(Mengchen Liu/Annenberg Media Center)

There were 11 candidates in last week's primetime debate, and some viewers might have found it chaotic when candidates ignored the moderator.

"For the casual voter, following the debate was like tuning halfway into an episode from the second season of Game of Thrones and trying to follow along," wrote Time's Daniel D’Addario in his review for the second Republican debate.

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Despite of the crowded field, the CNN/ORC poll indicates Republican voters polled thought Fiorina did the best job in the debate, which explained her dramatic rise from near the bottom of previous polls. 

“It’s both helping and hurting her,” said Professor Robert Shrum, a former political consultant who worked on numerous Democratic campaigns, about Fiorina’s performance in the second debate. “She’s a real candidate in the race, but with that comes new scrutiny…Her record at Hewlett-Packard, the 30,000 lay-off shipping jobs overseas, the millions of dollars she made, basically running two companies into the ground and getting fired by the broad of directors in a way hurt her.”

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When she was the CEO and chairman of Hewlett-Packard, Fiona was the first woman to lead a top-20 company as ranked by Fortune magazine. But she’s also the one who laid off 30,000 U.S. employees during the biggest high-tech merger in history. She left Hewlett-Packard afterwards.

“I don’t think the Republican Party wants to go through another Mitt Romney, where there are workers on television talking about lay-offs and what was done to them," Shrum continued. He also said Fiorina's case is worse than Romney's "because it’s not only a case of great people being laid-off; it’s a case of incompetence."

Last week, however, not many people doubted her competence in the role of debater.

Despite his fellow CEO's strong performance, Trump is still leading even though he dropped in the polls from earlier this month.

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“Donald Trump is a little like Mark Twain; the reports of his death are premature. The Republican establishment and a lot of the press have wanted to write his epitaph for a long time,” Shrum said. The former consultant does not believe Trump is going anywhere anytime soon.

The newest poll supports that opinion. The poll data shows that people believe that Trump could best handle the economy (44 percent to Fiorina’s 11 percent), illegal immigration (47 percent to Rubio’s 15 percent) and foreign policy (22 percent to Rubio’s 17 percent).

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio benefited from his energetic eloquence in the first debate. But his strategy on the second debate changed.

“Marco Rubio was sitting there, in the middle of the pack, waiting in the weeds, to see how this develops. That’s a real chance to emerge over time,” Shrum said.

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Ben Carson, who went into the second debate in second place, failed to gain to gain more support the second time around. The New York Times criticized him for having a “lack of fire”. The former neurosurgeon lost five percentage points since a poll in early September.

On Sunday, Carson said the United States should not elect a Muslim president, which led some to call for him to drop out of the race.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, whose support was close to zero in the latest CNN poll, dropped out of the race on Monday.

Reach Staff Reporter Mengchen Liu here.