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:
How well do likely Republican voters think candidates will perform?
In anticipation of tonight’s debate, we partnered with Ipsos and The Washington Post to ask likely Republican primary voters what they think about tonight’s debate participants and the candidate field in general.
The 4,968 likely Republican primary voters we polled using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel expect Ramaswamy’s performance to be best among the eight expected debate participants. According to a five-point scale that we calculated using respondents’ answers (with 1 being “terrible” and 5 being “excellent”), likely voters expected Ramaswamy to perform “very good” (3.59 out of 5). They thought DeSantis would perform second-best (3.51 out of 5) and Scott third (3.43 out of 5).
When it comes to whom respondents think they’ll place their votes for in the primaries, 65 percent are considering Trump and 52 percent are considering DeSantis. About 1 in 4 likely Republican primary voters are considering voting for Pence, Scott and Haley. The remaining six candidates we asked about fell below 25 percent.
We’ll be watching to see how the candidates fare tonight, and if debate watchers’ opinions on whom they’re considering voting for will change after tonight’s performances.
-Analysis by Holly Fuong of FiveThirtyEight
Which issues are Republican voters most concerned about?
Before tonight’s debate kicks off, FiveThirtyEight, The Washington Post and Ipsos partnered to ask Republican voters about how they might vote in the upcoming Republican presidential primaries. Specifically, we asked 4,968 likely Republican voters which issues are most important to them when deciding which candidate to vote for in the primaries, using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel.
We offered respondents a list of 16 issues and allowed them to select up to three. Of the topics that we asked about, voters were most concerned about “getting inflation or increasing costs under control” (53 percent of respondents selected this issue), something Republican voters have been concerned about since at least the 2022 midterms, according to a previous FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll. Other issues that were top of mind for voters were “controlling immigration” (36 percent), “someone fighting against liberalism and the woke agenda” (25 percent) and “ability to beat Joe Biden” (25 percent).
If tonight’s debate touches upon those top issues, voters might get some clarity on who they are considering voting for when primary season comes around.
-Analysis by Holly Fuong of FiveThirtyEight
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 for the most ridiculous claims.
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 in 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 White House, 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 consumed (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 52 fact-checks of the GOP candidates. Our checks tend to follow the polling of the race. We’ve fact-checked Trump 17 times, DeSantis 14 times, Pence six times, Haley and Tim Scott each five times, and so on. 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
Why is the debate in Wisconsin?
I flew to Milwaukee earlier this week to talk to some local voters and learn more about why the GOP decided to have its first presidential debate of the 2024 cycle in the state.
-Analysis by Galen Druke of FiveThirtyEight
FiveThirtyEight takeaway: Haley delivers fireworks, but is it enough?
Nikki Haley has been in the race for longer than anyone else on the stage but hasn't had a breakout moment yet. She was clearly aiming to change that tonight, and she did have one of the most memorable back-and-forths of the night when she took Ramaswamy to task over his lack of foreign policy experience. She came out swinging early not just against Biden but against Republicans in Congress, and she was one of just a handful of contenders to make an electability argument against Trump by pointing out his low favorability ratings. But for a candidate who is polling at 3.4 percent nationwide, it's not obvious that was enough.
Burgum's presence was a victory in and of itself for the governor, given his injury today. But he got scant talking time, and his most interesting answer, when he came out definitively against a national abortion ban, isn't likely to earn him many new fans in the GOP.
But here's what I really think. The next debate is not for another month, but tomorrow, Donald Trump will surrender to the authorities in Atlanta. His mugshot will ricochet across the internet and land on the front page of every major newspaper in the country. At that point, will people be talking about tonight's debate? Or will they be back to talking about Trump? I'd put my money on the latter, and that's not good news for anyone on stage tonight.
-Analysis by Jacob Rubashkin, Inside Elections