Republican debate highlights and analysis: Fiery faceoff on Trump, Ukraine and more
The 2024 hopefuls took the stage in Milwaukee on Wednesday night, without Trump.
The first Republican debate of the 2024 presidential primary was held in Milwaukee on Wednesday night.
Eight candidates qualified for a spot on the stage: North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, former Vice President Mike Pence, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott.
Missing from the event was the primary's early front-runner: former President Donald Trump, who declined to participate and instead released a pre-recorded interview with Tucker Carlson.
ABC News and FiveThirtyEight live-blogged every major moment and highlight from the debate, aired on Fox News, with FiveThirtyEight providing analysis and a closer look at the polling and data behind the politicians. PolitiFact made real-time fact checks of key statements.
Read deeper:
Anyone surprised by how little Trump has come up tonight?
In the front-runner's absence, many of us here at FiveThirtyEight suspected (in part because of some leaked debate memos) that the former president would loom large over the proceedings, with candidates taking shots at him whenever possible. That hasn't really happened tonight, though! What do you make of it?
-Analysis by Maya Sweedler of FiveThirtyEight
Ramaswamy leads in Google searches during the debate
Ramaswamy has been far and away the most Googled candidate during the debate tonight. He’s received three times as much search interest as DeSantis or Haley. Now, I’m not sure what that means for his chances — Google searches aren’t votes, and people might just be curious to learn more about him. But I think it does reflect that he has been the story of this debate so far. Whether that’s a good story for him or a bad story is still TBD.
-Analysis by Nathaniel Rakich of FiveThirtyEight
Fact-checking DeSantis’s claim that Florida eliminated CRT from schools
That’s Mostly False.
In checking previous instances when DeSantis made this same claim, PolitiFact found no evidence that critical race theory, a broad set of ideas about racism being woven into American systems, was being taught in Florida’s K-12 schools in the first place. Educators, school officials and several Florida public school districts told us that CRT has never been part of the state curriculum.
PolitiFact found a few examples of state education officials objecting to textbooks and courses they said contained CRT teaching in recent years. They show the state’s objections to prospective teaching materials, and success in preventing content it deemed to be CRT-related. But questions remain about its rationale and broad definition of the theory and other prohibited topics.
-Aaron Sharockman, PolitiFact
DeSantis: 'We need education, not indoctrination'
Asked about how he would fix America's education system, DeSantis said "we need education, not indoctrination."
The governor defended keeping schools open during the COVID-19 pandemic and argued that the lockdowns were connected to students falling behind.
He also touted his response to the culture wars, saying Florida "eliminated" critical race theory and gender ideology in K-12 schools.
-ABC News' Hannah Demissie and Will McDuffie
Candidate favorability vs. President Biden
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