LAKEWOOD — If you were looking to gauge Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s chances of winning the Republican presidential nomination next year, you probably couldn’t have found a better barometer than the crowd at Misfits in swing-district Jefferson County on Wednesday night.

Misfits is a biker bar located next to an oil-change shop in Lakewood, in the more urban part of the suburban community just west of Denver. Men at the bar wore facial hair and leather vests. There was craft beer and a menu that included burgers, nachos and cream cheese-stuffed jalapenos wrapped in bacon. Couples took turns sitting outside, in front of the line of angled motorcycle parking spots, smoking and chatting. Replace the mountains to the west with the industrial Menomonee River Valley, tweak the accents, and you could be on the south side of Milwaukee, in working-class Walker territory, blocks from Wisconsin’s Harley Davidson museum.

Yet, over the winding course of CNN’s three-hour Republican debate, almost none of the 40 or so GOP voters gathered at Misfits seemed to much notice Walker. Yet there he was on stage the whole time, the biggest night of his professional life, standing right next to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and one podium away from Donald Trump — the smack-talking real-estate billionaire who has taken the field by storm, gathering headlines by the truckload and crushing his competition in the polls.

“Walker? Yeah, well, no,” said Dorrie Banning. She was marking a homemade score card divided into squares for each candidate. She drew a single hashmark in a square each time she liked something the candidate said. She drew an X each time she didn’t like something the candidate said.

Half-way through the debate, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina’s names sat atop lots of lines on Banning’s folded sheets of paper. Trump’s name floated like a wrap-around hairdo above a long mixed stretch of hashmarks and Xs.

There weren’t any marks for Walker.

By the end of the night, however, Rubio and Fiorina’s names were joined at the top of Banning’s list by a new name: “Chris Christie,” the name of the governor of New Jersey, who was standing on the far-right side of the CNN debate stage.

“I know! That’s a total surprise,” Banning said. “But he really got me tonight. He just said what he thought and he seemed so passionate.”

Christie’s candidacy has suffered from ongoing corruption investigations focused on his administration and his fundraising has never taken off. Wednesday’s debate was make-or-break for him, as it was for probably at least half of the other 10 candidates on the stage, including Walker. But Christie seems to have come in with a better plan than the rest of the candidates did. In the Summer of Trump — the reality TV star with the self-acknowledged enormous ego — Christie spent the debate talking about the voters, the struggling middle-class, the American people who have been granted the power to run the government but who are mostly left out of the political debate, as he put it.

He asked that CNN turn the cameras on the crowd at one point. “They’re the ones this election is about,” he said.

“I will be your vessel through which we can fix this country,” Christie told the crowd. “But it’s not about me. It’s about all of you. It’s about getting this government off your back and out of your way and letting you succeed.”

At Misfits at least, Christie had the kind of night Walker desperately needed.

Walker came into the debate staring out from the bottom of a deep slump. He has tumbled in the polls, falling from the one-time frontrunner in Iowa to the back of the pack, his support there barely registering. He notched only 2 percent in a recent national Washington Post-ABC News survey. Analysts and even his donors this week said Walker had to deliver a strong performance Wednesday to credibly remain a contender. Yet Walker didn’t really show up. According to NPR, he won the least speaking time of any of the candidates who shared the stage. Trump, at the head of the pack, logged more than 19 minutes of microphone time. Walker logged a mere 8 minutes and 29 seconds during the marathon event.

In response to his dipping poll numbers, Walker has been easing up if not completely breaking with a campaign strategy that has presented him as a “regular American.” As the Washington Post put it, that strategy has perhaps captured the man too well, presenting him as a “middle-aged Midwestern dad who never finished college, rides a used Harley and brags about the deals he gets at Kohl’s department store,” which is exactly what he is, in addition to being a governor. Walker seems likable to Republican voters, according to poll analysts, but also not very presidential.

Enthusiasm among primary voters certainly isn’t the problem, said Natalie Menten, an RTD Board member and longtime Jefferson County GOP activist. It’s just that voters are beginning to move more solidly toward some of the candidates.

“The excitement that’s out there — there are student groups forming for Ben Carson, there are women who are especially behind Carly, there’s a lot of people who really admire Cruz,” she said.

Watchers at Misfits rated Fiorina high — at least at first. She took a tumble, though, after her comments explaining that she opposed legalizing marijuana and that her child had died of a drug overdose.

“Geesh. No one’s on the floor here. We’re all fine,” said Judy McCallister. “I sympathize, but people talking like that about Colorado don’t know what it’s like here since we legalized pot. We Republicans have to lay off the social issues a little. I mean, look around this room. There’s not a lot of young people, right?”

Sue Moore, chairman of the Denver Republican Party, sent out a release after the debate reporting that Fiorina won the straw poll at the GOP watch party in Denver. Cruz placed second, Trump third.

“I’m not seeing as much attraction to some of the other candidates,” said Menten. “Walker’s falling off,” she said. Kentucky U.S. Sen. “Rand Paul is falling off.”

Don Ytterberg, a former congressional candidate and past chairman of the Jefferson County Republicans, said he likes Walker. “His accomplishments in Wisconsin are amazing,” he said.

Ytterberg discounted the “mercurial polls.” He pointed out that it’ll be months until anyone casts actual votes in the primary.

“It’s fascinating to watch… The only vote that matters is on Election Day or caucus night. We’ll see what plays out in the months ahead,” he said.

The Jeffco Republicans may have mostly ignored Walker, but they seemed to viscerally dislike Bush. “Mainstream,” somebody said about the candidate as he was answering a question. “Same old,” said another.

One of the biggest applause lines Bush drew among the Lakewood crowd was when he told debate moderator Jake Tapper that, if he were elected, he would choose “Eveready” as his Secret Service codename. He was referring to the battery brand. “It’s very high-energy, Donald,” he said, looking at Trump.

It must have been an unnerving moment for Bush campaign staffers to watch. It was their candidate’s best line and it referenced a dig made at Bush by his main rival, Trump — and dig that has seemed to stick. Trump called Bush “low-energy.” It couldn’t have helped that Trump answered the same question right after Bush and drew even greater laughs when he deadpanned that his codename would be “Humble.”

Ytterberg said he appreciates the Trump phenomenon, even if he’s less enthused about Trump the candidate.

“I don’t think he’ll be able to go the distance to win the nomination,” Ytterberg said. “But his bombastic personality and experience in the public eye have probably focused 10, 15 million people on these debates who wouldn’t otherwise be watching them at all.”

Menten agreed.

“There are a lot of people who are really frustrated and haven’t been involved in elections who are attracted to Trump, and that’s really fascinating.

“I’m glad to see people really excited, and I’m glad we’ve got a lot of choices. What would be sad is if we didn’t have those choices. People feel it’s a top-down choice, and I really think it is grassroots that’s going to decide this. I’m used to going to events where we see the same old faces. But 90 percent of the people in that room, I don’t know who they are. They showed up, and I think that’s great.”

With additional reporting by Ernest Luning

— john.tomasic@gmail.com