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 and Ramaswamy trade insults and poll positions

Haley going after Ramaswamy was a recurring theme in the first debate. They were the standout candidates in our polling last time and there was a lot of speculation about Ramaswamy moving up in the polls — perhaps even surpassing DeSantis. But since August, Ramaswamy has actually lost support, to the point where Haley passed him in our polling average today. It makes sense that they're trading blows again; this seems to be a successful strategy for Haley, and Ramaswamy can't help but take the bait.
-Analysis by G. Elliott Morris of 538


The candidates are discussing support for Ukraine. About half (49 percent) of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say that vital U.S. interests are not really at stake in the war in Ukraine, according to an August Echelon Insights survey. Thirty-seven percent disagree, saying that if Russia wins, vital U.S. interests and values are threatened. Fourteen percent are unsure.
—Analysis by 538


Ramaswamy’s dance card fills up

For those keeping score at hope, Christie, Pence, Scott and now Haley have all gotten into shouting matches with Ramaswamy at these debates.

—Analysis by Nathaniel Rakich of 538


DeSantis finally gets a little momentum. His "they don't care" repetition is the most impassioned he's been all night (or in either debate). But whatever applause he might have got was cut short the conversation moving on a discussion about NATO and another Scott/Ramaswamy spat.
-Jacob Rubashkin, 538 contributor


The facts about the 2024 GOP hopefuls

At PolitiFact, this is our fifth presidential cycle. We’ve published more than 23,000 fact-checks since launching in 2007, all using our Truth-O-Meter, which rates claims on a scale from “True” to “Pants on Fire” false.

If PolitiFact is new to you, there are a couple of rules of the road. First, we don’t fact-check every claim every candidate says. We couldn’t … we’d be dead. We focus on claims that are particularly interesting, in the news or obviously potentially wrong. Our grading scale tries to measure both the literal truth and how voters might interpret a politicians’ words. So if Pence tonight claims that he and Trump “achieved energy independence” in their first three years of office, it can be more complicated to fact-check than you think.

In Pence’s case, yes, the United States did produce more energy than its citizens consumed during the Trump-Pence administration, but that was built on more than a decade of improvements in shale oil and gas production, as well as renewables. And the U.S. did not produce more gasoline than it consumes (which is maybe what you were thinking about). And if that’s not enough, even though the U.S. didn’t use all the energy it produced, it still imported a substantial amount of energy to serve domestic markets.

So far in this cycle, we’ve published more than 50 fact-checks of the GOP candidates. Our checks tend to follow the polling of the race. We'll be drawing on those previous fact-checks, as well as the thousands of other claims we've vetted, throughout the night.
—Aaron Sharockman, PolitiFact