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

We got glimmers of candidates attempting to narrow down the GOP primary field. Haley and Scott sparred over South Carolina politics, Pence criticized DeSantis’ spending in Florida, DeSantis criticized Trump’s stance on abortion, and just about everyone tried to take Ramaswamy down a peg (though that might have been a result of their frustration with him rather than actual political strategy). But what Republicans need in order to wage a credible challenge to Trump’s frontrunner status is to shake up the field, and I don’t know if we saw that tonight. It looked like we might get a little closer to winnowing down the field when moderator Dana Perino asked everyone to write down who they should “vote off the island” — but DeSantis, making a show of being above that sort of petty question, prevented us from getting any answers.
— Analysis by Leah Askarinam of 538