Republican debate highlights and analysis: Candidates squabble in Simi Valley
2024 hopefuls argued over education, spending and border security.
The second Republican debate of the 2024 presidential primary, taking place at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, has just come to an end.
The affair was more raucous than the first debate, which took place over a month ago. Candidates interrupted one another much more regularly and several — most notably former Vice President Mike Pence and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — have directly criticized front-runner Donald Trump, who elected not to show up tonight. The two candidates from South Carolina, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott, went after one another for their records on spending, and seemingly everyone who had the chance to take a shot at entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy did so.
Read below for highlights, excerpts and key moments.
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Haley hits Ramaswamy on TikTok
Haley abruptly jumped in to hit Ramaswamy for his use of TikTok to appeal to voters, calling TikTok "one of the most dangerous social media apps," and saying she feels "dumber" every time she hears Ramaswamy talk. This moment, along with some others, revealed two things: First, Haley is on the more assertive side of the GOP foreign policy debate when it comes to dealing with China (a Chinese company owns TikTok), although Ramaswamy has said that he'd like to keep people under 16 from accessing social media. Second, she and the other Republicans on stage really don't like Ramaswamy. There've been a few other jabs at Ramaswamy tonight, but her line about feeling dumber was pretty telling.
— Analysis by Geoffrey Skelley of 538
Flip-flop on TikTok?
PolitiFact has a feature we call the Flip-O-Meter. It measures — you guessed it — flip flops.
Ramaswamy entered the flip zone when he criticized TikTok and then created an account on the platform.
"I am very open to banning TikTok outright," he wrote on X in February. "In the meantime, we sit on our hands and do nothing as kids get addicted to it like it’s digital fentanyl."
Later, on Sept. 13, Ramaswamy announced that he was joining TikTok. "Yes, kids under age 16 shouldn’t be using it, but the fact is that many young voters are & we’re not going to change this country without winning," he wrote on X. "We can’t just talk about the importance of the GOP ‘reaching young voters’ while hiding in our own echo chambers."
Ramaswamy is not the first candidate to criticize a social media platform while simultaneously using it. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren advertised on Facebook while also saying that big tech had too much power.
-Analysis by Aaron Sharockman, PolitiFact
Didn't expect such a pro-robot stance from Christie after he attacked Ramaswamy for sounding like ChatGPT last debate.
-Jacob Rubashkin, 538 contributor
Christie suggested that the government should refrain from regulating AI. Polling shows Republicans agree: when it comes to who should be responsible for providing solutions to AI-related issues, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to turn to companies and brands than to the government. In a July survey from Ipsos, Republicans preferred companies and brands over the government to be most responsible for creating or retaining local jobs by 29 percentage points, ensuring that AI doesn’t discriminate by 8 percentage points and ensuring AI provides accurate results by 14 percentage points. On protecting creators from unfair use of their work and preventing the spread of misinformation by AI, equal numbers of Republicans said that the government and companies should be most responsible.
—Analysis by 538
Fact-checking Haley’s claim that ‘Congress has only delivered a budget on time four times’
This is accurate. From our colleagues at the Pew Research Center:
“In the nearly five decades that the current system for budgeting and spending tax dollars has been in place, Congress has passed all its required appropriations measures on time only four times: fiscal 1977 (the first full fiscal year under the current system), 1989, 1995 and 1997. And even those last three times, Congress was late in passing the budget blueprint that, in theory at least, precedes the actual spending bills.”
-Analysis by Aaron Sharockman, PolitiFact