Presented by the American Petroleum Institute.

Hey, good morning. I'm Playbook co-author Rachel Bade. It's Wednesday, August 23rd,

and I am coming to you this morning from Milwaukee, Wisconsin for Debate Day.

As somebody who doesn't watch sports, I am starting to get an idea about how people feel on Super Bowl Sunday.

It's basically the Super Bowl for the GOP primary. For a lot of Republicans around the nation, they've been busy with their summer

plans, and they haven't really been paying attention to what's going on on the trail. But that

all is going to change tonight with the first Republican debate. So even before the curtain call, we're starting

to get an idea of what we can expect this evening. We know Nikki Haley is going to be gunning

for Vivek Ramoswami over his isolation as foreign policy views. Mike Pence has been talking

a lot about his role on January 6th on the campaign trail, so we can expect him to talk about that.

And perhaps chide Trump for putting self-interest over the Constitution. Chris Christie, slugger

that he is, will be going after everyone and their mother. And Tim Scott, who's actually been

seeing a little bit of a bump in the polls but hasn't been receiving a lot of

attacks, he's probably going to try to maintain that posture and hope that nobody comes after him.

But Donald Trump won't be on the debate stage, and that means a lot of these candidates who have

been pining for a chance to take a shot at him won't actually get it.

However, that means that they can create perhaps

their own standout in viral moment that can help sort of catapult them in the polls and maybe even

overtake the former president. My colleagues on the politics team have a really great read-up

this morning that we tease out in playbook about what each candidate needs to achieve on the debate stage

tonight in order to have a good evening. Ron DeSantis, who arguably has the most to lose or gain

tonight, needs to dodge his rival's arrows because he's going to be the top target for Republicans

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