2024 hopefuls argued over education, spending and border security.
The second Republican debate of the 2024 presidential primary, taking place at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, has just come to an end.
The affair was more raucous than the first debate, which took place over a month ago. Candidates interrupted one another much more regularly and several — most notably former Vice President Mike Pence and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — have directly criticized front-runner Donald Trump, who elected not to show up tonight. The two candidates from South Carolina, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott, went after one another for their records on spending, and seemingly everyone who had the chance to take a shot at entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy did so.
Read below for highlights, excerpts and key moments.
In our pre-debate 538/Washington Post/Ipsos poll, 9 percent of likely Republican primary voters were looking at “improving health care” as one of up to three most important issues (among a list of 20) in deciding which candidate to vote for in the primaries.
—Analysis by Holly Fuong of 538
Using military force in Mexico has become one of DeSantis's signature planks. In the past few months he's talked about sending special forces to confront the cartels, and didn't rule out firing missiles into Mexico either. It's a heavy-handed proposal that just a few years ago probably would have been major news but these days is pretty par for the course for more and more GOP officeholders.
-Jacob Rubashkin, 538 contributor
A plurality (31 percent) of Republican voters in a NewsNation poll from July said that drugs and substance abuse was the overall root cause of crime in their community. Twenty-three percent said the breakdown of the family unit was to blame, followed by 17 percent who listed underfunding of law enforcement. Systemic racism was the least mentioned issue, with just 3 percent of Republicans saying that it was the overall root cause of their community’s crime.
—Analysis by 538
Christie gets the first question out of the break on how to handle crime, and he made the case that he's the only person on stage whose done it as a former prosecutor. But he turned the question into an attack on Trump, calling out Trump for skipping out on the debate, saying that soon he'll be called "Donald Duck" for avoiding it. The thing is, Christie has essentially a 0 percent chance of winning the GOP nomination, so it's not especially interesting to hear him go after Trump. Earlier in the debate, DeSantis did echo an attack Christie made by hitting Trump for not being on stage to defend the former president's record on spending. More of those kind of dings from anyone besides Christie would be a development in this debate.
— Analysis by Geoffrey Skelley of 538
