Interesting early questions by the Fox News hosts. DeSantis got to go first, understandably, and he didn't face any questions about his tenure as governor. By comparison, when the hosts turned to Christie and Scott, they faced questions about state debate in Christie's case and Scott's voting record on spending bills. Both seemed caught a little off balance by actual scrutiny of their records.
-Analysis by Geoffrey Skelley of FiveThirtyEight

Interesting early questions by the Fox News hosts. DeSantis got to go first, understandably, and he didn't face any questions about his tenure as governor. By comparison, when the hosts turned to Christie and Scott, they faced questions about state debate in Christie's case and Scott's voting record on spending bills. Both seemed caught a little off balance by actual scrutiny of their records.

Ramaswamy taking a minute to introduce himself shows how he's still a semi-unknown quantity. But he got big applause from the crowd.
-Analysis by Monica Potts of FiveThirtyEight

Ramaswamy’s “skinny guy with a funny last name” line is a direct reference to Obama’s famous line about being a “skinny guy with a funny name” in his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention. Ramaswamy, of course, wouldn’t mind following Obama’s same path to the White House.
-Analysis by Nathaniel Rakich of FiveThirtyEight

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