Here’s what to watch for from each of the eight candidates in tonight’s debate.

Some of the candidates have signaled that they plan to go on the offensive, attacking one another over abortion rights, Ukraine and other issues. For all of them, the debate provides the biggest audience of the race to date, and their first — and perhaps last — chance to make an impression.

Here’s what to watch for from each of the candidates:

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has perhaps the most at stake. A distant second to Mr. Trump in most polls, he is expected to be a target of attacks while he tries to reset the narrative of his campaign after a run of challenges, including bad press, staff shake-ups and sinking poll numbers.

Mr. DeSantis also might find himself in a bind after the release of a strategy memo that offered suggestions on how he should deal with other candidates. If he ignores that guidance, he could miss the opportunity to undercut key rivals. If he follows through, he could look inauthentic.

Former Vice President Mike Pence will be trying to get Republican primary voters to look past an issue that has dogged him: his role in certifying the 2020 election, which made him a target of Mr. Trump’s supporters.

Mr. Pence’s team hopes the debate will give him a chance to make the case that he was just following through on his constitutional duty on Jan. 6. In mock debate sessions, he has also prepared to contrast his staunch opposition to abortion, his support for Ukraine and his focus on economic growth with other candidates’ positions.

Vivek Ramaswamy, a wealthy entrepreneur and political novice, has gained traction in the race by wooing Trump supporters who want a next-generation version. But he has taken a fairly casual approach to debate prep.

If Mr. DeSantis follows the guidance of the strategy memo, Mr. Ramaswamy will be a key target. And many far more politically experienced contenders have met their end under the bright lights of the debate stage.

Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey is an experienced debater with a knack for landing memorable attacks.

In recent days, Mr. Christie has signaled that he may go after Mr. DeSantis’s claims to be the most electable candidate. The debate offers an opportunity for Mr. Christie to take aim at those aligned with Trumpism and portray himself as a true alternative.

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has campaigned on an upbeat, future-focused message that has helped him steadily raise his profile, though he remains mired in single digits in most polling.

Mr. Scott will be looking for a bounce from a strong performance, but it remains to be seen whether a positive, forward-looking message can break through in a debate that could easily become a referendum on Mr. Trump and the 2020 election.

Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and a United Nations ambassador under Mr. Trump, was the second candidate to enter the race, after her former boss. But a grueling campaign pace hasn’t done much for her poll numbers.

Ms. Haley has urged voters not to count her out in not-so-subtle ways, showing up at the Iowa State Fair in a shirt that read: “Underestimate me. That’ll be fun.” Yet primary voters have expressed little interest in the lone woman in the Republican race.

Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, a billionaire former software executive, at one point offered $20 gift cards in exchange for $1 donations in order to meet the donor threshold to qualify for the debate.

There’s a good reason he was so motivated: Mr. Burgum hasn’t broken 3 percent in polls in Iowa, which means this debate may be his only chance to make an impression on voters who don’t know anything about him.

Former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas faces a similar need to introduce himself to voters, and only announced on Sunday that he had met the qualifying requirements for the debate, which included having at least 40,000 individual contributors, with 200 each from 20 states.

What will he do to resonate with voters? The best advice he received for the big night was blunt, he said: “Don’t make it boring.”

Donald J. Trump is not in Milwaukee for the first Republican presidential debate, but a caravan of a dozen surrogates and loads of other supporters have been making the rounds at the Fiserv Forum — and trolling his top rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.

Fox News has restricted access to the center’s media spin room on Wednesday night, so it is unclear how many of Mr. Trump’s surrogates will make it inside. But a dozen are in town. They include his son Donald Trump Jr., and the younger Mr. Trump’s fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, along with several Florida Republican congressmen who have endorsed Mr. Trump over Mr. DeSantis, their own governor: Byron Donalds, Matt Gaetz, Carlos Gimenez and Michael Waltz.

Among Mr. Trump’s proxies are also Kari Lake, who unsuccessfully ran for governor of Arizona last year; Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Russell Fry; and Chris LaCivita, Jason Miller and Steven Cheung, his campaign advisers and strategists.

As early as noon, campaigns were making their presence felt outside the Fiserv Forum. Mr. DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy had their buses parked nearby.

