Fingers pointed and tempers flared as Republican candidates for the 2024 presidential nomination faced off during the fourth primary debate.
The debate, held in solidly Republican Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was the last GOP presidential debate of 2023 and came just 40 days before Jan. 15, when the first official votes will be cast in the Iowa caucuses.
In this debate, the Republican field was whittled down to four qualifying candidates: Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
The candidates squabbled over electability, corruption and support for Israel. They also discussed support for former President Donald Trump, the GOP front-runner, who skipped this debate, as he had the previous three.
Here, we fact-check their claims.
We are continuing to update this story.
DeSantis: “I did a bill in Florida to stop the gender mutilation of minors. It’s child abuse and it’s wrong. She opposes that bill. She thinks it’s fine and the law shouldn’t get involved with it.”
This claim has two parts, and each needs more context.
In May 2023, the Florida Legislature passed a bill that banned gender-affirming surgeries for minors. Experts told PolitiFact that gender-affirming surgeries are not the same as genital mutilation. And the law didn’t ban just surgeries — it banned all gender-affirming medical care, including puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, which are supported by most major U.S. medical organizations.
Surgeries are rarely provided as part of gender-affirming care for minors.
In a June CBS interview, Haley said when it comes to determining what care should be available for transgender youth, the “law should stay out of it and I think parents should handle it.” She followed up by saying, “When that child becomes 18 if they want to make more of a permanent change they can do that.”
Haley’s campaign pointed to a May ABC appearance in which she said that a minor shouldn’t have a “gender-changing procedure” and opposed “taxpayer dollars” funding one.
China
DeSantis and Haley repeated familiar attacks on China. DeSantis quipped that Haley wrote a “love letter” to recruit Chinese business to South Carolina when she was governor. Fox News reported that Haley wrote to Chinese Ambassador Cui Tiankai in 2014 during her governorship, writing, “We consider your country a friend and are grateful for your contributions on the economic front.” She recruited multiple Chinese companies to the state, including a fiberglass company with connections to the Chinese Communist Party.
Haley shot back that DeSantis accepted campaign support from a “Chinese” refrigerant company. McClatchy reported DeSantis held a 2022 rally at iGas USA, a Tampa-based refrigerant company, which has “backing from China.” CEO Xianbin (Ben) Meng wrote DeSantis a check in August for more than $11,000, [McClatchy reported].
As Haley continued, DeSantis brought up how fact-checkers have not found “one instance of me recruiting a Chinese business” to Florida. That’s consistent with what PolitiFact reported this month.
Haley: “I said that if you have to be 18 to get a tattoo, you should have to be 18 to have anything done to change your gender.”
During the debate, Haley likened her position on gender-affirming care for minors — that it should be up to parents until the child is 18 — to age requirements for getting a tattoo: “I said that if you have to be 18 to get a tattoo, you should have to be 18 to have anything done to change your gender.”
We’ve heard that comparison before. For what it’s worth, two-third of U.S. states allow minors to get tattoos if their parents consent. And medical experts have told us gender-affirming care is in many cases considered medically necessary, while tattoos are cosmetic.
DeSantis: Biden wants “a central bank digital currency”
This is misleading. President Joe Biden has not proposed a central bank digital currency. In March 2022, he issued an executive order directing a feasibility study for one, however. As a result, the Federal Reserve is studying the pros and cons of a central bank digital currency, as are dozens of countries.
The Federal Reserve said a central bank digital currency would not replace cash. It also said it has not decided to institute such a system, and that congressional approval would be required to create one.
DeSantis also said during the debate that a central bank digital currency would take away Americans’ privacy and regulate their purchases.
Bryan Griffin, then DeSantis’ press secretary, told PolitiFact in April the fact that the Fed is studying it “leaves plenty of room for concern.” But experts we spoke with in March said current U.S. laws wouldn’t permit the kind of control and surveillance DeSantis described.
Ramaswamy: “These people want to send your sons and daughters to go die in Ukraine. They’ve been arguing for it for a year.”
The other candidates have not said this.
In the second Republican debate, on Sept. 27, DeSantis said, “It’s in our interest to end this war. And that’s what I will do as president. We are not going to have a blank check. We will not have U.S. troops.”
Haley said at an August campaign stop, “I don’t think we need to put troops on the ground. But what we do need to do is get with our allies and make sure they have the equipment and ammunition they need to win.”
