Fact check the Republican debate? We've got you covered. What candidates got right (or wrong)

The eight Republican presidential contenders who clashed on the debate stage Wednesday night in Milwaukee made a variety of misleading or outright false claims.

With former President Donald Trump notably absent, the remaining candidates often found themselves attacking each other rather than the party's front-runner – and sometimes straying from the facts in order to do so.

Live file: Fact-checking the GOP debate: Claims on CRT, Hunter Biden, schools, Ukraine, COVID-19

Topics included the candidates' records on education, criticism of the state of the economy and concerns about violent crime in the country, with each subject prompting a handful of misleading claims.

Here's where the candidates were off – and on – the mark:

Education claims center around board meetings, critical race theory

Several false or misleading claims were made about education, ranging from what is – and is not – being taught in classrooms, to one of the cornerstones of the party platform: school choice.

Sen. Tim Scott resurfaced a long-debunked claim that under the current Department of Justice, parents attending school board meetings were called “domestic terrorists.”

That mischaracterizes an exchange that started with a September 2021 letter from an education group asking the federal government to help with threats of violence at school board meetings. The letter from the National School Boards Association claimed that some of those threats “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism.” The DOJ never used that phrasing.

Fact check: FBI is not using threat tags on parents who protest at school board meetings

Former Vice President Mike Pence also claimed that when he was Indiana’s governor from 2013-17, that state had the largest school-choice program in the country and it doubled.

But that depends on how you measure program size: When Pence left office in 2017, there were nearly 35,000 students in Indiana’s Choice Scholarship Program – more than three times as many as when he took office in 2013. That’s according to the 2017 edition of The ABCs of School Choice, published by the school-choice advocacy group EdChoice.

While Indiana did have the largest single voucher program in the country that year, Ohio – which had five such options – had more total students who received vouchers, The Washington Post reported. There were roughly 47,000 of them in that state as of 2017, according to the EdChoice publication.

And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ claim that “we eliminated critical race theory from our K-12 schools” is misleading.

That’s because teachers, education officials and districts across that state say the controversial academic concept that examines the roles of systems and policies in perpetuating racism was not being taught in elementary, middle and high schools in the first place, PolitiFact reported. It is taught primarily in colleges and universities, largely in graduate programs.

Fact check: Fake list of banned Florida books circulates widely online

Among the claims that did check out: Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s assertion that a child who can’t read by third grade is four times less likely to graduate from high school. That was the main conclusion of a 2011 study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a child well-being watchdog group.

Economic claims focus on spending cuts, smaller government

It was not a surprise that the candidates stuck to the GOP party line of spending cuts and smaller government.

But one of the first stat drops of the night came from Haley, asking whether Republicans have stood by those principles recently. She said Trump added $8 trillion to the national debt, which is mostly accurate, according to Treasury Department data. The debt rose by about $7.8 trillion to $27.8 from January 2017 to January 2021.

Fact check: False claim Trump increased debt more than any president

One claim that was a bit off the mark: Asa Hutchinson’s assertion that during his term as Arkansas governor, he cut the state workforce by 14% – a variation of a claim he made previously about reductions to the number of people working in the state’s executive branch, KARK-TV reported in April.

The number of employees working in that branch fell by 3,000 from his 2015 inauguration to his exit from the office earlier this year, according to the El Dorado News-Times in January. But state figures show the reduction from 26,108 to 23,111 during that time works out to a drop of just over 11% – not quite the 14% he claimed.

Scott’s assertion that President Joe Biden’s Bidenomics “led to the loss of $10,000 of spending power for the average family” was about right, depending on how you do the math. One report put the number at $10,000, while another put it closer to $7,500.

Fact check: Claim about inflation from 2017 to 2022 misses the mark

Claims mislead on Florida's crime rate, Hunter Biden's charges

DeSantis, widely seen as one of Trump's main challengers, responded to a question from one of the debate's moderators with the misleading claim that crime in Florida is at a 50-year low.

While it's true state officials put out a report that showed Florida’s crime rate fell to a 50-year low in 2021, it came as many law enforcement agencies were changing how they reported crime data, the Tampa Bay Times reported.

About half of the agencies – covering about 40% of the state's population – weren't included in data used to make a statewide estimation, according to The Marshall Project, a news organization that covers the country's criminal justice system. Experts told The Marshall Project that it's "nearly impossible" to compare Florida’s current crime statistics to past years due to the low participation by law enforcement in data collection.

And there was one specific criminal case that drew the candidates' attention: the case involving Hunter Biden, the son of the president. As part of a plea deal that later fell apart in court, Hunter Biden agreed to plead guilty to two counts of tax evasion and participate in a pretrial program for a firearm offense.

During the debate, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie wrongly claimed Hunter Biden faced a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence on the gun charge. Ten years is the maximum penalty Biden could face if convicted of the firearms office, the most serious charge, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Delaware. There's no such mandatory minimum.

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Contributing: Brad Sylvester, Eric Litke

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Republican debate fact check: What candidates got right (or didn't)