Mr. Trump’s team is taking special shots at Mr. DeSantis, who has long been viewed as his top challenger, though Mr. DeSantis has been stuck in a distant second in polls. The former president’s campaign took a similar tack trolling Mr. DeSantis at the Iowa State Fair with a band of nine Florida Republicans who had endorsed Mr. Trump.

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The campaign has also emailed a “debate night bingo card” to supporters, with squares that jabbed at Mr. DeSantis’s reputation for social awkwardness.

Mr. DeSantis’s campaign responded to the Trump team on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The entire establishment has their knives out for DeSantis,” Andrew Romeo, the campaign’s communications director, posted on X. “They know he’s the only one who can beat Biden.”

Jeff Roe, a top adviser to a DeSantis super PAC, struck back harder when asked on CBS News about the Trump campaign mocking Mr. DeSantis’s many resets as a presidential candidate.

“I guess we’ll have as many restarts as they have indictments,” Mr. Roe said.

The audience can be a proxy for voters, a pain for the moderators and, sometimes, a launchpad for viral campaign characters.

The debate tonight in Milwaukee will be held before a crowd, including major Republican donors and other V.I.P.s. Little else is known: Neither Fox News nor the Republican National Committee would provide details on Wednesday afternoon about the size or composition of the audience. (The event is being held at Fiserv Forum, where the Milwaukee Bucks play before crowds of up to 17,500 people. It is unlikely that many people will be at the debate.)

As for how the audience reacts to the candidates, one of the debate’s moderators, the Fox News host Bret Baier, told Deadline in an interview that he and his co-host, Martha MacCallum, would instruct the crowd to keep applause and cheers to a minimum.

But he added: “You can’t really silence a whole stadium full of people.”

The absence of former President Donald J. Trump — who has animated debate audiences from the beginning of his 2016 campaign — could temper the rowdiness of the crowd. Though the format is different, the event’s organizers surely bore in mind CNN’s widely criticized live town hall with Mr. Trump in May, when the audience cheered wildly for the former president, goading him as he attacked the moderator and took command of the event.

Surrogates for Mr. Trump, including his son Donald Trump Jr. and Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor who lost last year, had planned to attend the debate. But Fox has said the “spin room” will be limited to debate participants, raising the possibility that they could be shut out of the event.

The audience, however large and loud, will be invisible — there will be no live audience questions. So there is less of a chance of a breakout character emerging from the crowd, like Kenneth Bone, the red-sweatered undecided voter who became a viral sensation when he asked a question about energy policy at the second presidential debate in 2016.

Above all, the live audience can be a powerful signal to the viewing public at home.

One oft-cited example of the influence audiences can have on the candidates and on viewer perception is from the 1984 debate between President Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale, when Mr. Reagan famously quipped that he would “not exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

The live audience laughed and applauded. In 2015, the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania conducted a study in which two groups of viewers were shown a clip of the exchange, one with the audience reaction edited out. Both groups reported a “favorability bump” for Mr. Reagan, but the group without the audience sound reported a much smaller one.

The study was part of a report that concluded that in-person audiences were harmful to the debate process. “Laughter, cheers or jeers also magnify moments and distract attention from the substance of the statements made by the candidates,” the report concluded, a problem that was particularly pronounced during primary debates.

To prepare him for this crucial moment, Mr. DeSantis has turned to Brett O’Donnell, a veteran Republican debate coach.

Mr. O’Donnell, whom the DeSantis campaign declined to make available for an interview, has worked for the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush, Mitt Romney and John McCain, as well as on scores of congressional races, according to his official biography. A recent headline in Politico called him the “G.O.P.’s Debate Wizard.”

Mr. O’Donnell most likely needed to prepare Mr. DeSantis for a barrage of attacks from the other candidates. But rather than engage in a back-and-forth with some of his rivals, as was advised in documents leaked by a super PAC backing Mr. DeSantis, his campaign has suggested that he will focus his criticisms on President Biden and pivot to his own policy message, particularly on the economy and immigration.

There’s one phrase that Mr. O’Donnell will surely urge Mr. DeSantis to cut from his debate performance: “Listless vessels.”

That was what Mr. DeSantis called certain Trump supporters in an interview last week, drawing a rebuke from the Trump campaign, which compared his remarks to Hillary Clinton’s damaging comment when she referred to Trump’s supporters as “deplorables” in 2016. Mr. DeSantis’s campaign responded that his words had been taken out of context and that he was referring not to voters but to “Donald Trump and some congressional endorsers.”