Although Christie has strongly supported Ukraine in its fight against Russia, we couldn’t find an instance in speeches and other public statements in which he backed sending U.S. troops to fight there.
Haley: “50% of adults 18 to 25 think that Hamas was warranted in what they did with Israel” in the Oct. 7 attacks.
Haley’s claim appears to stem from a Harvard-Harris poll of 2,116 respondents conducted after the Hamas attacks. It asked, “Do you think the Hamas killing of 1,200 Israeli civilians can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified?” Fifty-one percent of respondents 18 to 24 (not 25 as Haley said) said the attacks were justified; 49% said the attacks were not justified.
But this statistic carries several caveats.
First, the sample size for this age group was small, about 199 people. That means the 51% to 49% result could be much wider because of sampling error.
Second, not one of three other polls conducted around the same time, revealed support for Hamas among young people to be that high.
Finally, 18-to-24-year-olds in the Harvard-Harris poll gave wildly inconsistent answers to other questions. By 2-1 margins, those respondents said Hamas’ Oct. 7 action “was a terrorist attack”; that the attacks “were genocidal in nature”; that Israel has “a responsibility” to retaliate “against Hamas terrorists”; and that Hamas “is a terror group that rules Gaza with force and fear and is not supported by them.”
Dritan Nesho, founder and chief executive officer of HarrisX, the polling company, told PolitiFact these seemingly contradictory views might stem from younger Americans’ relatively unformed views on the conflict and its political complexities.
This extra information is why we rated a similar claim from Ramaswamy about young Americans’ purported support for Hamas Mostly False.
Ramaswamy: “I think the north star here is transgenderism is a mental health disorder.”
PolitiFact rated Ramaswamy’s claim False after he introduced it at the second primary debate.
In the past, the medical community used to view the experience of being transgender as a “disorder,” but they no longer agree on that categorization. In the last decade, diagnostic manuals published by the World Health Organization and American Psychiatric Association contained updated language to clarify that being transgender is not a mental illness. Experts told us that persistent gender dysphoria can cause other mental health issues, but it is not itself a mental health disorder.
Haley: “Ron is so hypocritical because he actually went and tried to push a law that would stop anonymous, um, people from talking to the press and went so far to say bloggers should have to register with the state if they’re gonna talk about, write about elected officials.”
Haley got some things right and some things wrong here.
DeSantis did push a Florida bill that would have suppressed journalists’ use of anonymous sources and make it easier to sue news organizations for defamation.
The measure, filed in February, died in committee. It would have removed many protections journalists have against defamation claims, including being able to refuse to identify anonymous sources in most cases. It also would have declared that anonymously sourced statements are “presumptively false for purposes of a defamation action.”
But DeSantis didn’t support a failed bill that would have required bloggers to register with the state. The legislation, filed in February by Florida state Sen. Jason Brodeur, R-Lake Mary, required journalists to submit reports if they are paid to write about elected officials, or face fines.
DeSantis said in a press conference shortly after the bill’s filing that he’s never supported the measure. It also died in committee.
Haley: “All of the 7 or 8 million illegals that have come under Biden’s watch absolutely have to go back.”
This represents a misinterpretation of available data.
From February 2021, Biden’s first month in office, to October 2023, immigration authorities encountered migrants almost 8 million times at and between ports of entry. But that doesn’t mean 8 million people have entered the country.
Customs and Border Protection’s data tracks events, not people. If one person tries crossing the border three times, for example, that would register as three encounters.
Immigration data also doesn’t tell us how many people have entered and stayed in the U.S. under Biden. Customs and Border Protection data shows that millions of encounters led to removals.
Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute told PolitiFact in October that there’s no authoritative source on how many unauthorized immigrants have joined the U.S. population since Biden took office.
From March 2020 to May 2023, border officials expelled 2.5 million people under Title 42, a COVID-19 pandemic-era public health policy that let officials quickly expel migrants without allowing them to first seek asylum.
During Biden’s tenure, border authorities have initiated around 694,110 removals at the southern border, CBP data shows.
Ramaswamy: “The 2020 election was indeed stolen by Big Tech.”
This is wrong. Allegations of a rigged or stolen 2020 election have been rebutted by audits, judges, and officials in Trump’s administration.
