Ben Domenech: The Reason Trump Got to the White House Is His Performance at the Debate Stage

EXCERPT:

DOMENECH: "You know, I’m closer to you, I think, because my view is that all of that stuff, this early kind of talk about Donald Trump’s huge national lead is really way too soon. You know, it’s the sort of thing where you don’t know how these guys are going to perform, and Nikki Haley as well, you know until they get on the debate stage. And I think that we’ve seen in the past, in the case of Donald Trump, the reason that he got the nomination, the reason that he ultimately got to the White House, is because of his performance on the debate stage above all else. You can talk about the other factors, but I think that without that performances, those performances that showed him dominating the field and then besting Hillary Clinton so emphatically, I don’t think that he would have gotten to the White House. So this time around, I think that you’re going to have to see performances from Ron DeSantis and potentially from others on the debate stage in order to win those voters over and prove themselves. And we have to keep in mind, this is such a unique moment. We have a former president, with all the power of incumbency really behind him and enormous investment across the country, running, and you also have arguably the most popular or conservative governor in the country running against him in an insurgent campaign. That’s not something that we've seen in our lifetimes."