Who Will Win The Third Republican Debate?

Sunday marked one year until the 2024 general election, a day when former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott all hope to be elected the 47th president of the United States. For these candidates, the road to get there runs straight through tonight’s third Republican presidential primary debate.

As we did for the first and second primary debates, 538 is partnering with The Washington Post and Ipsos to poll likely Republican primary voters both before and after the debate to see how they reacted to it and whether it changed their minds about any of the candidates. Below is how they felt going into the debate; tomorrow, we’ll update this page with the results of the post-debate poll (which will go in the field immediately after tonight’s debate ends).

Debate expectations are highest for DeSantis and Haley

How well likely Republican primary voters think each participating candidate will perform

We asked respondents how they expected each candidate to do on a five-point scale from “excellent” to “terrible” and converted each answer to a number on a 1-to-5 scale. “Excellent” was equal to 5, “very good” was equal to 4, “about average” was equal to 3, “poor” was equal to 2 and “terrible” was equal to 1. Scores were then averaged to create an overall expectations score for each candidate. Respondents who answered “don’t know” to the expectations question were excluded.