What Went Down At The Univision Democratic Debate

Tonight, we saw a capital-D Democratic debate. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders argued over who was more liberal on immigration, economic inequality, energy and other topics. Some questions were asked both in English and Spanish. But did Clinton or Sanders put together a game-changing performance? My guess is that neither of them did, and my colleagues mostly agreed. When asked to grade each candidate’s debate performances on how much they helped or hurt their chances of winning the nomination, Sanders came out slightly ahead of Clinton; he averaged a B+, and she averaged a B. (I gave both of them a B.)

FiveThirtyEight’s Democratic debate grades

	AVERAGE GRADE	HIGH GRADE	LOW GRADE
Bernie Sanders	B+	A-	B-
Hillary Clinton	B	B+	C

Clinton faced tough questions from the moderators about her emails and Benghazi, which put her on defense more than Sanders. Sanders, for his part, faced tough questions on his immigration voting record and his views on socialist regimes in Latin America. One other thing that became clear from tonight’s debate is that Clinton and Sanders are getting on one another’s nerves. In the last debate, Sanders snapped at Clinton for interrupting him. This time Clinton snapped at Sanders for interrupting her. That’s a far cry from the squabbling in the Republican debates, but it’s clear that both of them recognize they have a lot on the line. Sanders knows that he must capitalize on his win in Michigan yesterday. He trails Clinton by more than 200 pledged delegates, and the terrain next Tuesday isn’t great for him. While there’s been a lot of concentration on Ohio (where the polls have been bouncy), Clinton is a heavy favorite heading into the delegate-rich states of Florida, Illinois and North Carolina, where the polling averages give her leads of anywhere from 20 to 37 percentage points. Sanders better hope that either the polls are off in those states like they were in Michigan (a possibility), or the public saw tonight differently than we did (also a possibility). Otherwise, his victory in Michigan will simply be a battle won in a war lost.

One of the people commenting on our live blog started her own mini-debate about whether Clinton has morphed ideologically to match Sanders. As we move forward, both candidates will have to begin thinking about how their primary battle will shape the general election. It will be interesting to see how and when both parties start tacking back to the center, and whether the primary voters activated by non-establishment candidates will remain as passionate during the general election.

As we come to a close here, I wanted to put in perspective what a large audience Democrats are getting on Univision. According to a 2013 Pew Research Center report, Univision has more viewers than the Fox network and nearly the same number as ABC. Moreover, Univision tops all of the English-speaking networks in terms of viewers ages 18 to 49.

Is Puerto Rico a state or a country? It’s a facetious question, since it’s neither, but the issue is important economically. The island is in the midst of a debt crisis, because it owes about $70 billion. To put that in perspective: that’s only 70 percent of Puerto Rico’s GDP, which is very high compared to other U.S. states but very low compared to other countries.

https://twitter.com/jensmanuel/status/707775032970366977

I think it was a legitimate misunderstanding on Sanders’s part. He thought he was being called on. After what we saw in the GOP debates, it’s funny that political Twitter is now criticizing candidates for too closely paying attention to the moderator’s instructions.

This was a moment debated in political Twitter, with most people I follow saying Sanders came off poorly, both for interrupting his opponent and for whining about his speaking time. What did you all think? https://twitter.com/politico/status/707771191281451008

On a recent trip to Cuba, I found that people over 35 generally did not want to speak to me, and my translator warned me they were afraid of the government. Cuba has a famously complex two-currency system, as well as a hard-to-quantify economy that relies in part on cash payments by tourists and remittances from relatives abroad. Obama is gearing up to visit the nation in two weeks, and many American companies are planning to invest.

I find it perplexing that Sanders hasn’t brought up trade more in tonight’s debate. While we don’t know definitively that his hammering of Clinton on NAFTA and other trade deals helped him win Michigan, it’s possible it did. With the Ohio primary coming up next Tuesday — and its 159 delegates at stake — it seems tactically smart to bring up the issue again.

