What Went Down At The Nevada Democratic Debate

I’m your Warren correspondent this evening and I’ll be monitoring a candidate who’s in a bad way. Once a co-front-runner of sorts, Warren now faces sliding poll numbers, lack of media attention after mediocre performances in the Iowa and New Hampshire contests, and a pervasive sense that she isn’t “electable.” According to our forecast, Warren is projected to win just 13 percent of the vote in Nevada. But in a pre-New Hampshire memo, her campaign emphasized that the support of some of Warren’s rivals is more ephemeral than it might seem and that ultimately, Warren would be able to collect the most delegates as “the consensus choice of the widest coalition of Democrats in every corner of the country.”

Debates have been moments in which Warren has shined, too, and there’s already some indication that her knife will be sharpened when she takes the stage. She seems particularly focused on attacking Bloomberg, as do a number of other candidates. On Tuesday, her campaign account tweeted out an article about Bloomberg’s notoriously short fuse and wrote, “It’s a shame Mike Bloomberg can buy his way into the debate. But at least now primary voters curious about how each candidate will take on Donald Trump can get a live demonstration of how we each take on an egomaniac billionaire.”

I’ll be watching to see how Warren addresses questions about or attacks on her campaign’s viability going forward, and whether she talks about the diminishing media coverage she’s received.

The candidate I’m watching tonight is Buttigieg. And although he technically has won the most pledged delegates so far, our forecast is pretty down on him, giving him just a 1 in 100 chance of winning a majority of pledged delegates. A big part of that is his weakness with voters of color. In fact, our forecast expects him to get just 13 percent of the vote, on average, in Nevada and 11 percent in South Carolina, two states with significant shares of nonwhite voters.

Nevada in particular represents his first chance to show he can do well in a state that isn’t as overwhelmingly white as Iowa and New Hampshire, so I’ll be looking for efforts to reach out to Hispanic and black voters — and how genuine they come off.

For example, might Buttigieg try to speak a little Spanish during the debate? It’s one of the eight languages he speaks, and he recently started airing a TV ad in which he speaks directly to the camera in Spanish. But if he does, there’s the risk that other voters will be turned off by it. A YouGov poll in June 2019 found that 46 percent of Democrats thought it was respectful when presidential candidates spoke Spanish during a debate, but 32 percent thought it was pandering. And it may not even help that much in attracting Hispanic support; according to the polling firm Equis Labs, Spanish is the preferred language of only 29 percent of Hispanic registered Democrats in Nevada.

I also expect Buttigieg to go after the other candidates in his “moderate” lane — which, with the rise of Bloomberg and Klobuchar, has gotten quite crowded! At the Iowa and New Hampshire debates, Buttigieg himself (who did well in those two states) was the target of these sharp elbows, but now many of them seem likely to head Bloomberg’s way. We’ve seen Buttigieg be an effective attack dog in debates before (just ask Warren); it wouldn’t shock me if he attempts to reassert control with another feisty performance tonight.

One candidate you won’t see on the stage tonight is Tom Steyer, even though, unlike Bloomberg, he is actually contesting Nevada.

He is actively campaigning in the state — and he isn’t polling too terribly there either (he’s in fifth behind Buttigieg) — but he still failed to meet any of the requirements to qualify for the debate stage. However, the lack of recent qualifying polls may have been a particular issue for him (and his campaign has certainly tried to make that case).

In fact, this will be the first debate Steyer has missed since September. His last performance in New Hampshire was a bit odd, though — he was one of the two candidates I was watching — with the billionaire spending much of his time trying to guide the conversation and agree with the other candidates rather than pitch himself and his platform.

That said, Steyer certainly hasn’t thrown in the towel just yet. In the past week alone, Steyer is second only to Bloomberg in Facebook ad spending nationally — though it’s worth noting it’s a distant second, with Steyer spending close to $700,000 compared to Bloomberg’s $8 million. Similarly, he’s also continuing to take up a healthy chunk of airtime with TV ad buys, according to FiveThirtyEight’s ad tracker.

A quick interjection as everyone else outlines what they’re looking for from their assigned candidate tonight: Harry Reid is throwing shade at Iowa and New Hampshire.

He’s not wrong — Nevada is the most representative early state.

The last time Klobuchar was on a primary debate stage, she managed to dramatically reverse her fortunes in New Hampshire. Her strong New Hampshire debate performance helped catapult her into a surprise third-place finish in the primary, and she raised more than $12 million in the days after the debate, according to her campaign. So tonight the pressure’s on — can she keep the momentum going with just days to go before the Nevada caucuses? And will she stand out in a debate that seems almost certain to be overshadowed by the presence of Bloomberg?

