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The VICE Guide to the 2016 Election

Everything You Need to Know About the Third Republican Debate

Ben Carson and Donald Trump will go head to head in another ritual public flogging for the GOP.
Illustrations by Drew Lerman

The GOP's 2016 clown car is rolling into Boulder, Colorado Wednesday for yet another Republican presidential debate, the third of 11 ritual public floggings that the country will be subjected to before this long, weird primary season is over next spring. Two weeks after Democratic candidates showed us what a wonky, substantive policy debate might look like, the remaining GOP candidates will take the stage tonight to confirm that theirs is the New Normal in American electoral politics.

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The debate, subtitled "Your Money, Your Vote," is being hosted by CNBC, and will focus on economic issues like job growth, taxes, Social Security, and the tech sector. Because as one moderator pointed out, apparently seriously, the candidates haven't had the chance to give their positions on the debt ceiling.

Related: What We Learned from the First Democratic Debate

But as much fun as it will be to listen to them shout at each other about retirement and Uber, the third GOP primary debate, like the ones before it, is really about the candidates—the nine men, and one woman who still think they can win the party's amateur cage-fight. With less than 100 days to go until the Iowa caucuses, the race remains wide open, having defied all political logic about how these things should go. And the candidates are becoming increasingly unhinged. Here's a guide to where they're at—and what to look for—going into tonight's presidential debate.

BEN CARSON
While Donald Trump will once again be center stage tonight, the attention will largely be focused to his left, on the sleepy ex-neurosurgeon who has suddenly pulled to the front of Republican polls. A New York Times/CBS poll released on Monday showed Carson with 26 percent support among Republican voters nationally, compared to 22 percent for Donald Trump. In Iowa, the doctor's numbers are even better, boosted by enormous support from the state's evangelical voters, a key voting bloc. And Republicans fucking love this guy. These numbers, from a recent Iowa poll, should show you how much:

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Image via Bloomberg/Des Moines Register Poll

Carson's rise is bewildering for many reasons. As I've noted many times before, he is a renowned neurosurgeon who was the first person to separate conjoined twins from the head, and it's hard to imagine why he would want to tarnish that record with the humiliation of running for president. There's also the issue of his political views, which tend to fall somewhere between Rush Limbaugh and the Old Testament. In the past few weeks alone, Carson has called for intensifying the War on Drugs, said he wants to monitor and punish "extreme political bias" on college campuses, and claimed that Jews could have prevented the Holocaust had they been armed with guns.

In the past two debates, Carson has been mostly a non-factor, a friendly, extremely chill voice amid the squabbling horde. On Wednesday, though, he is likely to get more attention—including from Trump, who has become increasingly distraught by his opponent's success. Asked by NBC News anchor Chuck Todd whether he might be too "low energy" to put up a fight in the debate, Carson's answer was characteristically bizarre.

"I do have a tendency to be relaxed," he said, appearing on Meet the Press last Sunday. "I wasn't always like that. There was a time when I was, you know, very volatile. But, you know, I changed. As a teenager, I would go after people with rocks, and bricks, and baseball bats, and hammers. And, of course, many people know the story when I was 14 and I tried to stab someone."

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No Dr. Carson. Many people do not know this story.

TRUMP
Having been replaced by Carson at the top of the field in Iowa, and now nationally, Trump seems to be cycling through stages of grief over the loss of his frontrunner status. First, he mocked the numbers. "Donald Trump falls to second place behind Ben Carson," Trump told supporters Saturday, pretending to read a headline. "We informed Ben, but he was sleeping."

But as the reality of his new second-place status sinks in, the orange-coiffed billionaire just wants to know why. "I don't get it," he said on MSNBC's Morning Joe Tuesday morning. "I'm going there [to Iowa] actually today and I have tremendous crowds and I have tremendous love in the room, and you know, we seem to have hit a chord. But some of these polls coming out, I don't quite get it." Later that day, he implored Iowans to get their shit together and get him back on top: "Will you get the numbers up, Iowa, please?" he demanded. "This is ridiculous!"

Going into Wednesday's debate, Trump has shifted his Twitter attacks toward Carson, jabbing his opponent for his campaign's reliance on super PACS, and making weird comments about his religion. (Carson is a Seventh-Day Adventist.) "I mean, Seventh-day Adventist, I don't know about, I just don't know about," Trump said at a rally in Florida Saturday. The comment drew criticism, though, and by Sunday, he'd switched to a safer line about creating jobs:

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Ben Carson has never created a job in his life (well, maybe a nurse). I have created tens of thousands of jobs, it's what I do.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)October 25, 2015

JEB!
Any notion that Jeb! is the "smart" Bush brother has long been dispelled, evaporating somewhere around the time he couldn't remember the name of the space shuttle disaster he said he would "never forget." Sadly, it now seems no amount of exclamation points will be able to save his flailing presidential campaign. When Bush isn't making gaffes, he's spinning in confused circles, trying—and failing—to put on a sweatshirt.

making sure people saw The Most Important Vine Ever (tm) — Oliver Willis (@owillis)October 27, 2015

Hemorrhaging staff and money, the would-be President Bush III has been reduced to insisting that he doesn't need this in the first place—that there are lots of other "cool" things for him to do besides run for president, thank you very much.

