Christie gets the first question out of the break on how to handle crime, and he made the case that he's the only person on stage whose done it as a former prosecutor. But he turned the question into an attack on Trump, calling out Trump for skipping out on the debate, saying that soon he'll be called "Donald Duck" for avoiding it. The thing is, Christie has essentially a 0 percent chance of winning the GOP nomination, so it's not especially interesting to hear him go after Trump. Earlier in the debate, DeSantis did echo an attack Christie made by hitting Trump for not being on stage to defend the former president's record on spending. More of those kind of dings from anyone besides Christie would be a development in this debate.

DeSantis stands by his decision to suspend two elected prosecutors in Florida, and says he'll bring civil rights cases (?) against local prosecutors as president.

-Jacob Rubashkin, 538 contributor

The data for this claim is incomplete. Crime figures are low in Florida, but DeSantis’ figure comes from a database containing information from law enforcement agencies that represent only around 57 percent of the state’s population, a Sept. 20 NBC News report found.

The patchy data is related to Florida’s transition to incident-based crime reporting, the new federal standard, rather than the summary-based reports it has used since the 1970s. With summary reporting, if one incident resulted in multiple crimes, only the most serious would be reported. In 2021, the federal government stopped accepting this type of data, and now requires states to report each crime.

FBI’s crime reporting database doesn’t support DeSantis’ figure either. Only 48 out of 757 Florida law enforcement agencies participated in the FBI’s data collection in 2021. The numbers appear to be similar for 2022, according to a Marshall Project analysis.
-Analysis by Aaron Sharockman, PolitiFact

Haley was just asked about hiring more police officers. According to a May poll conducted by Ipsos for Reuters, 91 percent of Republicans said they were more likely to support a presidential candidate in 2024 who “supports increasing police funding to fight crime.” 53 percent said they were much more likely, while 38 percent said they were somewhat more likely. Just 9 percent said they were less likely to vote for such a candidate.
—Analysis by 538

Foreign policy isn’t quite dominating this debate, but U.S. policy towards China is a prominent theme, and Ramaswamy is bearing down a lot of attacks on that.

Ramaswamy and Haley had a heated moment on the debate stage over the issue of support for Ukraine – which Haley tied to China. When Ramaswamy argued against support for Ukraine, Haley jumped in, saying that a win for Russia is a win for China, and then accused Ramaswamy of liking China.

There was also the memorable TikTok exchange between the two. Haley sniped at Ramaswamy that "every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber for what you say” and that he can't be trusted as he justified his choice to join TikTok after being convinced by influencer and boxer Jake Paul to join despite previously calling it "digital fentanyl." TikTok was created by Chinese company ByteDance and lawmakers have scrutinized the app over security concerns. (Ads for TikTok are also airing on Fox Business Network during commercial breaks.)

Scott also accused Ramaswamy of being ‘bought’ by China. He was likely referencing Ramaswamy's company, Roivant Sciences, announcing 5-years ago that it was partnering with China state-owned investment company CITIC Group Corp

And Pence had a similar, pointed attack: “I'm glad Vivek pulled out of his business deal in 2018 in China -- that must have been about the time you decided to start voting in presidential elections."

It’s worth noting that Haley criticized Trump too on this front, in that case for not pursuing China aggressively enough on a host of issues: “This is where President Trump went wrong.”

– ABC News’ Kendall Ross, Libby Cathey, Soorin Kim, Abby Cruz, Nicholas Kerr, and Oren Oppenheim