CLEVELAND — About an hour into the primetime debate of the top 10 candidates in the Republican presidential race, the conservative actor Nick Searcy tweeted, "I'm afraid @CarlyFiorina is winning the second debate too."

He was on to something. Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO, shone earlier in the evening, when seven GOP candidates who didn't make the cut for the primetime session gathered for the night's first faceoff. For about an hour after that debate, the big story was Fiorina winning what was sometimes called the undercard session.

That news was not going to last long, because then came a primetime debate that was hugely entertaining but at times seemed in danger of veering off the rails with loopy and sometimes embarrassing answers from Donald Trump. A few of the candidates, like John Kasich, did well, but only Marco Rubio turned in a truly standout performance.

It was hard to declare a clear winner of the primetime debate. Combine the two sessions into one, however, and Fiorina emerged as the likely winner of the entire evening.

Fiorina has impressed crowds in Iowa, New Hampshire, and other key states. Wherever she speaks, audience members who've never seen her before express almost uniformly positive reactions. Those friendly receptions, however, have not translated into rising national poll numbers; hence Fiorina's appearance at the early, rather than the primetime, debate.

When the debate structure was first announced, Fiorina confidently predicted she would qualify for the primetime session. It didn't work out that way. So she made the best of the opportunity she had. She gave a biting commentary on Donald Trump. (She did it when asked, not volunteering.) A solid answer on cybersecurity. A good, if oft-repeated, answer on Iran. A compelling explanation of her own conservatism. And in her final statement, a concise statement of her main focus, which is her pledge to fight Hillary Clinton every day of every week of every month in the coming campaign:



Hillary Clinton lies about Benghazi, she lies about e-mails. She is still defending Planned Parenthood, and she is still her party's frontrunner. 2016 is going to be a fight between conservatism, and a Democrat party that is undermining the very character of this nation. We need a nominee who is going to throw every punch, not pull punches, and someone who cannot stumble before he even gets into the ring.

While the target was Hillary, few in the room missed that Fiorina's "stumble before he even gets into the ring" line was directed at Jeb Bush and his recent rhetorical missteps.

But that was fairly subtle. In general, Republican voters like their candidates to focus on defeating Clinton — as opposed to, say, bickering with each other. Fiorina taps into that vein more effectively than anyone else. The core of her message is that of the 17 Republicans running for president, only she is tough enough to wage the daily battles it will take to defeat Clinton. Some observers have taken that to mean that Fiorina is saying that, as the only woman in the GOP field, she could take it to Clinton as only another woman could. That's not what Fiorina means. She means that she is the only one tough enough to defeat the Democratic nominee for president, whoever that nominee is, woman or man. The flipside of that argument is that all her fellow candidates don't have the stuff to fight 24/7.

She might be right.

When Fiorina spoke to reporters after the debate, I asked if it was her view that her Republican opponents are in danger of going too easy on Clinton. Fiorina didn't really say no.

"I am suggesting that this really is a fight in 2016," she said. "It is a fight about the character of our nation. I believe that. It is a fight between conservatism and progressivism, and yes, I think we need nominee who will throw every punch. I would just observe what others have observed, many in the media have observed — I am the person who most consistently goes after Hillary Clinton. And I think it's going to take that to beat Hillary Clinton, or whomever the Democrats put up, but I think it's going to be Hillary Clinton."

Later, someone else asked the question a little differently. Can't Jeb Bush take the fight to Hillary Clinton? "Well, so far not," Fiorina answered. "And he's not the only one who hasn't particularly thrown punches effectively at Hillary Clinton. I think I have."

Fiorina still faces a lot of questions about being an unknown. Why isn't she better known by now? Why aren't her poll numbers higher? Her answer is that she is making progress and intends to keep pushing. "Everybody here can admit it," she told reporters. "When I announced my candidacy May 4, you didn't think we would have come this far. So I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing."

Before the debate, a number of observers speculated that Fiorina might use the earlier session to make best use of her skills, in an atmosphere without all the Donald Trump drama that would come with the later debate. That's exactly what she did. And of the seven candidates onstage in that early debate, only Fiorina had a genuine chance of breaking out, of making the leap from the second-tier debate into the first. As it turned out, that's exactly what happened — if Fiorina can raise those stubborn poll numbers in the next few weeks.