Using military force in Mexico has become one of DeSantis's signature planks. In the past few months he's talked about sending special forces to confront the cartels, and didn't rule out firing missiles into Mexico either. It's a heavy-handed proposal that just a few years ago probably would have been major news but these days is pretty par for the course for more and more GOP officeholders.
-Jacob Rubashkin, 538 contributor

A plurality (31 percent) of Republican voters in a NewsNation poll from July said that drugs and substance abuse was the overall root cause of crime in their community. Twenty-three percent said the breakdown of the family unit was to blame, followed by 17 percent who listed underfunding of law enforcement. Systemic racism was the least mentioned issue, with just 3 percent of Republicans saying that it was the overall root cause of their community’s crime.
—Analysis by 538

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

Trump maintains a lead of 33 percentage points over Haley, his nearest competitor in New Hampshire, according to the most recent polls. Haley appears to have benefitted the most from the first debate in the state, gaining 8 points compared to her average result on Aug. 23. No other candidate’s average has moved by more than 3 points, either up or down.

According to a September survey from the University of New Hampshire/CNN, only 36 percent of likely New Hampshire primary voters have definitely decided who they plan to vote for. Thirty-eight percent said they are leaning toward someone, and 24 percent said they are still trying to decide. Trump’s voters, however, were much more firm on their choice: Sixty-nine percent said they have definitely decided, compared with 31 percent for Ramaswamy and less than 20 percent for the other candidates.

When it comes to policy, New Hampshire Republican primary voters seem particularly concerned about economic issues, according to a September survey by NMB Research for the Competitiveness Coalition and the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy. Given a list of issues that have been raised in the primary, 32 percent said the most important issue to them would be reducing federal budget deficits by cutting spending; 21 percent said it would be spending less on green energy by repealing parts of the Inflation Reduction Act; and 18 percent said it would be keeping taxes low. The only other issue to reach double-digit support was deploying the U.S. military to the Mexican border to stop illegal drugs from entering the country, which was named as most important by 19 percent of voters.

—Analysis by 538