We contacted Ramaswamy’s campaign during the debate to ask for his evidence and received no immediate response. On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Aug. 27, Ramaswamy said, “There’s hard data showing that many voters, many independent voters, would have changed their result enough to influence the outcome of the election if they had been exposed to what we now know to be the truth about the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
The laptop was left at a Delaware computer repair shop, and some of the laptop’s contents were reported by the New York Post in October 2020, weeks before the presidential election. The laptop story was suspected to be Russian-planted disinformation, but subsequent reporting contradicts that premise.
Twitter blocked users from sharing the story. Executives at the tech giant now say that was done errantly. Since the 2020 election, news organizations such as CBS News, The New York Times and The Washington Post have independently verified at least some of the laptop’s contents.
But there isn’t evidence that Twitter’s actions resulted in the election being stolen.
A 2022 poll by a self-identified “right-leaning outfit” found that among a group of people who had been following the story, 28% would have been “very likely” to change their vote had they known the laptop was not disinformation, and 25% were “somewhat likely.”
However, the pool of respondents who answered this question leaned Republican more strongly than the general population, so most of these voters would not have been voting for Biden in the first place.
DeSantis: “100% of the things I promised as governor, I delivered on those promises.”
This is inaccurate. DeSantis has followed through on some of his campaign promises, but not all, PolitiFact’s DeSant-O-Meter promise tracker shows.
Of the 15 promises PolitiFact tracked, DeSantis kept five and compromised on six. We’ve rated one Stalled and one In the Works. His remaining two pledges were rated Promise Broken.
DeSantis failed to follow through on his 2018 promise to lower the corporate tax rate in Florida. The rate dropped temporarily from 2019 to 2021 before rebounding in 2022 to 5.5% — the rate it was before he took office.
We also rated Promise Broken his pledge to reduce the state’s communication services tax. The tax is levied on services such as cable and satellite television, video and music streaming and telephone and mobile communications. Florida’s total communications services tax rate of 7.44% has been consistently ranked as one of the nation’s highest. It hasn’t budged during DeSantis’ governorship.
DeSantis: When Calvin Coolidge was president, “the country was in great shape.”
Historians disagree about the success of Coolidge’s presidency, which ran from 1923 to 1929.
Coolidge’s reputation has risen in the past two decades, especially among conservatives, who value his record of balanced budgets, low taxes, light regulation and limited government. Biographer Amity Shlaes, who chairs the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, wrote that, under Coolidge, Americans began buying cars and electric appliances, and patents “increased dramatically.”
Coolidge’s hands-off approach appeared to be reasonably popular with Americans. But the Roaring ’20s ended abruptly with the Great Depression five months after Coolidge left office. This sequence of events has been hard for historians to ignore: A periodic survey of historians currently places Coolidge 24th in the ranking of presidents, just below average.
“Much was happening both at home and abroad, and one must ask whether Coolidge’s policy of apparent inertia was really appropriate for a twentieth-century presidency,” wrote Peter Clements, author of “Prosperity, Depression and the New Deal.” Coolidge “spoke in his inaugural address of problems such as lynching, child labor and low wages for women. Yet he did nothing to overcome any of these issues.”
David Greenberg, another Coolidge biographer and a Rutgers University historian, has faulted Coolidge failing to help farmers in the run-up to the Depression and for a foreign policy approach that failed to forestall fascism’s rise in Europe.
DeSantis: “Nikki Haley said the other day there should be no limits on legal immigration and that corporate CEOs should set the policy on that.”
This is misleading and needs context.
Haley has not called for unlimited immigration. At a rally and in an interview with the conservative outlet Breitbart, she said legal immigration should be “based on merit” and not on an “arbitrary number.”
Every year, the U.S. allows a specific number of immigrants to enter the country for permanent employment. But Haley said that debating what is the best number is “the wrong way to look at” legal immigration.
“Yes, the fabric of America is legal immigration,” Haley said at a November rally in New Hampshire. “But let’s get the right ones in that are going to make America better.”
Haley said the U.S. should ask industries, such as agriculture, tourism and technology, “What do you need that you don’t have?”
“We want the talent that’s going to make us better,” Haley said. “Then you bring people in that can fill those needs.”
The focus should be on “those who will lift our economy,” Haley told Breitbart in August.
Reporting by Grace Abels, Marta Campabadal Graus, Jeff Cercone, Louis Jacobson, Samantha Putterman, Maria Ramirez Uribe, Amy Sherman, Sara Swann and Loreben Tuquero.