At the very least, Mr. DeSantis needs to avoid committing major gaffes onstage tonight.

That’s proven to be a tall order for him when facing off against other candidates at previous major debates. In 2018 and 2022, he stumbled into embarrassing moments that went viral, although he still won both elections.

In 2018, when Mr. DeSantis first ran for governor, his Democratic opponent, Andrew Gillum, who is Black, criticized him for saying that voters should not “monkey this up” in choosing the Democrat. In 2022, Mr. DeSantis was leading in the polls but he was pulled into a rowdy exchange with the former governor, Charlie Crist.

Enter Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, the Fox News Channel mainstays who drew that assignment and will pose questions to the eight G.O.P. presidential candidates squaring off for the first time, absent former President Donald J. Trump.

The party’s front-runner, Mr. Trump will bypass the debate in favor of an online interview with Tucker Carlson, who was fired from Fox News in April.

But that doesn’t mean the debate’s moderators will be under any less of a microscope.

Here’s a closer look at who they are:

Bret Baier

He is the chief political anchor for Fox News and the host of “Special Report With Bret Baier” at 6 p.m. on weeknights. Mr. Baier, 53, joined the network in 1998, two years after the network debuted, according to his biography.

Mr. Baier, like Ms. MacCallum, is no stranger to the debate spotlight.

In 2016, he moderated three G.O.P. primary debates for Fox, alongside Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace, who have since left the network. He was present when Ms. Kelly grilled Mr. Trump about his treatment of women during a 2015 debate, an exchange that drew Mr. Trump’s ire and led him to boycott the network’s next debate nearly six months later.

During the 2012 presidential race, Mr. Baier moderated five Republican primary debates.

At a network dominated by conservative commentators like Sean Hannity and the departed Mr. Carlson and Bill O’Reilly, Mr. Baier has generally avoided controversy — but not entirely.

After Fox News called Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr. on election night in 2020, becoming the first major news network to do so and enraging Mr. Trump and his supporters, Mr. Baier suggested in an email to network executives the next morning that the outlet should reverse its projection.

“It’s hurting us,” he wrote in the email, which was obtained by The New York Times.

Mr. Baier was also part of a witness list in the defamation lawsuit that Dominion Voting Systems brought against Fox News over the network’s role in spreading disinformation about the company’s voting equipment. Fox settled the case for $787.5 million before it went to trial.

Martha MacCallum

She is the anchor and executive editor of “The Story With Martha MacCallum” at 3 p.m. on weekdays. Ms. MacCallum, 59, joined the network in 2004, according to her biography.

During the 2016 election, Ms. MacCallum moderated a Fox News forum for the bottom seven Republican presidential contenders who had not qualified for the party’s first debate in August 2015. She reprised that role in January 2016, just days before the Iowa caucuses.

She and Mr. Baier also moderated a series of town halls with individual Democratic candidates during the 2020 election, including one that featured Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Before joining Fox, she worked for NBC and CNBC.

When Fox projected Mr. Biden’s victory over Mr. Trump in Arizona, effectively indicating that Mr. Biden had clinched the presidency, Ms. MacCallum was similarly drawn into the maelstrom at the network.

During a Zoom meeting with network executives and Mr. Baier, she suggested it was not enough to call states based on numerical calculations — the standard by which networks have made such determinations for generations — but that viewers’ reactions should be considered.

“In a Trump environment,” Ms. MacCallum said, according to a review of the phone call by The Times, “the game is just very, very different.”

The candidates appearing onstage this evening have offered tidbits about how they’re getting ready — some traditional, and some less so.

Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has spent time reviewing topics central to his campaign and planning for various scenarios that could arise, according to his team.

An adviser to Nikki Haley, the former U.N. ambassador, suggested Wednesday morning that Ms. Haley’s time on the campaign trail taking questions from voters had helped her get ready for the face-off. But she has also had some musical inspiration, blasting Queen, Joan Jett, Def Leppard and the Go-Gos, the adviser said.

Vivek Ramaswamy, whose campaign has said that he prioritized hitting the campaign trail over formal planning, telegraphed a lack of rigorous preparation on social media.

“Three hours of solid debate prep this morning,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Monday, alongside a video of him playing tennis without a shirt. On Tuesday, he posted a video of himself doing burpees with his wife, Apoorva, with the caption, “More debate prep this morning, with my favorite sparring partner.”

