For the two attention-hungry governors — one of them looking for a spark to a flailing presidential campaign and the other with more national ambitions — the primetime matchup was a good opportunity to spread their respective messages. But for DeSantis, he’ll need much more than a good ratings night to make a vast gap in the polls in the presidential race, with Donald Trump polling upwards of 40-50 percentage points ahead of him.
The governors’ debate had no party infrastructure backing or promoting it, unlike the ongoing series of debates in the GOP presidential primary contest. The three Republican presidential debates in recent months drew 12.8 million, 9.5 million and 6.9 million viewers respectively. Without Trump, the frontrunner and frequent crowd favorite, the debates — two hosted by Fox networks and third by NBC — have done little to change the trajectory of a race that has remained stubbornly stagnant, save some shifts largely constrained to single percentage points.
Still, DeSantis had to stand out in previous debates against several other candidates, many of them with similarly conservative messages to him. The Democrat vs. Republican dynamic on Thursday night gave him a clearer purview for him to cut through to potential voters, as he stood in sharp contrast on essentially every single issue with the Democrat on stage with him.
In early November, fellow Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy had a small-scale debate with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) in another play for attention in the Trump-dominated race.
NewsNation will host the fourth debate in the series next Wednesday. But its reach compared to the major television networks won’t give the not Trumps of the field too large of a pedestal. The RNC has not announced public plans for a fifth debate.
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