Lifting the Cuban embargo would be quite popular among Democrats and Latinos. According to a September Marist survey, 78 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of Latinos support it.

A query about Wall Street for the candidates was framed by a quote by Sen. Elizabeth Warren about what she sees as a “revolving door” between Wall Streeters and the White House. Those ties can also be indirect, as we’ve seen during the current administration. In 2013, Lawrence Summers, the economist and former Harvard University president, withdrew from consideration to be chair of the Federal Reserve because of criticism of both his policy stances and his taking fees for speeches to financiers. Warren has been famously silent while Sanders and Clinton duke things out. She’d be a big get as an endorsement.

Obama is a divisive figure, not equally appreciated by the bases of the two Democratic candidates. As FiveThirtyEight contributor Dan Hopkins pointed out: Clinton supporters like Obama a lot more than Sanders’s voters do.

Harry, to your point that many are seeing these candidates for the first time: There are signs that the television audience composition for debates is changing. Sunday night’s debate audience was, according to Nielsen, 9 percent men ages 18 to 34, 15 percent black and 9 percent Hispanic — all highs to date (not counting Telemundo’s simulcast of last month’s debate).

https://twitter.com/pewresearch/status/707770093581819904

https://twitter.com/CarrollDoherty/status/707770163383238656

Something I need to keep reminding myself is that most Americans don’t watch politics as closely as I do. For many, this debate is the first time they’ve heard the candidates speak. That’s especially the case for this Univision debate. It’s the reason it’s important to have more than just a few debates, which was the original plan of Democratic Party officials.

Sanders isn’t exactly right that the U.S. is “the only major country on Earth that doesn’t guarantee health care to all of our people,” but the U.S. certainly is in the minority among the most developed nations. He’s on firmer ground in questioning Clinton’s claim that 90 percent of Americans are covered — insurance coverage isn’t a yes-or-no proposition, and plenty have lousy plans.

Jobs and the frustration of Americans with an economy where the average real household income is less than it was 10 years ago is driving the candidacies of both Sanders and Trump. Both Clinton and Sanders are pushing different plans for paying for education and dealing with student debt, with Sanders proposing free college education at public institutions. Clinton, on the other hand, talks about refinancing student debt. It’s worth noting that student debt cannot be discharged in a bankruptcy, and a few seniors have even seen their Social Security checks garnished for student debt.

We’ve heard it a lot tonight: The unemployment rate for Latinos/Hispanics is higher than the national average — specifically, it was 5.4 percent in February 2016, compared to the national rate of 4.9 percent. But the gap has been narrowing since the Great Recession, when it was more than 3 percentage points higher.

A: Good question. Bill Clinton typically gets paid almost $200,000 per event, though he once made $750,000. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has made $270,000 for a speech. Former Vice President Al Gore once pocketed $156,000 for a half-hour speech. There’s plenty more on politicians-turned-paid-speakers from ABC News, Fortune, The Washington Post and the Daily Beast. Turns out it can pay better to be considered a business success than to be a political one: Trump has made $1.5 million a pop for speeches at the Learning Annex.

Following up on the Twitter wars about the comparison by Sanders and Clinton of guest worker programs to slavery, Darren Hutchinson (@dissentingj) tweeted me to point out that the Southern Poverty Law Center report called for reforming guest worker programs, not ending them. It was also titled “Close to Slavery,” which is not quite the same as Sanders’ direct parallel comparison to slavery.

Sanders’s performance in Michigan was unquestionably an eye-opener, but as we’ve said repeatedly the thing to keep those open eyes on is the delegate count. Our friend Dave Wasserman (star of many a FiveThirtyEight live blog) was in the office today and we got a chance to talk about the race, using our really cool delegate tracker. Here’s a little video of me trying to barely keep up as Dave maths it up like crazy. https://twitter.com/FiveThirtyEight/status/707729213336334337

Sanders brought up Clinton’s citation of praise from Henry Kissinger. Does this help Sanders connect with voters? We’re not sure — when he used this line of attack in a debate last month, we tried and failed to find any recent polls on Kissinger’s approval rating.

