Born in 1985 and only 38, Ramaswamy may be the only candidate on stage who was too young to remember the Cold War. The USSR dissolved when he was 6.
-Analysis by Monica Potts of FiveThirtyEight

The debate over Ukraine is a window into the intraparty battle between its previously more dominant neoconservative wing that lost credibility during and after the George W. Bush years and the comparably isolationist wing that's gained ground with Trump's time in office. Ramaswamy, as an avatar for the New Right, specifically name-checked the Iraq War, saying the Ukraine conflict could lead to American intervention. By comparison, Pence and Haley, more traditional conservatives who have foreign policy experience from their time as vice president and U.N. ambassador, respectively, were especially vocal in defending U.S. support for Ukraine.-Analysis by Geoffrey Skelley of FiveThirtyEight

Scott, DeSantis, Christie, Haley and Burgum (plus, of course, Pence) all said tonight that Pence did the right thing on Jan. 6 by refusing to overturn the results of the 2020 election (which he didn’t have the legal ability to do anyway). That’s a notable break from one of the highest-profile tenets of Trumpism — that he was the rightful winner in 2020. In fact, in 2022, we found that only 31 percent of Republican candidates for Senate, House, governor, attorney general and secretary of state had accepted the legitimacy of Biden’s election. Tonight, a majority of the GOP presidential candidates have done so.
-Analysis by Nathaniel Rakich of FiveThirtyEight

Bret Baier just asked about increasing funding to Ukraine. According to a July poll by SSRS/CNN, 71 percent of Republicans say that the U.S. Congress should not authorize additional funding to support Ukraine, while 28 percent say that it should. However, there is more support among Republicans for some other U.S. actions in Ukraine, such as 56 percent who support assisting Ukraine in intelligence gathering, 48 percent who support military training for Ukranians, and 30 percent who support supplying the Ukrainian military with weapons.
-Analysis by FiveThirtyEight

In 2016, Trump was the ultimate outsider candidate — he didn’t receive a single endorsement from a sitting senator, representative or governor until after he had already won New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. This year, though, he already has a ton of elite support. According to the FiveThirtyEight endorsement tracker, he has 343 endorsement points — nearly eight times as many as DeSantis, who is in second place.

The 2016 race notwithstanding, endorsements have historically been very predictive of who eventually wins a party’s nomination. The candidate with the most FiveThirtyEight endorsement points on the day before the Iowa caucuses has won 11 of the last 17 Republican and Democratic primary fights without an incumbent president. And when that candidate has a dominant endorsement lead, they win even more often: Endorsement leaders who had collected more than 15 percent of the estimated available endorsement points before Iowa won nine times out of 10. And Trump already has 17 percent of all available endorsement points with five months left until Iowa.

-Analysis by Nathaniel Rakich of FiveThirtyEight