MARCO RUBIO
The new favorite of the Washington Establishment, Rubio is "brimming with untapped potential," according to more than one political handicapper. Enamored of his good looks and smooth speaking style, the chattering classes seem to have appointed Rubio to assume the role of "Normal Candidate" previously assigned to Jeb! This makes sense in theory, although Rubio has yet to back it up with much in the way of policy.

When he does, it's mostly to show his willingness to run headfirst into war. He made that clear this week, in voicing opposition to the new budget deal reached by Congress. While most Republicans don't like the deal because it includes additional government spending, Rubio thinks it doesn't provide enough: He knocked the deal—which lifts caps on do­mest­ic and mil­it­ary spend­ing by $80 bil­lion over two years, and puts tens of bil­lions more in a war ac­count—in part for not provid­ing enough additional funding for the Pentagon.

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It also appears Rubio is not doing a very good at the job he does have: He has missed nearly 30 percent of votes this year, more than any other senator,more than a quarter of which came before he was a candidate for the presidency. And over the weekend, Rubio admitted that he doesn't really like being a Senator very much anyway, increasing the likelihood that it will come up at the debate on Wednesday.

TED CRUZ
The Texas Senator is reportedly running a very serious campaign, laying the groundwork to swoop up support from Trump and Carson, when—or if—the leading GOP candidates drop out of the race. In the meantime, Cruz is laying low, raising money and building up his organization in early voting states, as well as the critical states that will cast ballots on Super Tuesday.

Cruz is likely to keep up his low profile on Wednesday night, except to weigh in on his favorite subject: Shutting down the federal government. Like Rubio and Rand Paul, Cruz opposes the budget deal reached in Congress this week, and while all three Senators will likely to get questions on it, only Cruz has shown a willingness to shut down the government in order to make—and fundraise off of—his point.

CARLY FIORINIA
No one really knows what's happened to Fiorina since her dynamic performance in the last debate. But it will be nice to see her again, I guess.

MIKE HUCKABEE
As Trump and Carson sucking up the oxygen of the 2016 campaign, the once-jovial former Arkansas governor has resorted to self-immolation, going balls-to-the-wall against his opponents on Twitter and jamming out with tweens in backwater family restaurants.

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I trust — Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee)October 14, 2015

.— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee)October 22, 2015

.— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee)October 14, 2015

On a more serious note, Huckabee is apparently obsessed with protecting retirement benefits—a an issue on which he deviates from most of his Republican opponents—so he'll likely use that to worm his way into the debate.

RAND PAUL
On the morning of the debate, Rand Paul was eating McDonald's in the Denver Airport. You're never winning when you're eating McDonald's in an airport.

Just landed in Colorado ahead of tomorrow's debate. It's important to have fuel before fighting for liberty. — Dr. Rand Paul (@RandPaul)October 27, 2015

CHRIS CHRISTIE:
Most of us had almost forgotten Christie was running for president until last weekend, when he got kicked out of an Amtrak Acela's quiet car for yelling on his cell phone while drinking a strawberry smoothie. The outburst may have been the final nail in the coffin for the New Jersey Governor's presidential campaign, confirming once again that Christie is just another loud fat dude that can't handle public transportation.

It was enough to make people forget what Christie had said in an interview just before the incident, when he said that Black Lives Matter "calls for the killing of cops," and accused President Obama of propping up the movement.

Unfortunately, Christie is not out of the race yet, which means that debate audiences will get another earful of his "Tough on Crime" ravings and invectives against the legalization of marijuana in Colorado—the latter of which is unlikely to go over well with all those Boulder Republicans.

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READ: The Republican Debate from Hell

JOHN KASICH
In the past, I've encouraged people to ignore John Kasich, because he is boring and generally seems like a dick. But in this debate, he could actually do something interesting. Because Kasich is apparently not happy with the way things are going in this election—not happy at all.

"Let me tell you something. I've about had it with these people,"the Ohio governor declared at a rally Tuesday, going on to attack Trump and Carson for their positions on Obamacare, taxes, and immigration.

"We've got one guy who says we've got to take 10 or 11 million people and pick em up—I don't know where, in their homes? Their apartments?—that we oughta pick em up and take em to the border and scream at them to get out of our country," Kasich ranted. "That's just crazy! That's just crazy!"

"What has happened to our party? What has happened to the conservative movement?"

Follow VICE Politics on Twitter. And be sure to follow VICE's liveblog of the debate, starting at 8 pm Eastern.