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina told Fox News that he was approaching the debate by “mostly spending time studying,” engaging in prayer and spending time with his family.

And former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, the long-shot candidate who was last to be added to the debate roster, posted a photo of himself with a notepad and laptop, with the caption, “Some last minute studying and prep for tomorrow!”

Not all pump-up activities have gone quite as planned, however.

Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota was taken to a Milwaukee emergency room on Tuesday after he tore his Achilles’ tendon playing basketball with his staff — an injury that put his status for the debate in doubt.

But a few hours before the debate was set to begin, Mr. Burgum posted a picture of himself approaching the stage on crutches, with a two-word message: “I’m in.”

But voters will still have a chance to hear from him, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who posts episodes of a show on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

The interview was recorded at some point in the last two weeks at Mr. Trump’s club, a person briefed on the matter said. The interview is expected to be posted around the time the debate — the first of the Republican primary season — begins.

Both Mr. Carlson and Mr. Trump have been feuding with Fox News, which is hosting the debate.

Mr. Carlson was pushed from his popular 8 p.m. show by officials at the network, and is still being paid the remainder of his contract.

Mr. Trump, who has a wide lead in early polling, has complained bitterly about the network’s coverage for many months, and has suggested he may not participate in any debates. But that’s especially true for Wednesday and the second debate, which will be hosted by Fox Business.

Mr. Trump is also likely to draw attention away from day-after coverage of the debate on Thursday, albeit for reasons less welcome to him: He is expected to travel to Georgia to be booked on the racketeering charges he faces there stemming from his efforts to remain in power after his 2020 election loss.

In contrast to many debates, the candidates will not make opening statements, though they will have 45 seconds each for closing statements. They will have one minute to answer each question and 30 seconds for follow-ups.

The debate will be moderated by the Fox News hosts Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, and will include eight candidates: Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, former Vice President Mike Pence, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina. Former President Donald J. Trump has chosen not to participate.

To qualify, candidates had to meet polling and donor criteria set by the Republican National Committee and also sign a pledge to support the Republican nominee, no matter who it is.

Mr. Trump, the clear front-runner among Republicans vying to challenge President Biden’s re-election, has chosen not to join the crowded debate stage, hoping instead to steal the limelight with a taped interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

The highest-profile candidates behind the lecterns at Fiserv Forum in downtown Milwaukee will include Mr. Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence; an ally-turned-enemy in former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey; and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who presented himself as the heir apparent to Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement but has stalled in his efforts to eclipse his one-time benefactor.

They will be joined by Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who would be the party’s first Black nominee, and Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and ambassador to the United Nations, who would be her party’s first female standard-bearer. Also onstage will be Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who has been perhaps the field’s most vigorous defender of the former president.

That mix of experienced political hands and upstart hopefuls may be able to take advantage of the front-runner’s absence to stake their claims as the Republican Party’s new face after a string of defeats and disappointments. The G.O.P. lost control of the House in 2018 and control of the White House and Senate in 2020, and had one of the most anemic showings in decades for a party out of power in 2022.

Here’s what to know:

• The debate will be hosted by Fox News beginning at 9 p.m. Eastern. Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum will be the moderators. Here’s how to watch.

• With his polling position dominant, Mr. Trump opted to instead tape an interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that will be posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, around the time the debate begins.

• The candidates will have to decide what type of Republican to be to woo Mr. Trump’s followers: one willing to challenge the front-runner directly, or one who allies with him and hopes that Mr. Trump’s third run for the presidency falters. Here’s what to watch for.

The dynamic has left his opponents preparing for an unusual scenario: debating among themselves while the front-runner with a commanding lead is entirely absent.

Still, for Mr. Trump’s rivals, the debate provides the biggest audience of the race to date, and their first chance to not only make an impression but to make the race a true contest.

Senator Mitt Romney, a Republican who ran the presidential debate gantlet twice and is his party’s most prominent elected Trump antagonist, offered this advice: “The key for them is not to focus on each other but the person who’s at the top. You got to punch up.”

Yet even the most viral moment could quickly be swept away in a wave of Trump-driven news. “In 99 out of 100 futures,” said Newt Gingrich, the former Republican presidential candidate and House speaker, “Donald Trump is the Republican nominee and he doesn’t even breathe heavy.”

