What Went Down In The Third Democratic Debate

I also keep coming back to the fact that the people most likely to die at the end of a gun are gun owners, themselves. By their own hand. That’s more handguns than automatic weapons. But I think it’s important to point out because it highlights why you need gun owner buy-in to reduce gun deaths in America. When gun owner suicide is our biggest gun violence problem, you can’t reduce gun violence without gun owners.

I’d really like to see a moderator hit Democratic candidates with conservative talking points. If voters are trying to assess how any of these candidates would go up against Trump, it would be helpful to see how they respond to arguments on the other side.

We are one hour in and have two TWO hours left. I would be curious to know if different parts of the country simply watch different parts of the debate as primetime moves west with the time zones. Maybe it doesn’t matter if the media framing is what people ultimately react to.

As your Buttigieg correspondent, I think Beto’s been sharper than I’ve been, and it makes me a little nervous that Beto and Buttigieg could swap places again, as they did once before a few months ago.

O’Rourke made some headlines last week for saying, in response to a question about whether he was going to take away people’s assault weapons, “I want to be clear: That’s exactly what we’re going to do. Americans who own AR-15s and AK-47s will have to sell their assault weapons. All of them.” I guess he thought it went well, because he basically repeated it tonight.

Sanders has not kept pace with the other top candidates in speaking time so far. The only candidate who’s spoken less than him is Yang.

A recent Quinnipiac poll found that mandatory buybacks of assault weapons are supported by 46 percent of Americans and opposed by 49 percent.

As ABC News has reported, ahead of tonight, O’Rourke has called on “banks and credit card companies to stop processing assault weapons sales and firearm transactions without a background check..”

Let’s remember that mass shootings are a tiny fraction of gun violence in America. That’s not to say that mass shootings are no big deal, though. Just consider what Harris is saying about the psychological impacts of school shooting drills. It’s stuff like that that can make a tiny problem (in numbers) have a big impact (in society).

Almost every candidate is praising O’Rourke’s response to the El Paso shooting in his hometown. I wonder if that will make voters see him in a more favorable light. On the other hand, it suggests the other candidates don’t view O’Rourke as a serious threat.

Biden’s implicit point is that public opinion and social movements matter. He’s right. But it’s a hard point for candidates to make because it suggests they don’t have total power to change everything.

Does Harris have … just a little bit … of a Marianne Williamson vibe tonight?

After watching what happened with a lot of Obama’s executive-order-based environmental policies post-Trump, I’m pretty skeptical of the executive order as a tool of long-lasting, meaningful change.

Biden’s probably not wrong — support for gun control policies is probably slightly higher than it used to be, if Gallup’s data to be believed.

Great point about governors, Dan. I wonder, though, if we overstate how great governors are at winning nominations. Reagan and Clinton were very good politicians. Take them out of the equation and I’m not sure governors look so hot.

In the FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll conducted this week, 4.2 percent of people said gun policy was the most important issue to them in the Democratic primary. Here’s who those respondents thought would be best at handling the issue. (See other results from the poll here.)

The president’s ability to pardon and commute sentences has come up as a surprisingly prominent issue in the primary. As I wrote for FiveThirtyEight a few years ago, pardons and clemency are used a lot less frequently than they used to be, although Obama did a bit to reverse the trend by issuing more than 1,000 commutations toward the end of his presidency. Candidates like Booker say that needs to be changed.

I was just assigning the candidates letter grades based on how the candidates have performed so far tonight and … I don’t think anyone’s had a particularly great night yet. I think maybe Klobuchar has been a B+ so far, and I’d have everyone else as between a B and a C.

If you want to read some interesting, science-based reporting on addiction and drug use, I’d recommend the work of Maya Szalavitz. One of the biggest things I learned from her is about the links between childhood bullying and drug use later in life. She’s even said that one of the best things we could do to fight addiction is to fight racism, sexism and other kinds of bullying in schools.

According to a Morning Consult poll released on Wednesday, “gun policy” is among the top issues for Democratic voters — 73 percent of respondents said it was “very important” the candidates discuss the issue during tonight’s debate. In the wake of August’ two deadly mass shootings, that’s an 11-point increase among Democratic voters since the pollster asked the question before the first debate in June. Meanwhile, the pollster found that voters are less insistent the candidates talk about abotion, although their desire to hear the candidates talk about climate change remains unchanged.

But as Nathaniel wrote for FiveThirtyEight recently, this shift in public opinion isn’t necessarily surprising. Support for stricter gun laws often spikes after a mass shooting before falling back down. However, since the early 2000s, there has been a shift in favor of stricter gun laws as well as an increase in the number of Americans who view gun policy as an important issue.

And after the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings, O’Rourke has positioned himself as one of the more aggressive candidates on this issue, proposing a mandatory buy-back program (Booker and Harris have both voiced support). But the race’s polling front-runners — Biden, Sanders and Warren — won’t go quite that far.

Whether felons should have the right to vote is a big issue on the left. Back in May, I wrote about how many people might be reenfranchised by the candidates’ most and least ambitious plans.