One big question for Klobuchar is whether she can appeal to a diverse coalition of voters in states like Nevada and South Carolina, after relying on a largely white, college-educated base in New Hampshire. Recent national polls have essentially found no support among voters of color for her. Last weekend, when asked about how she’ll draw in black, Asian and Latino voters, Klobuchar didn’t have a great answer other than more people “need to get to know her.” But recent questions about her record as a prosecutor in Minnesota and her record on immigration might not make it easier for her to appeal to nonwhite voters. Additionally, she was one of two candidates (along with Steyer, who didn’t make tonight’s debate) who couldn’t remember the name of Mexico’s president in a Telemundo interview in Nevada last week — not a great look in a state with a large Latino population.

We’ll see if she tries to address these issues head-on, and how she responds if she gets questions about them. I’ll also be watching to see if Klobuchar is able to land some punches against Bloomberg. Last week, she said that she can “beat him on a debate stage.” She’ll finally get her chance to try tonight.

We’re back with randomly drawn candidate assignments, and tonight each of our politics reporters will be watching one of the six candidates who have made tonight’s stage.

How it works is simple: Our politics reporters cover their candidates’ performances in detail, including a post on what they see as each candidate’s strategy going into the debate and a final write-up on how they think their candidates fared tonight. For example, was Bloomberg, in fact, the center of attention tonight? Or did candidates avoid making everything about Bloomberg and go after the actual front-runner (Sanders) instead?

To be sure, we’ll still be watching the debate holistically and reacting to things as they happen in the moment, but the idea here is that we’ll also have a few folks dedicated to following whomever they drew, providing detailed insight on how well (or poorly) their candidates are doing.

Here is who’s watching whom:

• Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux is watching Klobuchar.
• Nathaniel Rakich is watching Buttigieg.
• Clare Malone is watching Warren.
• Geoffrey Skelley is watching Biden.
• Perry Bacon is watching Sanders.
• Nate Silver is watching Bloomberg.

What will follow is a series of posts on what our writers will be looking for with each candidate tonight. Amid the general back-and-forth of the live blog, Clare, Nate, Perry, Nathaniel, Amelia and Geoffrey will also periodically check in on how they think their candidates are doing. Kaleigh Rogers will also be following the candidates tonight in close detail and will kick in a post about Steyer, who didn’t make the stage but will be on the ballot in Nevada.

If you have a candidate-specific or policy-specific question, please send ’em to us on Twitter. I’ll try to answer them here on the live blog.

We will talk about other things on this live blog — I promise — but the big news going into tonight’s debate is the addition of Michael Bloomberg to the stage.

It’s Bloomberg’s first appearance all cycle, and he’s bound to grab headlines regardless of his performance given his recent rise in the polls. He’s essentially tied with Joe Biden now at around 16 percent in our national polling average, even though he hasn’t competed in any of the states that have already voted. His name won’t be on the cards that Nevada caucusgoers fill out either.

Yet this debate could be pivotal because it’s the first time voters will have a chance to directly hear from Bloomberg on why he should be president. Presumably, other candidates — particularly those also running in the “moderate” lane, including Biden, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigeig — will be looking to tell voters why they should pick these more established candidates instead of Bloomberg. It’s also entirely possible, though, that Bloomberg’s addition to the stage will be more of a distraction than anything else, when all the candidates might otherwise be focused on Sanders. He is, after all, currently the front-runner and has a very good chance of winning the most votes in Nevada, at least according to our model.

There are a couple ways tonight could unfold, but as we saw in New Hampshire with Klobuchar, candidates’ performances could be decisive for voters in Nevada who are still deciding who to back. (Klobuchar got good reviews in the debate just before New Hampshire voted, and hugely outperformed her polls.) So the stakes tonight are as high as ever, especially for everyone who isn’t Sanders and who’s hoping to have a breakout performance at the caucuses on Saturday. (Think Elizabeth Warren, for example.)

As always, thanks for joining us. We’ll be watching the debate together — you, me and our team of political analysts (including editor-in-chief Nate Silver). So stay tuned as we update the blog with analysis, charts, thoughts, questions, ideas, idle fancies and more. We’ll be talking in real time about everything that happens on stage — what issues the candidates talk about, who they attack, how they position themselves, etc. — and how the media covers the debate.

We’ll also answer all your 2020-related questions. So if you have thoughts, inquiries, requests or anything else, send ’em to us on Twitter.