But the eight candidates have a shot to present Republican voters with an alternative. How they make their case could make the 2024 primary a contest and not a coronation.

Here are nine things that are likely to define the debate.

How present is Trump, even when he’s absent?

A significant portion of the debate will most likely revolve around Mr. Trump, his criminal indictments, his continued questioning of the 2020 election and his responsibility for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. While the candidates have been asked about those issues frequently, a debate allows for follow-up questions — heightening the possibility of a misstep.

Mr. Trump will still put his mark on the moment. He has announced plans to try to upstage the debate with the release of a recorded online interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

And on Thursday, the former president plans to surrender to the authorities in Atlanta to face charges in the case accusing him of election interference, an appearance that is likely to dominate the news cycle and cut into any bounce his rivals hope to receive from the debate.

Can DeSantis reset?

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Perhaps the candidate with the most at stake on Wednesday is Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. The DeSantis team expects him to be the target of attacks. “The other candidates, a lot of them don’t really say much about Donald Trump, and they focus more on me,” Mr. DeSantis said on Fox News Radio last week.

Mr. DeSantis is viewed as Mr. Trump’s strongest challenger, but he has faced weeks of bad press, campaign shake-ups and sinking poll numbers — in what can be a self-reinforcing downward cycle. The debate is his opportunity to change the narrative.

But that strategy was complicated last week when a series of documents and a debate strategy memo were published on the website of a firm associated with the super PAC that has taken over some of the basic elements of Mr. DeSantis’s presidential campaign.

The strategy memo outlined “four basic must-dos” for the governor to parry the attacks, including going after Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and author who has gained ground in recent weeks, and defending Mr. Trump in the face of attacks from Chris Christie, who has seized the role of chief Trump antagonist in the race.

The release puts Mr. DeSantis in a bind. If he punts on those attacks, he could miss the opportunity to undercut key rivals. If he follows through, he may look inauthentic or even like a puppet.

Can Pence make Republicans reconsider?

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In mock debate sessions, Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s vice president for four years, has prepared to contrast his staunch opposition to abortion, his support for Ukraine and his focus on economic growth with the other candidates on the stage. Yet there’s one issue that some of his advisers believe he must address to pull out of single digits in polling: his role in certifying the 2020 election. The issue has dogged Mr. Pence, who has been criticized by Mr. Trump’s supporters and labeled a traitor.

The debate, his team hopes, will still give Mr. Pence a bigger stage to make the case that he often does on the trail — that he was just following his constitutional duty on Jan. 6.

Can Ramaswamy live up to the hype?

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Mr. Ramaswamy, a wealthy entrepreneur and political novice, has gained traction by wooing MAGA supporters who want a next-generation version of Mr. Trump. He has taken a series of hard-right positions and has said Mr. Trump’s “America First” agenda does not go far enough.

Mr. Ramaswamy has taken a more informal approach to preparing for the debate, holding conversations on policy with advisers as he travels the country aggressively, visiting nine states in the last week. A 38-year-old Harvard graduate, Mr. Ramaswamy has focused on studying foreign policy in particular. Victoria Coates, a former Trump administration official, has been among those giving him briefings, according to a campaign adviser. He prefers less structured sessions that don’t feel overly produced, the adviser said.

Many far more politically experienced contenders have met their end under the bright lights of the debate stage. Can Mr. Ramaswamy’s performance match his bluster?

How do policy differences shape the debate?

Two issues have divided the Republican field more than any others: abortion rights and support for Ukraine in its war against Russia. The Ukraine war has exposed a rift between the foreign policy hawks and the anti-interventionist wing of the party.

On abortion rights, an issue that has powered Democratic victories since Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, Republicans have struggled to unify around a central position. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina says he will fight for a 15-week federal ban, Mr. Pence has expressed support for a six-week ban and Mr. Christie says the issue should be left to each individual state.

Mr. Pence, Mr. Scott and Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador under Mr. Trump, plan to highlight these differences, seeing an opportunity to win support among different party factions. How Republican voters respond will offer some early clues into the ideological future of the party, particularly in a post-Trump era.

Will Christie turn his firepower on DeSantis?

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Aside from Mr. Trump, Mr. Christie is the most experienced debater in the field, with a knack for landing memorable attacks. He participated in eight face-offs during the 2016 campaign and helped coach Mr. Trump for his presidential debates in 2020.

