Takeaways From the Haley-DeSantis Debate

Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley faced off in the fifth GOP debate Wednesday night and while there were fewer presidential hopefuls on stage than in previous debates, the outcome was similar: Many commentators saw frontrunner Donald Trump, who once again skipped the debate, as a winner. Matt Lewis at the Daily Beast says there were hopes that having just two candidates on stage would "incentivize a serious policy debate"—but instead, there was a "semi-childish, back-and-forth debate." "It turns out that giving DeSantis and Haley more time and a brighter spotlight just revealed their flaws," Lewis writes, adding that neither candidate had a "moment of authenticity that might reveal something about who they are as a person." More takeaways:

• DeSantis didn't get what he needed. Aaron Blake at the Washington Post doesn't describe Haley as the winner, but he says DeSantis was definitely the loser. The Florida governor "didn't have a bad night," despite some stumbles on foreign policy, Blake writes. "But he's probably the one who needed the most out of this debate, given the trajectory of their respective campaigns. And he didn't seem to do much to change that."

• Viewers were the losers. Andrew Prokop at Vox declares Haley the winner, saying that she only "needed to avoid a damaging gaffe or embarrassing moment, and she did that." The loser, he says, was the viewers. "DeSantis and Haley called each other liars so many times, in such rapid-fire tempo, nitpicking each other's records and supposed comments the other made in such aggressive fashion that it was extremely difficult for even hardened political obsessives to make sense of it," he writes.
• They went relatively easy on Trump. DeSantis and Haley "largely shied away from discussing Mr. Trump and his actions" until the moderator raised the subject, per the New York Times. But they did target the former president—who held a separate event Wednesday night—over the Capitol riot and efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Politico reports. "What happened on Jan. 6 was a terrible day. Trump will have to answer for it," Haley said. "You can't terminate the Constitution. I mean, you know he does," DeSantis said of Trump. The AP reports that Haley was "blunter" than DeSantis, saying, "That election, Trump lost it. Biden won the election."
• A sharp divide on Ukraine. One of the biggest divides between the two candidates was on Ukraine. Haley, former US ambassador to the UN, is much more supportive of continued US aid than DeSantis, writes Laura Kelly at the Hill, who believes the Florida governor won the debate. Kelly says one of DeSantis' "best ripostes" came during the exchange on Ukraine: "You can take the ambassador out of the United Nations but you can't take the United Nations out of the ambassador."

(More GOP presidential debate stories.)