The Third Republican Debate Is Tonight: What to Watch

But the winner, once again, was the prohibitive front-runner, former President Donald Trump, who did not show up and went unscathed and unchallenged.

The debate in Miami came a day after voters across the country rebuked the Republican Party, especially over abortion rights. But that issue, which drove voters to the polls in Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and elsewhere on Tuesday, did not appear until an hour and 40 minutes in.

Once it did, the candidates showed the party’s divide. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina emphatically expressed support for a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, said it should be up to the states. The entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy spoke of “sexual responsibility for men,” suggesting that widely available paternity tests could be used to force men to take responsibility for pregnancies that should not be terminated.

And Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, sought a conciliatory position.

“I don’t judge anyone for being pro-choice, and I don’t want them judging me for being pro-life,” she said, adding, “Stop the judgment. We don’t need to divide America over this issue anymore.”

Voters in Iowa will cast the first votes of the Republican primary season in little more than two months, yet the debaters continued their competition for second place rather than training their fire on Mr. Trump.

For the third time, Mr. Trump did not bother to show up, instead counterprogramming at a simultaneous rally in nearby Hialeah, Fla. Aside from a few harmless jabs at Mr. Trump, the five candidates who did attend saved their harshest attacks for one another.

The most heated exchange came over the unlikely issue of TikTok. After Mr. Ramaswamy bragged about using the Chinese-owned social media network to broadcast his message, he turned to his nemesis, Ms. Haley, and mocked her daughter for using the app.

“Leave my daughter out of your voice,” she snapped, muttering into the microphone, “You’re just scum.”

But the debate did address weighty issues: whether a soaring budget deficit required a higher retirement age for access to Social Security and Medicare, how the United States should back Israel against Hamas and Ukraine against Russia, and how a president could immediately address the strain of inflation in everyday debate.

It even strayed into stultifying territory, as the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, one of the moderators, demanded to know exactly how many new ships should be added to the U.S. Navy to confront China.

But in the end, it was unclear how the five candidates onstage could catch Mr. Trump if they would not directly answer the question that started and ended the debate: Why should Republican voters choose them over Mr. Trump?

He has repeatedly given vague answers about being in a relationship with a woman, but a significant other had not campaigned with him.

On Wednesday night when the Republican presidential debate ended — a time when candidates are regularly greeted onstage by spouses and other relatives — Mr. Scott stunned observers when he appeared arm-in-arm with a longhaired blonde woman in a gray pantsuit who smiled widely as they posed for photos.

She was later identified by a person close to the campaign as Mindy Noce, Mr. Scott’s girlfriend and a design and renovations manager for a real estate company in the Charleston, S.C., area. In the spin room after the debate, a tight-lipped Mr. Scott confirmed that the mystery woman was his girlfriend and that they had been seeing each other for “about a year or so.”

The moment grabbed more attention than anything Mr. Scott said during the debate did, an unfortunate metaphor for his presidential run. Even the pictures taken at his debate lectern with his girlfriend had the feel of being the final souvenirs from a stalled campaign.

Mr. Scott entered the race as an underdog, but had proven to be a strong fund-raiser with the party’s base of online, small-dollar donors. His Sunday-school style of conservatism has yet to resonate even with evangelicals in Iowa, home of the party’s first nominating contest.

Still, Mr. Scott, who champions himself as a “happy warrior,” remains an optimist. When asked by NBC News if this was his last debate, he referred to the next debate in December in Alabama, saying, “Thirty days from now in Alabama, we’ll be hanging out having a conversation. I’ll be on the stage.”

The emergence of Mr. Scott’s companion onstage, like her emergence in the campaign itself, took a while.

Immediately after the debate concluded and other candidates were joined by their spouses, Mr. Scott put his arm around his mother, Frances Scott, and posed for a picture behind the lectern he had used during the debate.

He walked along the edge of the stage and squatted for selfies with fans in the audience. He chatted with supporters. He stood and stared out into the crowd, seeming to take in the moment.

He took more pictures with his nephew, Ben Scott.

Finally, after most of his rivals and their families had left the stage, Mr. Scott was joined at his lectern by Ms. Noce.

Mr. Scott pointed out a step, taking care that she did not trip. They stood side by side, wrapped their arms around one another’s back and smiled for pictures.

Mr. Scott held onto her hand as she turned to walk offstage, as if he did not want to let go.

Nicholas Nehamas and Maya King contributed reporting.

“A lot of people who are voting for the referenda are Republicans who would vote for a Republican candidate, so you’ve got to understand how to do that,” he said. He suggested that Republicans should emphasize that many Democrats have not identified a gestational limit they would support for abortions — a popular Republican talking point, despite the fact that 93 percent of abortions are performed in the first trimester and fewer than 1 percent are performed after 20 weeks.

