Sixty-eight percent of Americans think the government is withholding information about UFOs, and three-fourths think there is some form of life on other planets. The number of Americans who suspect UFOs have been spotted has also increased, and 41 percent believe that some spotted UFOs are alien spacecraft. This has only been increased in recent years with Navy pilots reporting strange sightings over the past decade, along with recent congressional hearings about the issue.
-Analysis by Monica Potts of FiveThirtyEight

Christie was seen smiling and shaking his head as Fox News moderator Martha MacCallum began to ask about UFO ecounters.

"I get the UFO question? Come on, man!" Christie said.

"I think it's horrible that just because I'm from New Jersey, you asked me about unidentified flying objects and martians," he continued. "We're different but we're not that different."

Adding onto Nathaniel's Google search comment ... debates can serve as a great introduction to some of the lesser-known candidates. Ramaswamy is probably tonight’s big winner in making a name for himself: 59 percent of voters had no opinion or had never heard of Ramaswamy before tonight, according to a favorability question in our pre-debate FiveThirtyEight/Washington Post/Ipsos poll. That’s likely changed after all of the talking he’s done on stage — and we’ll be tracking whether that’s a good or bad thing. Check back in at FiveThirtyEight tomorrow afternoon for our post-debate analysis.
-Analysis by Holly Fuong of FiveThirtyEight

Pence was pressed by moderators if presidents should have to pass a mental and physical test to serve, invoking President Joe Biden's age.

Pence, who is 64, initially joked that "it might be a good idea to have everybody in Washington" pass one.

He then took a serious tone, saying, "No, the American people can make those judgments."

He appeared to take a swipe at Ramaswamy, the youngest candidate on stage, stating the nation doesn't need a president who is too young either.

-ABC News' Alexandra Hutzler

If you’re trying to gauge which Republican primary candidate would perform best against Biden in next year’s general election — their “electability” — their favorability ratings are a helpful signal. According to FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages, Biden is viewed favorably by 41.6 percent of U.S. adults and unfavorably by 53.9 percent, for a net rating of -12.3 percentage points. That compares to a net favorability rating for Trump of -16.5 points (39.7 percent favorable and 56.2 percent unfavorable). Given those numbers, a reasonable observer might expect Biden to beat Trump in the popular vote in 2024, all else being equal. (Of course, it never is).

Many of the other candidates — like Ramaswamy and Scott — have higher net favorability than Biden. But that doesn’t mean they’d actually perform better against the incumbent president in a general election. Candidates’ net favorability tends to decline as more people know them. To get a sense of how popular some of the less-known candidates are, we can use a regression model to quantify the relationship between name recognition and net favorability and then estimate what each candidate’s net favorability rating should be based on how many people know them. Then, we can compare the actual number to that benchmark and get a better sense of who is overperforming or underperforming. On this metric, Scott and Ramaswamy score the best of the non-Trump field, with current net ratings that are 5 and 6 percentage points, respectively, higher than we would predict for them. Christie, meanwhile, trails the field with a net favorability rating 15 percentage points lower than his benchmark.

-Analysis by G. Elliott Morris of FiveThirtyEight