The big news out of Saturday's Republican debate had to be Marco Rubio's perplexingly repetitive use of the same phrase, almost verbatim, about Obama. And, perhaps just as widely covered, Chris Christie's barking response calling him out on having a "memorized 25-second speech."

So is it really a big deal? Will this dampen the Rubio surge in New Hampshire ahead of Tuesday's primary?

"It gets at something deeper about Marco Rubio," says McKay Coppins, senior political writer for BuzzFeed News and the author of The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party's Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House (Little, Brown and Company, 2015).

Coppins said he's spoken to a lot of Rubio's supporters and described: "There's a kind of deep-seated anxiety that a lot of them talk about when they talk about Rubio - and these are his friends, these are people who like him!"

Coppins went on to suggest that Christie won't be seeing a bump in support because of his debate performance, noting the "spoils rarely go to the chief aggressor, partly because voters just don't like it."