I watched the GOP primary debate on youtube (so I can pause and rewind) and took extensive notes, with the goal of examining the quality of the debate (rather than the content itself). The following is a short summary of my notes:
There were 146 total response to questions.
Of the 146 responses they actually answered the question proposed 45 times and of those 45 answers, 29 of them were to stupid questions.
Within their responses they managed to change topics 47 times and 7 of of those were to bash Obama, 2 were to bash Clinton and the record holder for topic changing is Bush with 6 times in 30 seconds.
They contradicted themselves within one sentence 7 times.
7 ad hominem, 3 emotional appeals and 5 times somebody managed to speak for 30 seconds without saying a word.
4 heartwarming stories about their family life.
3 people advocated war, 2 advocated diplomacy and twice they implied that electing a democrat was akin to the end of the world.
Trump said he would solve problems with friendliness — twice.
One person managed to implicitly criticize themselves within their own response.
Trump refuted a claim about his weak knowledge of international affairs by arguing that international affairs is a topic that nobody actually knows….I mean seriously, all those crazy Arab names? Nobody actually knows that shit. Right?
Only once was the ‘liar, liar, pants on fire’ argument used. Ok, this may have happened more than once.
Rand Paul was ONLY candidate to actually change a topic back to original question…but only once. Although Fiorina and Christie both made statements similar to ‘let’s get this back on topic’ but actually just changed to a completely new topic instead.
However, it was not a total disaster….here are the good parts:
There were a total of 7 well thought out responses (Paul 4, Bush, Walker & Huckabee)…..
And Jeb Bush used to smoke pot……
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And the winner is……<drum roll>……SCOTT WALKER!!!
Why? Because he spoke the least (8 min. 29 seconds total).
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