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.


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Sen. Scott so far has stayed away from attacks and stuck to his stump speech

While many candidates onstage have sparred with each other -- including Haley and Ramaswamy swapping sharp words on foreign policy -- Scott has yet to engage with any of the other candidates.

Much of his remarks have almost word for word repeated elements from his campaign stump speech. When asked about China, which he has addressed in other appearances, he pivoted to speaking about the U.S. border.

-ABC News’ Gabriella Abdul-Hakim and Oren Oppenheim


DeSantis said he wouldn’t increase aid to Ukraine: "Europe needs to step up"

Asked to raise their hand if they would not increase aid to Ukraine, DeSantis did so, saying that "Europe needs to step up. They need to step up and do their job."

He argued: "I would have Europe pull their weight. ... Our support should be contingent on them doing it.

DeSantis -- who had received backlash from some other politicians for seemingly backtracking on support for Ukraine -- pivoted to say that he wasn’t going to send troops overseas but rather down to the Southern border.

-ABC News' Hannah Demissie and Will McDuffie


According to a Pew Research Center survey from August 2022, 72 percent of Republicans say that increasing security on the U.S.-Mexico border is a very important goal for immigration policy. However, Hispanic and non-Hispanic Republicans differ on this issue, with 55 percent of Hispanic Republicans saying border security is a very important goal, compared with 74 percent of non-Hispanic Republicans.
-Analysis by FiveThirtyEight


Moderators try to halt Pence interruptions

Baier and MacCallum have repeatedly sought to stop Pence from interrupting their questions or other candidates' answers -- an example of a debate in which the candidates were sometimes freewheeling in how they answered questions and handled the time limit rules the moderators had set out.

While asking Hutchinson about the border, Baier again had to again stop Pence, saying, "Vice President Pence, it really doesn't help."

-ABC News' Tal Axelrod


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