Under Presidents Obama and Trump, Democratic voters have quickly moved toward the view that African Americans’ disadvantage is a product of systemic racism. Democratic candidates’ discussion of racial issues has also changed considerably. Democratic candidates used to perceive a risk of losing white Democrats by focusing on racial inequality. But white liberals’ changing opinions on race have freed them to adopt more aggressive language and prioritize racial issues in criminal justice, education and economics.

Wow, Dan, I didn’t realize there wasn’t a single governor on stage tonight — that’s kinda stunning.

Given how much electability is an issue among Democratic voters, I’m surprised how few candidates are pivoting to make the case that their policies are general election winners.

Picking up on the conversation with Julia and Seth, I think if the DNC were putting a thumb on the scale, they might have wanted to have a governor or two among the candidates on stage tonight. Governors used to be the farm team for the presidency; there isn’t a single governor on stage tonight.

Stony Brook University political scientist Julian Wamble has a great thread explaining why black candidates aren’t automatically supported by black voters.

It’s worth noting that two of the female candidates on the stage tonight are former prosecutors – Harris and Klobuchar. That’s not too surprising, given that female politicians often build up a record in state politics/public office before running for national office. But being a prosecutor is more of a liability in the Democratic primary than it used to be, and their long records (which could also signal experience!) have both been criticized.

Few respondents in the FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll conducted this week ranked crime as their top issue in the Democratic primary.

Over here at the Klobuchar News Desk, she seemed maybe a little caught off guard by the question about her record as County Attorney in Hennepin County (Minneapolis) but I thought she was very eloquent about what she had done to improve the system and what she wants to do as president. I’d say she’s having a much better night than in previous debates. Will that matter? Maybe if Biden is getting tripped up tonight and moderate Dems are looking for somewhere new to go. We’ll see.

Biden saying “nobody should be in jail for a non-violent crime” is on par with him pushing Obama to come forward in favor of marriage equality. Wow.

Just a random note here: The Biden campaign posted this ad this morning. Subtle, no?

Both of Klobuchar’s answers so far tonight have been forceful and substantive. I think she will benefit from the sloughing-off of the lower-tier candidates. By being on this stage, she will be taken more seriously, and I think she’s capitalizing so far.

Klobuchar was asked about police shootings of unarmed black men. A poll released Wednesday by Morning Consult asked if this issue was a priority for Democrats: 51 percent said yes.

Wow, as the other former prosecutor on the stage, Klobuchar gave a very powerful defense of her record. Maybe Harris will want to take a page out of her book.

Responding to Julia and Dan, the DNC’s role this cycle has been fascinating — taking a very active role in shaping the size of the field but going out of its way to avoid appearing to pick favorites. I think Julia is right that polarization helps with this — there aren’t off-message candidates who seem to have a real shot at winning. But I don’t know what the DNC would do if there were.

I think that’s right, Nate, re: Harris and the way she’s positioning herself as a reforming prosecutor. I think that there’s still an awareness by her team, though, that black voters are wary of her record. They definitely have an instinct to want to soften her on that point.

I’m not sure that answer on her record as prosecutor worked for Harris; I think she’d be better off owning more of her toughness as a prosecutor rather than claiming to have solely been a reformer.

Harris has found it very, very difficult to shake criticisms of her record as a prosecutor in California. She just released a big new criminal justice plan designed to shore up her brand as a “progressive prosecutor.” But in a lot of her ways, her struggles on this issue are a sign of how far left the Democratic Party has moved on criminal justice in the past few years.

That was a particularly pointed question for Harris from moderator Lindsey Davis, taking her to task for her background as a prosecutor and asking about Harris’s criminal justice reform plan. “You used to oppose the legalization of marijuana, now you don’t. You used to oppose outside investigations of police shootings, now you don’t. You said you changed on these and other things because you were, quote, swimming against the current, and thankfully, the currents have changed. But when you had the power, why didn’t you try to affect change?” asked Davis.

As Aaron mentioned, in our pre-debate survey with Ipsos, only 3 percent of respondents — 110 people — said racism was the most important issue in the country. And among those people, they were pretty divided about which candidate they thought was best on the issue — 21 percent said Sanders, 20 percent said Biden, 19 percent said Harris, and 12 percent said Warren.

Buttigieg has nonexistent support among African Americans, so getting his Douglass Plan more publicity might help him. Still, Buttigieg’s chances are probably most tied to his performance in Iowa, which of course is one of the whitest states in the country.

Booker and Harris have both spoken about racial bias in the criminal justice system. According to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center earlier this year, 65 percent of American adults say that black people are treated less fairly than white people by the criminal justice system. Eighty-seven percent of black people and 61 percent of white people (including 86 percent of white Democrats and 39 percent of white Republicans) feel that blacks are treated less fairly by the criminal justice system.

People have noted the similarity between Buttigieg’s approach to politics and Obama’s. American was, politically, a very different place in 2008, but it’s also safe to assume that Americans would have had a very different reaction to a black candidate talking about race the way Buttigieg just did. Obama talked about there being no black or white America. Buttigieg just said we essentially live in two different countries because of the harm done to African Americans.

Let’s say Harris becomes the Democratic nominee. Will she pivot to more of a tough-on-crime stance? Will she be able to?

It’s worth noting that Buttigieg’s housing policies in South Bend have been described as part of the systemic racism problem.

In the FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll conducted this week, 3 percent of respondents said racism was their top issue in the Democratic primary.