Trump was the only consistent winner from all the GOP debates

• The GOP presidential debates have come to a close.
• Former President Donald Trump skipped all four of them — it paid off.

Former President Donald Trump and his campaign made a calculated risk in August to skip each of the four Republican presidential primary debates and let the rest of the field fight for second place.

Now, in December after the Republican National Committee finished hosting its four televised debates, Trump's gamble has paid off: of the entire GOP presidential playing field, he's the only candidate to come out of debates unscathed.

With less than a year to go until the 2024 elections — and without having set foot on a debate stage since 2020 — the former president is more than 45 percentage points ahead of the second-place GOP candidate in national polls. While every other Republican candidate has drawn less than 20% support since mid-July, national support for Trump is about as high as it has been this entire cycle.

As his competition spent hours of debate time trying to separate themselves from the rest of the pack, Trump has amassed a Rolodex of endorsements from influential Republican elected officials like the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Sen. Rick Scott, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

Without Trump on the debate stage, each of the remaining GOP presidential hopefuls had the opportunity to make a name for themselves.

By and large, they squandered it.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, originally predicted to be Trump's biggest competitor in this race, quickly became a non-factor as his support in polls plummeted month after month and his campaign and super PAC each experienced significant layoffs and resignations. He still sits in second place in an average of national polls, but it certainly looks like he'll fall to third or fourth soon.

Vivek Ramaswamy, a entrepreneur quickly made a name for himself as a loud, brash candidate unafraid to spread dangerous conspiracy theories and controversial ideas. Though flashy, polling later revealed his strategy backfired and made him more "unfavorable" to Republican primary voters, ultimately sinking his polling to fourth place.

Of all the Republican candidates still in the race not named "Donald Trump," former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is the only one who actually seems to have gained anything from the debates.

Despite having the job experience to back up her presidential bid, it never ultimately seemed as if Trump and her other competitors took her candidacy seriously until recently, allowing her to slowly separate herself from the rest of the candidates on stage.

Now, she's about 2 percentage points in polling away from bumping DeSantis out of the second-place position. With the possibility that Trump may not be on the ballot in 2024 as he continues to fight the 91 felony charges levied against him in jurisdictions across the country, Haley's managed to position herself as a potential replacement to take on Democratic President Joe Biden.

Haley will likely still need to shake off the "corrupt" label that Ramaswamy's tried to pin on her over the past few months if she's to win over a sizable amount of GOP voters, but she's in an enviable spot moving forward compared to most of her fellow candidates.

With Iowa and other state caucuses and primaries ahead, however, it's still Trump's nomination to lose. And because he's been able to maintain such a lead by skipping out on the debates, the embattled former president has taught a generation of future candidates that, moving forward, the debates themselves may be a pointless exercise for leading candidates to even attend.