Gov. Scott Walker saw his first debate action Thursday night at the GOP’s first debate of its presidential nominating process. The primetime debate, held at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio, featured the top 10 GOP candidates from an average of the five most recent national polls, with an additional debate of lesser regarded candidates held earlier that day.
“We defunded Planned Parenthood long before the videos were released,” Walker said, during a segment on abortion, which prompted many candidates to voice their support for defunding Planned Parenthood.
The debate ranged from topics such as abortion and immigration to the economy and foreign policy. Walker and other candidates such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush emphasized the link between President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who remains the favorite to win the Democratic Party’s nomination.
Participants in the debate also included frontrunner businessman Donald Trump, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Sens. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio. Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie also joined Walker on stage for the debate.
Although Walker did not record the same amount of talk time as the other candidates, he did not hesitate to get his general message of limiting the scope of government across, from repealing “Obamacare” and the recently signed Iran deal to implementing tax cuts and deregulation.
"I listened to the American people,” Walker explained after a moderator brought up his changed stance on immigration from two years ago.
Walker also responded to whether his staunch pro-life stance, recently made stronger after signing a 20-week abortion ban in Wisconsin, makes him too out of the mainstream to win an election.
“There are many other ways to protect a mother’s life,” Walker said, declining to say he would allow an abortion to save a mother’s life.
The Democratic Party quickly criticized the debate, with Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz calling the proposed policies “old and outdated.”
“We failed to hear any solutions for income inequality, and not even a mention of college affordability, equal pay, raising the minimum wage, or the Voting Rights Act on its fiftieth anniversary,” she said in a Thursday statement.
While nobody was a consensus winner according to the media, the top-searched candidates on Google during the debate were Trump, Carson, Cruz, Bush and Rubio.
