DeSantis is asked about the Florida education guidelines on teaching slavery. He immediately calls it a hoax and attacks Vice President Kamala Harris (America's first Black vice president), which has been his campaign's strategy on this issue since it first broke. The moderators are quick to tee up a discussion between DeSantis and Scott, though, since the South Carolina senator was among the most outspoken Republicans against the DeSantis plan.
-Jacob Rubashkin, 538 contributor

Moderators questioned Haley on "school choice." Seven Republican states, including Florida, passed "universal school choice" this year, which mostly means vouchers for private schools that are available to nearly all students, without income limits. Public school supporters have said these vouchers are a backdoor way of defunding public schools. In most states, states take the per-pupil allocation of tax dollars and give the money directly to parents instead, allowing them to pay for private, religious, or homeschooling courses. In many states the vouchers could go to parents who could otherwise pay for private school, and aren't enough to pay for full tuition for parents who couldn't afford it. The public is divided on these policies, but trust in public schools and public education has been declining, especially among Republicans.
— Analysis by Monica Potts of 538

Asked about the challenges of high health care costs for Americans, Haley argued that the system needs a major overhaul, from the insurance companies to hospitals, with improved transparency for patients so they have more options and better knowledge of the costs they'll face. Still, this issue isn't as high on Republicans' list of key issues. In a recent Economist/YouGov survey, 58 percent of Republicans said "heath care" was a very important issue. That sounds high, but 81 percent said the same of jobs and the economy, 81 percent of national security and 77 percent of immigration. It's not the 2010 tea party era anymore, or even 2017, when the GOP failed to get rid of Obamacare while in full control of the government.

— Analysis by Geoffrey Skelley of 538

In polling for EdChoice conducted by Morning Consult in August, 46 percent of Republicans strongly or somewhat support school vouchers, while 11 percent strongly or somewhat oppose vouchers, 27 percent say they have never heard of them, and 16 percent don’t know. After being provided a definition, support for vouchers among Republicans increased to 70 percent, and opposition increased to 19 percent.
—Analysis by 538

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