Many Americans might be asking themselves: “Who are the Koch brothers?” (Clinton said the Kochs, who run an industrial empire, had praised Sanders for opposing the Export-Import Bank.) According to a 2014 poll by George Washington University, 52 percent of Americans had no idea who Charles and David Koch are. For those who did know the billionaire conservative donors, a majority had an unfavorable opinion.

The Congressional Research Service and studies by U.S. Customs and Border Protection found that the U.S.-Mexico border wall that exists today cost $16 million to $21 million per mile. In several spots, it’s also undermined — literally — by narcotraffickers. Critics including former Texas Gov. (and former Presidential candidate) Rick Perry say the price and logistics are unworkable. Other critics believe it’s un-American, with Vice President Joe Biden saying “building walls is fundamentally contrary to what made this country what it is.” But the United States is just one of 65 nations choosing to wall its borders. That’s four times as many nations as when the Berlin Wall fell.

Most Democrats think Clinton has been honest about Benghazi. According to a November Fox News poll, 67 percent of Democrats said “yes… Clinton has been honest with the American people about the State Department’s role in the events surrounding the Benghazi terrorist attacks.”

Why did the crowd boo the Benghazi question? Maybe because “the public’s interest in the September 2012 attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, and the subsequent investigations into Clinton’s responsibility for the death of two U.S. diplomats while she was secretary of state, has dropped considerably since the events,” our colleague Leah Libresco reported last fall.

https://twitter.com/Crowdpac/status/707762659601481728

I’m somewhat worried, Micah, but let’s not go bonkers. We had a big error in New Hampshire in 2008 in Clinton’s favor, but the rest of the campaign didn’t feature major polling errors in her favor. If there’s a state I’m worried about most, it’s Ohio, which is like Michigan in a lot of ways.

Take a step back from the debate for a moment: How worried should we be that the polls in Ohio, Illinois and maybe Missouri could be as wrong as they were in Michigan?

Sanders has been working hard to make his call for Clinton to release transcripts of her speeches to Goldman Sachs catch on with voters and the media. The longer she resists these calls, the more voters might wonder just what she said. Last month, Politico tried to find out what Clinton said. One attendee said, “It was pretty glowing about us. It’s so far from what she sounds like as a candidate now. It was like a rah-rah speech. She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director.”

As Clinton and Sanders mock Trump in this Univision debate, it’s tough to overstate how much Hispanic voters hate Trump. A recent Washington Post-Univision poll found that Trump’s favorable rating among Hispanic voters was just 17 percent. He trailed Clinton among Hispanics in a hypothetical general-election matchup 73 percent to 16 percent.

The “auto bailout,” or more specifically the $80 billion in funds provided to General Motors and Chrysler by the federal government, came out of the TARP program, which also provided bailouts to major financial institutions. According to the Congressional Budget Office, a total of $80 billion was loaned to the auto industry. But all of that has since been paid back or written off by the Treasury. The real amount that the auto bailout cost the taxpayers, according to the CBO’s estimates, was $12 billion.

Tonight’s moderators — chiefly Maria Elena Salinas and Jorge Ramos of Univision, sitting with Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post — are leading the race so far for successfully cutting off candidates who go over their time, as well as the race in asking follow-ups when candidates don’t answer specific questions.

Earlier I raised the question of whether there’d be pushback against the comparisons between guest worker programs and slavery. Apparently there was some, judging from my Twitter feed. Here are a few tweets with an opposing points-of-view: https://twitter.com/angelcintronjr/status/707758821314265088 https://twitter.com/People4Bernie/status/707754025320652800

https://twitter.com/jensmanuel/status/707759484911878144

I love those moments when politicians feel their backs are against the wall. The good ones up their game. The bad ones don’t make it very far (see Pawlenty, Tim). Sanders knows he is far behind in the delegate count, while Clinton doesn’t want to give Sanders momentum after his win in Michigan.