So far, he has focused much of his firepower on Mr. Trump — in a candidacy that some rivals see largely as a kamikaze mission to prevent the former president from recapturing the nomination. The debate offers Mr. Christie an opportunity to take aim at those aligned with Trumpism, even if they are opposed to Mr. Trump. In recent days, he has signaled that such attacks could be coming, particularly against Mr. DeSantis and his claims that he is the most electable in the field.

“If you like Coca-Cola and Coke comes out with New Coke, and Coke is still available, well, you’re going to buy Coke because what do you need New Coke for?” he said in a recent town hall in New Hampshire, arguing that Republicans needed a truer alternative to Mr. Trump than Mr. DeSantis. “Ron DeSantis is New Coke.”

Can Scott stay a happy warrior?

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The senator from South Carolina has campaigned across the country with an upbeat, future-focused message that leans heavily on his compelling personal story. There has been some evidence it’s working: In recent weeks, his standing has crept up steadily in polls.

But while Mr. Scott has been gaining ground, he remains mired in single digits in most early-state polling. The debate is a chance for him to get a bounce. But will a positive message break through in a debate that could easily become a referendum on Mr. Trump and the past election?

Can Haley make it happen?

Ms. Haley, a former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador, entered the race in February, before any other candidate aside from Mr. Trump. She has campaigned at a grueling pace through Iowa and New Hampshire. But so far, she has little to show for her efforts. Her poll numbers have barely moved. And Mr. Scott, her home state rival, has surpassed her in both early-voting states.

In not-so-subtle ways, Ms. Haley has urged voters not to count her out, showing up at the Iowa State Fair in a shirt that read: “Underestimate me. That’ll be fun.” Yet primary voters have expressed little interest in the lone woman in the Republican race.

Aides say she views the debate as the kickoff to the fall season of the campaign, when voters will start tuning into the primary race. But can she can make them pay attention?

How will lower-tier candidates introduce themselves?

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Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota went to great lengths to qualify for the debate stage, at one point even offering $20 gift cards in exchange for $1 donations. But so far, the billionaire former software executive has yet to break 3 percent in Iowa. The issue, Mr. Burgum and his team argue, is largely one of familiarity. The debate offers Mr. Burgum his biggest — and possibly his only — chance to make his pitch. “The important part was making the debate,” he said in a brief interview in Iowa.

Former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas faces a similar need to introduce himself to voters. He said the best advice he had received for the big night was blunt: “Don’t make it boring.”

For his part, Mr. Burgum is not placing a lot of pressure on his performance on Wednesday night. “For us, we don’t have to hit home runs, grand slams, any of that stuff,” he said. “We’re just on the stage with everybody else, being ourselves.”

• Fox News Channel will broadcast the event, with live coverage starting at 8 p.m. Eastern — an hour before the debate itself — and running past midnight.

• Fox Business Network will broadcast the same coverage simultaneously.

• The face-off will be streamed at FoxNews.com and on Fox Nation, which is Fox News Channel’s subscription streaming platform.

• The online streaming platform Rumble will also show the debate, as an official R.N.C. partner.

Which candidates will be onstage?

As of the official qualification deadline Monday evening, eight candidates had made the stage. They are Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, former Vice President Mike Pence, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.

When will they start taking questions?

Immediately, according to the debate guidelines. There are no opening statements.

What about Trump?

Donald J. Trump, the clear front-runner for the nomination, plans to skip the debate. He has, instead, recorded an interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. They plan to post the interview on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, concurrently with the debate, according to a person with knowledge of the planning.

Mr. Trump’s decision to record an interview with Mr. Carlson to be released while his rivals share a stage was a slap in the face to both the R.N.C., whose leadership tried hard to persuade him to participate in the debate, and to Fox News, which is hosting the debate and fired Mr. Carlson earlier this year.

Who is moderating the debate?

The debate will be moderated by two Fox News hosts, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum. Mr. Baier has previously moderated Republican debates in 2015 and 2016, and he and Ms. MacCallum led a town-hall event with Mr. Trump in 2020.

What issues are the candidates likely to focus on?

The candidates will undoubtedly be asked about Mr. Trump and the four criminal indictments against him. Other topics of discussion could include inflation, immigration and border security, foreign-policy issues like the situations in Ukraine and China, and abortion. Here is where the candidates stand on those issues and more.

Let us know here what you hope the moderators will ask.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.