Getty Debate Night Scott Walker swings, misses and his campaign scrambles Weakened contender gets defensive about his performance, dodges staff change question.

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. – Scott Walker knew he needed a breakthrough performance at the second debate. He didn’t get it.

Instead, Walker found himself working the debate’s spin room long after most candidates had departed and refusing to rule out a question about whether he is now considering senior-level staff changes.


“Right now I’m considering how I’m going to get through the end of tonight,” Walker said, “and get ready for tomorrow to get back on the campaign trail.”

The Wisconsin governor had come out swinging in the early minutes of Wednesday’s debate – butting in to attack Donald Trump even before the moderators called on him – but for long swaths of the unruly three-hour debate Walker seemed entirely absent.

The disappearing act was ill timed. The fallen Iowa frontrunner arrived at the debate in need of a jolt after weeks of bad headlines and a sharp slide in national polls that has brought him within the margin of error of zero. Instead, he turned in a workmanlike performance.

“It was an opportunity he didn’t grab as much of as he could have,” former RNC Chair Michael Steele said. “He took advantage of certain moments, but he didn’t grab as much of them as he could have.”

Walker certainly delivered his prepared lines with a liveliness that eluded him in the first debate -- “Mr. Trump we don’t need an apprentice in the White House,” Walker said early on. “We have one right now.” He also landed some strong lines – “I'd love to play cards with this guy because Barack Obama folds on everything” – but he delivered them straight to camera, making them feel less natural and more rehearsed.

Yet, in a freewheeling debate that was dominated by outspoken personalities like Trump, Chris Christie, and Carly Fiorina, he got lost in the shuffle.

He didn’t get a question until 90 minutes into the debate. ("Isn't that amazing?” Walker said after the debate. “It is what it is.") And when Walker finally got an opportunity, he tried to make up for lost time with a kitchen-sink answer that included talking about education, job training, tax cuts, his energy policy and repealing Obamacare.

After the debate, he sounded exasperated for having received only two questions from the moderators. “Short of tackling someone I don’t know what more I could have done,” Walker said. “I aggressively interrupted Jake Tapper a bunch of times along the way, and short of an absolute brawl I don’t know what more one can do. We jumped in, and for us its quality and not quantity.”

Walker’s team understood the score going in. Ahead of the debate, the campaign alerted top donors it would hold a conference call for them midday Thursday, going so far as to say Walker himself and campaign manager Rick Wiley would be on the line in hopes of calming jittery contributor nerves.

Walker’s own advisers admitted heading into the faceoff that he had to do something to redirect his downward trajectory. His performance at the Cleveland debate last month was widely viewed as flat; his campaign promised supporters and donors that this time Walker wouldn’t cede back precious seconds to moderators but forcefully fill out his time delivering his campaign’s message.

In the final tally, Walker spoke less almost anyone on stage, except Mike Huckabee, and for about half as long as Trump or Jeb Bush.

About halfway through, Walker was only the seventh most-searched candidate of the 11 on stage, according to Google Trends, and by the end he was lagging in tenth. And the third and fourth most-asked questions about him: “What happened to Scott Walker?” and “Where is Scott Walker?” Walker also finished dead last in his share of the conversation on Twitter, getting a mere 1.21 percent of mentions, according to Twitter.

When Walker did speak, he tried to tap into the outsider anger that has rocketed Trump and Ben Carson to the top of the polls, railing at one point against congressional Republicans for not defunding Planned Parenthood, as he touted doing in Wisconsin. “This is precisely why so many Republicans are upset with Washington,” Walker said. He suggested they pass such a bill with “51 votes” – a potential affront to the filibuster.

Overall, Alex Castellanos, a veteran Republican strategist, said Walker was “much improved” and did “enough to keep raising money and stay in the top echelon of contenders.”

"He lives to fight another day,” Castellanos added.

But even some Walker allies worry he entered the race too late – in July, just as he began to crater in the polls – and didn’t take advantage of his months of front-running to build up a political rainy-day fund for the current downpour of bad news. Walker has plummeted all to the way to 2 percent in the most recent Washington Post/ABC News and New York Times/CBS News polls.

And now cash flow could be at risk, and his team knows it.

Walker has been on a cross-country push to make sure he doesn’t run out of funds. While his super PAC and nonprofit raised $26 million in the first six months of 2015, Walker didn’t begin raising money within the $2,700 limits for his campaign itself until July and he must fund a sizable staff, in his Madison headquarters, Iowa and elsewhere.

Earlier this month, he ventured to the Dallas office of Doug Deason, the son of billionaire mega-donor Darwin Deason. At that point, the two were on board with Rick Perry – in a big way, contributing $5 million to his super PAC. But Walker suspected that Perry might be out of the race soon, and he wanted to let Doug Deason know he was interested in winning his support. The two talked football, and Walker told him he’d love to be his second choice.

Soon after Perry dropped out, Deason got a call from Walker. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask for your support,” the governor said. But Deason, who has also been contacted by Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich, said he hadn’t made a final decision on who he would get behind.

Walker will test the post-debate fundraising waters almost immediately, meeting on Thursday with contributors at the Los Angeles-area home of Republican pollster and pundit Frank Luntz. Luntz, whose home includes a replica of the Oval Office, hasn’t endorsed and has hosted numerous candidates.

Scaramucci, who is co-hosting a Walker fundraiser next week in New York, downplayed Walker’s recent fade and predicted that Trump and Carson were only passing fads.

“It’s Danny Zuko and Sandra Dee of the Republican Party. It’s summer love but it doesn’t last,” Scaramucci said. But, he added, “If Scott’s in the same position he is today in late October, then it’s a different conversation.”

