’s debate stage.
“They will not tell you when they have achieved their goal and this is going to go on maybe hundreds of billions more into the future,” DeSantis said of aid to the country, going on to accuse Haley of caring more about Ukraine’s border than America’s southern border.
“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 Haley.
Haley took the moment to take a personal jab at DeSantis’ campaign, saying he has “blown through $150 million” – a line Haley would go on to bring up again later.
“I don’t even know how you do that,” she said. “He has nothing to show for it.”
“If you can’t manage a campaign, how can you manage a country?” Haley said.
Over in the Middle East, both candidates expressed support for Israel in its war with Hamas but took jabs at one another.
Haley attacked DeSantis for campaign in Iowa with Rep. Thomas Masie, R-Ky., who voted against a resolution affirming Israel’s right to exist, saying he did not agree with language equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
“It's really rich that Ron [DeSantis} is going to act like he suddenly cares for Israel when he brought the person to Iowa that is the most anti-Israel Republican,” Haley said.
DeSantis called it “cheap, cheap garbage.”
Asked about comments from Israeli Cabinet members calling for the mass relocation of Palestinians from Gaza, DeSantis said he wouldn’t question Israel. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken this week said Israel confirmed to him that mass removal of civilians in Gaza was not the government’s policy.
Ramaswamy, Hutchinson on outside, looking in
Also in Des Moines, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy — who was excluded from the debate after failing to reach CNN’s polling requirements — took part in a conversation with right-wing media personalities Tim Pool and Candace Owens. The discussion veered from one conspiracy theory to the next, including Ramaswamy baselessly claiming the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack was an inside job orchestrated by Trump’s enemies. He also avowed his belief in the Great Replacement Theory, a false conspiracy theory embraced by white supremacists and mass shooters.
And former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, while still campaigning, had no events scheduled on Wednesday night. He is polling at under 1% in Iowa and New Hampshire.
“I am competing for votes in the Iowa caucuses and I plan to beat expectations,” Hutchinson said in a statement on Wednesday, commending Christie for his campaign. “My voice continues to be critical in this race.”