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

Christie is praising Pence for standing up to Trump after the 2020 election. But I don’t know if Pence wants an endorsement from the most-booed candidate of the night.

— Analysis by Leah Askarinam of FiveThirtyEight

Republicans remain unconvinced of former President Donald Trump’s guilt: According to an August poll from Premise, 77 percent of Republicans don’t believe Trump is guilty of trying to overturn the 2020 election. And in a CivicScience poll from August, 60 percent of Republicans said that Trump wasn’t guilty of any of the criminal charges he’s been indicted on across three different cases.
-Analysis by FiveThirtyEight

This debate might be going out to a national audience, but the 2024 Republican presidential primary will be decided on a state-by-state basis — and because they’re the first to vote, Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada will have an outsized impact on the race.

We’ve been collecting data on how many times each candidate has visited each early state, and there are some revealing trends. For one thing, the candidates seem to think Iowa and New Hampshire are much more important than South Carolina and Nevada. They’ve visited the first two more than 90 times each but South Carolina only 30 times and Nevada only four times. In addition, some candidates seem to be putting all their eggs in either New Hampshire’s or Iowa’s basket. For example, Christie and Hurd are focusing almost exclusively on New Hampshire — perhaps the famously independent Granite State will prove more receptive to their anti-Trump brand. Hutchinson, meanwhile, is focusing on Iowa.

Overall, Ramaswamy and Haley have paid the most visits to early states — though that’s partly because they announced their campaigns earlier than most other candidates.

-Analysis by Nathaniel Rakich of FiveThirtyEight