Nikki Haley, a former United Nations ambassador and a former governor of South Carolina, echoed her previous calls to “find consensus” on banning abortions late in pregnancy, promoting adoption and access to contraception and not criminally charging patients who get abortions.

“Stop the judgment,” she said. “We don’t need to divide America over this issue anymore.”

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina restated his endorsement of a national 15-week abortion ban and called on Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley to support one, too. (They have both said they would sign one but have not been nearly as vocal as Mr. Scott has.) That prompted Ms. Haley to urge Mr. Scott to “be honest with the American people” on the chances of getting such a ban past a Senate filibuster, and on the fact that he is not a co-sponsor of a 15-week proposal put forth by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said that while he found abortion access late in pregnancy “morally reprehensible,” the federal government “should not short-circuit the process until every state’s people have the right to weigh in on it.”

And Vivek Ramaswamy — whose home state is Ohio, and who told CNN after the Ohio vote on Tuesday that proponents of abortion bans needed to “talk about the issue very differently” — attributed the referendum results to a “culture of losing” among Republicans.

“The Republicans did not have an alternative vision on the table,” he said, before reiterating his calls to talk about contraception, adoption and “sexual responsibility for men.”

Then he paused and surveyed the crowd of thousands who packed into the soccer stadium where he was speaking. “So,” he asked them, “do you think we did the right thing by not participating?”

They affirmed him with a resounding cheer.

Mr. Trump’s event was staged about 30 minutes down the road from the debate, but it might as well have been a world away. For those gathered here, Mr. Trump’s position as his party’s standard-bearer was not in question.

“We want Trump, the MAGA-dor to kill the goddamn bull,” Roseanne Barr, the actress who was one of several speakers at the rally, said from the stage.

Over the last several months, Mr. Trump has largely delivered speeches at smaller events or gatherings hosted by others. His campaign has billed many of those appearances as “remarks” rather than rallies, denoting smaller-scale events with less verve and production value.

The event on Wednesday was a kind of return to the full-scale political rallies that marked his first two campaigns.

Mr. Trump largely hewed to familiar themes, though he tailored his speech to the home crowd in Hialeah, a solidly Republican, working-class enclave outside Miami, where 94 percent of residents identify as Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Early in his speech, he compared President Biden’s administration to “Communist Cuba,” noting the number of “great Cubans” in the audience.

He went on an extended riff that compared Mr. Biden’s America to Fidel Castro’s government, concluding by accusing Mr. Biden, who is Catholic, of persecuting Catholics.

The Republican National Committee debate was the third Mr. Trump has dodged. During the first, he took part in a live-streamed interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. During the second, he spoke at an auto parts factory in Michigan, the day after Mr. Biden had visited a picket line with striking autoworkers.

The Wednesday evening rally resembled a kind of Make America Great Again festival. Food trucks lined the periphery of the stadium. Vendors sold Trump look-a-like rubber ducks and T-shirts with his campaign slogans.

And the former president made it clear that he did not regret skipping the debate, even as some of his primary opponents have accused him of lacking the gumption to exchange words with them onstage.

Mr. Trump referred to that criticism at one point during the rally.

“Well, listen, I’m standing in front of tens and thousands of people right now, and it’s on television,” Mr. Trump said. (His crowd estimate could not be confirmed.) “That’s a hell of a lot of harder to do than a debate.”

“Ukraine is not a paragon of democracy,” Mr. Ramaswamy said, reeling off a litany of critiques, including: “It has celebrated a Nazi in its ranks. A comedian in cargo pants. The man called Zelensky. That is not democratic.”

The statement raised eyebrows both in the room in Miami and on the internet, where hundreds of stunned viewers made posts on social media. One such post, from the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump Republican group, called Mr. Ramaswamy an “unserious candidate.”

Mr. Zelensky, who is Jewish, lost family members in the Holocaust.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Ramaswamy, Tricia McLaughlin, said that he had not called Mr. Zelensky a Nazi. Instead, Ms. McLaughlin said, he was referring to an event in September in which Mr. Zelensky visited Canada’s Parliament and joined a standing ovation honoring a 98-year-old Ukrainian Canadian war veteran. The problem, it turned out, was that the veteran, Yaroslav Hunka, had served in a division that was under Nazi control during World War II.

The ovation was widely condemned by Jewish groups, which called it “beyond outrageous.” Ms. McLaughlin said that Mr. Ramaswamy was referring to Mr. Zelensky’s joining in the applause and waving to Mr. Hunka.

