Winners and Losers from the Michigan GOP Debate

Winners

Mitt Romney
Romney came into this debate the frontrunner, and left it looking like the presumptive nominee. His debate-style isn’t going to win him any accolades alone, but he leaves nobody questioning his temperance and vision for America. The point that many conservatives believed could lead to his fall from grace, his lack of pushing for a flat tax, came up last night, and he handled it perfectly. Instead of running from the issue, Romney countered with the fact that he is looking to initially ease the tax-burden on businesses and the middle-class while “not looking to raise taxes on anybody.” His fiscal policy platform is not only easy to understand, empower the middle class and peal back the barriers standing in the way of job growth, but unlike Herman Cain’s, also exceptionally specific and laser-focussed.

Rick Santorum
Santorum may not have improved his chances to become the next leader of the free world, he still doesn’t have any feasible path to victory, but he may have had the strongest debate out of the entire pack. Known as a staunch social conservative culture warrior, an economic-focussed debate may not initially have been seen as the right forum for Santorum to impress, but conventional wisdom was wrong. This highlights the problem in pigeon-holing candidates as single-issue. In the House and Senate, Santorum was known as a guy who could simply get things done. His tax-incentive plans, including a 0% rate on US manufacturing, resonate well with both business owners, and middle-income workers who would then have more jobs open to them. If Santorum wants to beat the odds and become the “anti-Romney” candidate, it might be politically wise for him to maintain a focus on getting America back to work.

Losers

Rick Perry
Perry has had a number of rough debate nights, but in the words of Larry Sabato, Director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, “Perry’s forgetfulness is the most devastating moment of any modern primary debate.” While forgetting the Department of Energy as an agency he would cut as President, was certainly the worst blunder of the night, he struggled to gain any foothold throughout the debate. When the topic of tax reform came up, the Perry plan sounded vague, when health reform came up, he sounded uninformed. Last night may mark the beginning of the end for the Perry candidacy.

Jon Huntsman
Ambassador Jon Huntsman needed this debate as much as anyone to catapult his candidacy into becoming a relevant force with less than two months until Iowa and New Hampshire. His performance was far from bad, but the end result is the same, Huntsman has no path to the White House, and no strong base in a Republican primary. His lone highlight was making it known that he was the only person on that stage that had ever actually enacted a flat tax, as he did in Utah, but the moment was quickly overshadowed, as has been the tale of most of his campaign.