What Went Down At The January Democratic Debate

I’ll be focused on Elizabeth Warren tonight.

With this being the final debate before Iowa, it’s a big night for every candidate on stage, so I don’t necessarily want to say it’s a bigger night for Warren than, say, for Biden or Sanders. But unlike those two, who are essentially tied for the lead in the FiveThirtyEight forecast of Iowa (and for that matter also New Hampshire and Nevada), Warren has some coming-from-behind to do.

In theory, that might make her adopt slightly riskier strategies — potentially attacking both Biden (perhaps over her bankruptcy plan) and Sanders. In practice, it’s less clear what she’ll do.

Tensions between Sanders and Warren already escalated substantially this week after reports surfaced that Sanders had told her in a private meeting in 2018 that he didn’t think a woman could win the presidency. Sanders and his team have vehemently denied the account, although Warren repeated the claim in a statement she released. Warren’s campaign has since told key surrogates to de-escalate the tensions with Sanders, according to an account from BuzzFeed.

All of this could be open to any number of interpretations. The sourcing on the original story, for instance, is vague, but some of the sources seem to be people close to Warren; “two people Warren spoke with directly soon after the encounter” is how CNN describes them. There’s also no real way to tell, yet, whether the allegations will have a negative effect on Sanders, on Warren, on both, or on neither.

Two things seem safer to say at this point:

1. This is a fairly high-stakes conflict. Although the Sanders and Warren bases don’t perfectly overlap, they do have a lot in common; Sanders supporters are considerably more likely to also be considering Warren than any other candidate, and vice versa.
2. CNN, one of the co-hosts for tonight’s event, is also likely to play up any such conflicts. Of the various debate hosts, CNN, in the debate it hosted in Detroit, tended to ask questions that highlighted tensions between the candidates and which were sometimes more horse-race-y than policy-focused. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, necessarily.) But the candidates might need to actively seek to avoid conflict in a CNN debate in a way they wouldn’t in one that was moderated differently.

Warren’s ideal evening would probably involve Sanders taking on a lot of incoming fire without her necessarily being the primary instigator of conflict. That’s a plausible scenario, too. Sanders has come to be perceived as a front-runner by the national media in a way that he wasn’t before. (Whether anything has actually changed is an open question — Sanders is in the same pretty-good-but-still-not-a-front-runner position in our forecast that he would have been a month or two ago — but leave that aside for now.) And when a candidate is newly anointed by the media as a front-runner, they tend to be a focal point of the debate — as Biden, Warren and Buttigieg (but oddly not really Sanders) have all experienced already.

Two more thoughts to close. First — it needs to be said — when judging candidates’ debate performances, the media can be inclined to apply harsher standards to women than men, especially when it comes to initiating conflict. And second, Warren tends to be pretty good at these things, consistently getting fairly high marks from voters in our post-debate surveys. So you can write some scripts where tonight turns out really well for Warren, but she’s going to have to think on her feet.

I’m covering tonight’s debate in person from Des Moines, so when I was assigned Buttigieg as my candidate to watch, I decided to go straight to the source, driving out to Winterset, Iowa, to attend a Buttigieg town hall.

Buttigieg told the crowd there that he’s not just running to beat Trump, he wants to tackle the many problems he says will still remain on “the day the sun rises over Winterset and Donald Trump is no longer president.” Speaking in a county that gave Trump 62 percent of the vote, Buttigieg talked about how he thinks he can heal the country’s partisan divide: He spoke of “offer[ing] voters of faith a choice” and described the feelings that stirred inside him when he looks at the American flag, like the one that hung behind him. At the same time, he emphasized his “progressive” vision for the country.

I’d expect Buttigieg to keep playing to an Iowa crowd with similar themes tonight — establishing himself as a tireless fighter for even the most liberal caucusgoers while still making the argument that he can find common ground with their Republican neighbors.