But she acknowledged that, without context, the remark could be easily misunderstood. “He was talking quickly and kind of oscillated in his words,” she said.

Mr. Christie pointed to his 30-year-old son as an example of an American equipped to handle such a change. “If he can’t adjust to a few-year increase in Social Security retirement age over the next 40 years, I’ve got bigger problems with him than his Social Security payments,” he said.

Mr. Christie also called, as he has before, for limiting benefits for the wealthy.

Ms. Haley agreed on both points, adding: “Those that have been promised should keep it, but for like my kids in their 20s, you go and you say, ‘We’re going to change the rules.’ You change the retirement age for them.” Ms. Haley also criticized former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, asserting that they were unwilling to talk about reforming Social Security despite the problems the program faces.

Neither Ms. Haley nor Mr. Christie would specify a new retirement age, with Mr. Christie saying that would be a negotiation with Congress that he would not start on the debate stage.

Their answers prompted one of the moderators, Kristen Welker, to directly ask other candidates whether they supported raising the retirement age.

Senator Tim Scott at first avoided answering and began extolling the virtues of Iowa farmers, before saying that at the moment, he would not be in favor of raising the retirement age.

Mr. DeSantis — who noted that “as governor of Florida, I know a few people on Social Security” — explicitly rejected the idea.

“It’s one thing to pay it on life expectancy,” he said, “but we have had a significant decline in life expectancy in this country.”

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina proposed ideological tests for universities to receive federal funding and said that he would deport students on visas who he claimed were “encouraging Jewish genocide.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida played up his role in encouraging the State University System of Florida to ban chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, saying, “We’re not going to use state tax dollars to fund jihad.” He criticized the Biden administration for initiatives to combat “so-called Islamophobia.”

And Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador and South Carolina governor, suggested that college administrators were more tolerant of antisemitism than they were of racism. “If the K.K.K. were doing this, every college president would be up in arms,” she said. “This is no different. You should treat it exactly the same. Antisemitism is just as awful as racism.”

Mr. Ramaswamy, too, denounced what he called the “scourge of antisemitism” and called students, who he said were “siding with Hamas,” “fools” who “have no idea what the heck they’re even talking about.” But he stopped short of calling for them to face punishment and called Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley “pro-censorship.”

“We don’t quash this with censorship, because that creates a worse underbelly,” he said. “We quell it through leadership by calling it out.”

Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, was the only candidate asked about Islamophobia. He referred to his experiences as a United States attorney after the Sept. 11 attacks and said that he had combated hate crimes against Jewish Americans and Muslim Americans in New Jersey.

“It takes leadership to do this,” he said. “You must work with both sides.”

Haley had a few solid lines. But it’s hard to see tonight substantially — or immediately — changing Trump’s dominance of this race. Perhaps I should just cut and paste that comment for after every one of these debates?

I agree, Lisa. Haley had another strong night. She continued to make her general-election pitch. She was the target of several fierce attacks but responded confidently. Was it enough to coalesce the party’s anti-Trump wing around her? Not sure.

Mr. Ramaswamy, the Ohio entrepreneur, scolded Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, for allowing her adult daughter to use the app, which Mr. Ramaswamy defends.

“She made fun of me for actually joining TikTok while her own daughter was actually using the app for a long time,” Mr. Ramaswamy said. “So you might want to take care of your family first before preaching to anyone else.”

“Leave my daughter out of your voice,” Ms. Haley snapped back.

The wording from Ms. Haley evoked, however fleetingly, Will Smith’s outburst at the Academy Awards just after he had slapped Chris Rock, yelling at the comedian to keep Mr. Smith’s wife’s name out of his mouth.

Ms. Haley entered the night with momentum after strong performances in the first two Republican debates, which have put her neck-and-neck in the polls with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in the race to become former President Donald J. Trump’s chief primary rival.

If Ms. Haley’s goal was to close that gap and take down Mr. DeSantis, the exchange with Mr. Ramaswamy was a distraction. But it’s unlikely to hurt her significantly. Mr. Ramaswamy has managed to irritate some of his rivals as well as some primary voters, and Ms. Haley’s verbal slap seemed to come out of an instinct to defend her family. Some in the audience appeared to applaud her for it.

Onstage, Ms. Haley listened as a smattering of boos erupted as Mr. Ramaswamy referenced her daughter.

“You have her supporters propping her up — that’s fine,” Mr. Ramaswamy said of the boos.

Ms. Haley, unlike Mr. Smith, kept her hands to herself.

“You’re just scum,” she told Mr. Ramaswamy.