By Nathan Layne and Joseph Ax

MILWAUKEE (Reuters) -The first Republican 2024 presidential debate on Wednesday opened with a focus on the U.S. economy, as eight contenders jockeyed for position behind the absent front-runner, Donald Trump.

“Our country is in decline,” said Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who stands in a distant second place behind Trump but ahead of the rest of the field. “We must reverse Bidenomics so that middle-class families have a chance to succeed again.”

While the economy has shown surprising resilience, defying recession predictions with a robust labor market, polls show many voters – including a plurality of those who supported Democratic President Joe Biden in 2020 – feel the economy has worsened during his first three years in office amid persistent inflation.

With the election more than 14 months away, Trump, the former president, holds a wide lead among Republican voters in opinion polls despite his four criminal indictments.

The former president skipped the debate stage at Fiserv (NYSE:) Forum in Milwaukee, instead sitting for a pre-recorded interview with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson that began streaming on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, just before the debate started in an effort to siphon away viewers. Within a half hour, the interview had drawn more than 22 million views.

With Trump absent, Republican candidates including tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and U.S. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who have enjoyed a bump in some state and national polls in recent weeks, were seeking to displace DeSantis as the most plausible Trump alternative.

“Do you want incremental reform, or do you want a revolution?” asked Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old political neophyte who has cast himself as an outsider even as he has been perhaps Trump’s biggest defender among the Republican candidates.

DeSantis, for his part, was looking to arrest a slow but steady slide in the polls. Aides and allies view the debate as an opportunity to introduce the governor to millions of voters who have yet to tune into the primary process and to shift the narrative away from turmoil that has gripped his campaign in recent weeks, including a significant staffing shake-up.

WARY OF TARGETING TRUMP

The debate, four months before the first Republican presidential nominating contest in Iowa, took place a day before Trump plans to surrender in Atlanta to face charges he sought to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state. That timing will put him back in the spotlight just as his rivals are hoping to raise their profiles.

On Wednesday afternoon, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former personal lawyer and a co-defendant in that case, surrendered in Atlanta to face charges relating to his alleged participation in the conspiracy to overthrow the election.

Chris LaCivita, a senior Trump campaign adviser, predicted that the candidates would spend a significant amount of time discussing the former president and dismissed the debate as an “audition” to be Trump’s vice president.

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, an ex-Trump ally turned critic, was expected to amplify his attacks on the former president. Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson and former Vice President Mike Pence, who broke with Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, might also take shots at the former president.

Polls show that most Republicans view the criminal charges against Trump as politically motivated, making the topic a tricky one to navigate for his rivals.

The eight participants included Scott, Ramaswamy, Pence, Hutchinson, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, DeSantis, Christie and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum.

In the most recent Reuters/Ipsos poll released this month, Trump held 47% of the Republican vote nationally, with DeSantis dropping six percentage points from July to 13%. None of the other candidates have broken out of single digits.