However, Buttigieg’s standing may have taken a hit since the last debate, where he was at the center of many attacks, including one from Warren on his willingness to accept donations from big-dollar donors. In our polling with Ipsos, Buttigieg was the only candidate whose net favorability (favorable rating minus unfavorable rating) fell — it dropped by about 2 points.

Buttigieg isn’t polling as well in Iowa as he once was, either. Friday’s Selzer poll of the Iowa caucuses found him in third at 16 percent, which is a pretty big shift from where he was in November — solidly in the lead with 25 percent of the vote. However, our primary forecast thinks Buttigieg is still likelier to win Iowa than other states where he’s in a relatively strong position, like New Hampshire and even his home state of Indiana. Without a win in Iowa, his chances of getting the nomination would become negligible, so the stakes for him are high.

Another problem for Buttigieg that might be even more troubling is that he also still needs a good answer on how he might better appeal to black voters. According to a January Quinnipiac survey, Buttigieg is polling at just 2 percent among black voters nationwide. And here in Iowa, Black Lives Matter protesters have been following him to events to confront him over his unsatisfactory (to them) record on racial justice in South Bend.

I’m keeping an eye on Klobuchar tonight, as this may be her last chance to catch fire in a nationally televised debate. Fortunately for her, the event is in Iowa, which also happens to be the state that has long been the focal point of her primary strategy.

There’s little debate that Klobuchar must do well in Iowa — if not outright win the state — to become a top-tier contender. Klobuchar is at about 7 percent in our Iowa polling average, good for fifth place behind the four candidates who lead the national polls, so there’s at least a modicum of evidence that her Iowa-centric approach has potential. Still, she may need to have a Rick Santorum-esque surge in the final three weeks or so before the caucuses to have a shot at winning, so this debate presents an opportunity for her to alter the trajectory of the race.

The smaller number of candidates on stage tonight could help Klobuchar, though, if the December debate is anything to go by. That debate featured only seven candidates, and Klobuchar ended up getting a lot more attention than in previous debates — she actually spoke more than any other candidate. And in FiveThirtyEight’s pre- and post-debate polling with Ipsos, Klobuchar essentially tied with Yang for the largest increase in net favorability among the candidates on stage — an indication that viewers reacted positively to her performance. So with more voters likely paying attention now, a repeat of that kind of performance might give her a boost in the polls — although the December debate doesn’t seem to have produced a Klobu-surge.

In terms of strategy, in the last debate, Klobuchar took a number of shots at Buttigieg, particularly on the issue of electability. So she might pursue a similar strategy this time around in the hopes of peeling off some of Buttigieg’s moderate supporters. There’s some evidence that this strategy may have worked well for her in December, too. A Monmouth University poll of Iowa that was released Monday found that 8 percent of voters were backing Klobuchar, putting her in fifth place, while Buttigieg was in third with 17 percent support. The poll also found that Klobuchar did best among voters who say they were moderate or conservative, winning 11 percent of them. Buttigieg however, still attracted more support in that group — 15 percent — so it makes sense that Klobuchar might aim to lure some of his backers to her own camp.

Klobuchar, of course, also needs to eat into Biden’s support, as he remains in the lead among more moderate and conservative voters, earning 35 percent in that Monmouth survey. At this point, Klobuchar doesn’t exactly have much time left to wait for a Biden collapse, so she might also try to appeal to electability-minded voters who are currently backing Biden. However, I’d expect her attacks against Biden to be more measured than the ones she made against Buttigieg last time — if she doesn’t do well in Iowa, she could still be in the mix as a vice presidential pick for one of the other contenders, including Biden, so she may not want to alienate a front-runner.

All in all, Klobuchar undoubtedly remains a long shot. She has less than a 1 percent shot of winning a majority of pledged delegates, according to our forecast. And she has just a 2 percent chance of winning the most votes in Iowa. But considering this debate might be her last chance to truly break through, Klobuchar could really be one to watch tonight.