Jeremy W. Peters and Annie Karni

The second- and third-tier moderate Democrats on the stage, they argued, had done much of the work for Trump, raising tough questions about plans supported by some of the leading candidates to nationalize health care, decriminalize illegal border crossings and drastically cut the use of fossil fuels.

These ideas are supported by progressive candidates like Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whom Republicans hope to turn into the face of a Democratic Party they are portraying as disconnected from the concerns of most Americans.

“What the moderates were doing was pointing out that a large group of the Democrats running are simply out of sync with mainstream swing voters,” said Karl Rove, the former top political adviser to President George W. Bush’s two winning presidential campaigns. “The idea they’re going to provide illegal immigrants free health care, that’s not going to go down in union households in Michigan.”

Trump and his supporters likely would have declared victory regardless of what was said onstage. And he will face no shortage of impediments to reelection. Majorities of Americans, even those who say they like him, disapprove of his erratic behavior. Important voting blocs like college-educated women have turned against him. And the economy is slowing down.

Former Vice President Joe Biden led Trump by 10 percentage points in a recent Fox News poll of registered voters nationwide, and Sanders led him by 6 points.

But the fissures within the Democratic Party had senior Trump campaign officials predicting that after the debate they would see a bump in their poll numbers in critical Rust Belt states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. In a statement released Thursday, Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, said the debates showed the Democrats’ “vendetta against coal, oil, and natural gas.” The campaign believes that will alienate voters in those key states, which Republicans had not won in decades until Trump carried them in 2016.

Though they were realistic about their limitations — and the fact that the general election is more than a year away — Republicans said that the debates had given them fodder for what they say will be hundreds of millions of dollars of attack ads.

“Thank you very much for what you are doing, because you are giving us unlimited amounts of video footage for us to use,” said Ned Ryun, the chief executive of American Majority, a group that is training and recruiting conservatives to help turn out the vote for Republicans in battleground states.

“Republicans have a very nasty habit of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory,” Ryun added. “But sitting here a year out, I’m not sure you could ask for better dynamics.”

Republicans pointed to several moments during the two debates when they said Democrats had undercut themselves in surprising ways, particularly on issues that will be important to voters in competitive Midwestern states like Michigan, where the debates were held.

Biden, for instance, declared that his energy plan would end fossil fuel use — a position that seems highly risky not only in Michigan, the cradle of the American automobile industry, but in coal-producing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio that Trump won in 2016.

Republicans said that other leading Democratic candidates like Warren, whom Trump campaign officials now view as the strongest debater in the field, missed opportunities to speak broadly to the concerns of middle-class voters and instead focused on issues with narrow appeal to progressives in the Democratic base.

Asked on Tuesday night whether her health care plan would be paid for by raising taxes on the middle class, Warren did not answer, saying only that “middle-class families are going to pay less out of pocket for their health care.”

“No one talked about the middle class or cutting taxes for the middle class,” said Alex Conant, a Republican consultant who advised Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida on his 2016 presidential campaign. “If anything, they talked about how much to raise taxes on the middle class. It’s bizarre how little they talked about issues that matter to most people.”

Democratic strategists saw more strength than weakness.

“It’s normal and healthy this far out to be debating amongst ourselves and forging our identity as a party over the next couple of years,” said Brian Fallon, a former spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. “There’s going to be a rollicking discussion for months to come. The more attention we give to some of these issues that mobilize our people, the more excited people will be about the nominee.”

Fallon also said that moderates like former Rep. John Delaney and Rep. Tim Ryan, who challenged the progressives, are unlikely to be part of the next debate in September. “Some of the moments from these debates are going to fade,” he said. “Are we really going to be watching John Delaney clips a year from now?”

But there is considerable risk for the eventual Democratic nominee if the televised debates over the next six months devolve into a progressive-versus-centrist civil war. In that scenario, regardless of whether the nominee is far left or center left, Democrats could find themselves trying to rehabilitate a candidate who has been battered by continuous attacks for more than a year, much like Mitt Romney was in 2012 after he emerged from a long and bitter primary in a weakened position to take on President Barack Obama.

Romney was also hurt by the perception that he had taken positions that were far to the right of where most voters were just to appeal to the conservatives he needed in the primary. That perception hardened over the course of 20 debates, where he made statements on issues like birth control that the Obama campaign seized on as extreme and anti-woman.

“Over at the White House they must be high-fiving themselves,” said Russ Schriefer, a Republican consultant who advised the Romney campaign in 2012. As he rattled off issues that have come up at the debates, like reparations for slavery, “Medicare for all” and the Green New Deal, Schriefer added, “All of these policies will become what the Democrats are. It will be how they are defined, certainly how the Trump campaign and the Trump super PACs will define them.”

During the debates this week, Democrats battled over many of the biggest issues Americans are facing as the 2020 election approaches. But those discussions were often limited to ideas and proposals that most Americans say they oppose.

Much of the immigration discussion on both nights focused not on how to comprehensively address the issue but a much more narrow concern: whether the government should subsidize health insurance for people who are in the country illegally. Just 38% of Americans said that government health care should be available to unauthorized immigrants, according to a CNN poll from June; 59% said it should not, including almost one-third of Democrats.

As for the proposal to replace private insurance plans with a government-run system, the same poll found the public overwhelmingly disapproved. Fifty-seven percent of those who think the government should provide a national health plan said it should not completely replace private insurance, while 37% said it should.

Many Democrats have also expressed concern with the party’s leftward tack on border security as more presidential candidates have expressed support for abolishing the law that makes it a criminal offense to cross the border illegally — an idea that has only recently become a point of disagreement. Many of the more progressive candidates like Warren and Julián Castro, the former secretary of Housing and Urban Development, have supported decriminalization.

A Marist poll last month of Americans nationwide found that just 27% said decriminalization was a good idea, while 66% said it was a bad idea. Among Democrats, slightly more disapproved than approved, 47% to 45%, the poll said.

Prominent Democrats who are raising alarms about the party’s move to the left include veterans of the Obama administration like Jeh Johnson, the former Homeland Security secretary, and Rahm Emanuel.

Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff, wrote an open letter to the candidates this week imploring them to think beyond the party’s base. “Too often, you succumbed to chasing plaudits on Twitter, which closed the door on swing voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio,” he wrote.

Republicans said the debates showed Democrats have a lot to worry about.

“They’re basically auditioning to see who’s going to be the sacrificial lamb to Trump,” Ryun said. Then he added a caveat: “If they keep going down this path, and the economy doesn’t tank.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/us/politics/debates-republican-reaction.html" id="214b2ce6-307a-338b-a023-853b610c0131">The New York Times</a>.

As Left and Center Squabble, Republicans Listen for Echoes in the Rust Belt

WASHINGTON — After two nights of debates between 20 presidential hopefuls that exposed a wide rift between the Democratic Party’s progressive and centrist wings, President Donald Trump’s allies and Republican strategists said Thursday that they had gotten largely what they wanted: Five hours of a nationally televised clash where Democrats themselves questioned the practicality of prominent liberal wish-list items.

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Jeremy W. Peters and Annie Karni

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As Left and Center Squabble, Republicans Listen for Echoes in the Rust Belt