This is the most negative Democratic debate so far, right, Harry?

Many in political Twitter are asking a question that echoes one that swept the Internet a year ago at this time: What color is Sanders’s suit? It looks brown on my screen, but his rapid response director says it’s blue, and that’s good enough for me. https://twitter.com/cascamike/status/707752659109978112

A Univision poll displayed in Spanish during the last commercial break showed that the third-most-important issue for women was abortion. A 2014 Pew survey showed that while a majority of Hispanics (56 percent) identify as Democrats, a majority of 53 percent also believe abortion should be made illegal in all or most circumstances.

The moderator pressed Clinton to commit to not deporting children because in the past, she has consistently declined to rule it out. “I would give every person, but particularly children, due process and have their story told,” Clinton has said, according to the Daily Beast, using language very similar to what she used tonight in her initial pass at the question. “And a lot of children will of course have very legitimate stories under our law to be able to stay.”

This debate has made it clear that both Clinton and Sanders want to get to the left of each other on immigration. Not only do Hispanics make up a substantial proportion of the Democratic vote in Florida, but Latinos have shown a willingness to adjust their opinions of politicians based upon their immigration stances. President Obama, for instance, saw a 12 percentage point bounce in his approval rating after signing an executive order offering temporary legal status to immigrants here illegally in 2014. Other Americans barely shifted their view of Obama during the same period, suggesting there was no penalty for Obama for his actions.

While the debate moderators are tapping into the Facebook discussion of the election, check out our map of the Facebook Primary — where, unlike in the actual national vote, Sanders is well ahead of Clinton.

A: David, I actually had the chance to co-moderate one presidential debate quite a while back — the September 2003 Fox News/Congressional Black Caucus debate, which was the first debate for the Democratic candidates that campaign. I think one thing that makes a huge difference is how many people are on stage. There was a cast of thousands — okay, make that nine — when I moderated. As the field shrinks, there is room for moderators to hammer back at candidates when they are evasive, and also more room for cross-talk (gentle or fierce) between candidates. I think the size of the field is as or more important than the moderators. But it’s also appealing to have a moderator who not only has researched intensively but also is willing to fact-check as candidates speak.

As both the Democratic and Republican races remain in flux, so does the American electorate itself. The Pew Research Center noted that white Americans, as a demographic, are the slowest-growing segment of the electorate, while Latinos and Asian-Americans are the fastest growing.

Univision is sponsoring a drive to register 3 million Latinos. Voter participation by Latinos lags considerably behind black and white registration and voting rates. But there are signs that Latinos are heeding the call to become naturalized citizens so they can vote against Trump. In this debate, both candidates were already asked if Trump was a racist. Sanders also compared exploitation in guest worker programs often used by Latinos to slavery… which may be seen as a flawed analogy by some listeners.

Sanders really did vote in 2006 for a House amendment to protect the Minutemen, a militia of private civilians that tried to block undocumented immigrants from entering the country, BuzzFeed News reported in December.

One of the debate sponsors — Spanish-language broadcaster Univision — is based in Miami, where the debate is taking place, and the focus it is bringing on immigration makes sense ahead of next Tuesday’s primary in Florida. In a Univision-Washington Post poll of likely voters in Florida’s Democratic primary conducted last week, 3 percent of respondents were Cuban and 12 percent more were Hispanics of non-Cuban origin. And 4 percent of respondents preferred to be interviewed in Spanish.

As my colleague Ben Casselman has written, most new immigrants to the U.S. are coming not from Latin America, but from Asian countries. While Mexico is still the largest single source of new immigrants, the numbers of new residents born in India and China is rising.

https://twitter.com/jensmanuel/status/707753607572094976

The two Democrats are just crushing Trump right now. It’s not just that this is a good line for a Democratic debate audience, but for the general election electorate as well. Look at the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll: Trump’s net favorability rating was -37 percentage points. That’s so low that ABC News noted that his favorability ratings “reflect remarkable levels of unpopularity for a major domestic political figure.”