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

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