What Went Down At The South Carolina Democratic Debate

Maybe, Clare, but like … what else do you attack him on? People don’t seem to be buying the electability argument against Sanders.

Maybe that’s a little 2016, Micah? I sort of wonder if he’s moved past that critique.

Twice in the last debate, Biden tried to shoehorn gun control into an answer as a way to contrast himself with Sanders, but the topic of guns never explicitly came up. So Biden brings it up in his first answer of the night tonight.

Sanders’s record on guns is probably his biggest weakness in a Democratic primary, right?

And Biden comes out swinging against Sanders, too — on his old “Report Card” with the NRA, which was once good. This Biden attack, coupled with the Warren one, is proof positive that Sanders is the frontrunner to beat.

SEEMS LIKE THE ESTABLISHMENT PACKED THE AUDIENCE TONIGHT.

If I were working for these campaigns, I would push the debate sponsors not to use those wide shots that show the candidates raising their hands to talk. 🔥 take!

I want to claim half credit on my guess for the first question, because every candidate is treating it as, “please compare and contrast yourself with Bernie Sanders.”

Buttigieg says that if you think you’ve seen chaos and craziness in the past four years, just wait until it’s Trump vs. Sanders in the presidential race. Seems like it’s the as-expected “attack Bernie” show so far, though Warren and Steyer have said his analysis is right but he’s not the right person to lead.

Warren brings up one of the big criticisms of Sanders, that he hasn’t explained how much his plans will cost, or how he will pay for it. It’s something he’s been trying to counter in the last few days.

“Think about what that will be like for this country,” Buttigieg said, referring to a Sanders-Trump election. That doesn’t quite seem to resonate with the fact that a large majority of Democrats like Bernie Sanders.

Steyer running to be … Bernie’s best friend?

Shades of Hillary Clinton there from Warren: “We need a progressive who gets things done.”

It’s kind of striking to hear Warren drawing such a clear contrast with Sanders. She hasn’t really done that in past debates. But obviously she is under a lot of pressure to show why she’s a better progressive candidate than Sanders is now.

Warren uses her first answer to draw a clear contrast with Sanders. “Bernie and I agree on a lot of things, but I would be a better president than Bernie.”

Well, we’ve got the fighting version of Warren again this debate: she jumps off by saying her standard line “Bernie and I have a lot in common” but twists to, “but I think I’d be a better president.” She’s really digging in hard against him.

Bloomberg is the one who comes out of the gate swinging tonight — referencing the report that Russia is trying to interfere in the election in a way that helps the Sanders campaign.

Agreed, and he took to opportunity to come out of the gate with a quick swipe at Bloomberg. Is Bloomberg still Sanders’s main target?

Relatively speaking, this first question is a bit of a hanging slider for Bernie. The sort of question his whole campaign is prepared to answer.

They’re taking questions via Twitter. That’s the first time any debate this cycle has taken “audience” questions, right?

Funny you should say that, Nathaniel. FiveThirtyEight built a whole quiz on this topic — “Sports commentator or political pundit?”

Maybe something like, “Sen. Sanders, in the wake of your Nevada win, you’re now the clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination. Yet some members of your party aren’t sure you can win in November. What makes you the most electable choice?”

These pre-debate montages always remind me of sports games.

Really?! I could see it being about the coronavirus personally.

Sarah, I think it will be something vague like, “Bernie Sanders is the new front-runner. Please comment.”

OK, any guesses as to what the first question will be?

I’ll be focusing on Sanders tonight, and I don’t think I’ll be alone.

Sanders is the front-runner: According to FiveThirtyEight’s primary forecast, he has a 43 percent chance of winning a majority of pledged delegates. That’s the same as the chance that no one getting a majority of delegates and far ahead of the next highest contender, Biden (10 percent).

And with a lead now in both delegates and our national poll average, Sanders probably has a big target on his back going into tonight’s debate. Other candidates will certainly be aiming at Sanders, so I’m interested to see how he parries their jabs.

Sanders hasn’t been easily ruffled by attacks in previous debates and usually seems prepared to rebut most criticisms. He got some practice earlier this week when he appeared on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” There, he faced questions about his praise of certain aspects of dictatorial regimes and about just how much his policies would cost, areas that have drawn attacks from other campaigns in the last few days.

Sanders tried to defend his past comments about Cuba by saying he opposes authoritarian regimes. But he also didn’t entirely disavow his previous comments, saying “When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?” It’s a soundbite his opponents, including Buttigieg and Bloomberg, have latched onto.

Meanwhile, when pressed on details about how much his proposed social programs would cost — a question that has continually dogged his campaign — Sanders mostly glossed over his responses, telling correspondent Anderson Cooper, “I can’t rattle off to you every nickel and every dime.” Sanders ended up releasing a more detailed health care plan Monday night, but it still leaves a lot of questions unanswered, so I expect some candidates to push him on this.

It will be interesting to see how much time other candidates spend trying to knock Sanders down tonight, and how he responds. Even attacks can sometimes bolster a candidate if the candidate can stay balanced, so let’s see how light Sanders is on his feet.

Poll bot… SMH. Maybe, it’s best you stick with polls.

Bleep bloop… Poll bot here, providing you with polling bites throughout the debate. And let me just tell you, nothing about my intelligence is artificial… 😂 #PollBot4ANetflixSpecial2020

I’ll be following along with Biden tonight in his absolutely crucial debate. Why?

Well, Biden has staked pretty much his entire candidacy on the idea that he is the choice of the diverse base of the Democratic Party. Black voters are a large part of the core of Biden’s support, too, so his campaign has gone all in on South Carolina, which has a lot of black voters that Biden hopes to win on Saturday.

If he doesn’t win the state, there’s a real question as to whether his candidacy could crumble. He hasn’t performed well in the first few states, and even though he finished second in Nevada — his highest finish among the first three states — it wasn’t close to Sanders. That said, Biden is the current favorite in South Carolina, although we still don’t have a ton of recent polls. He projected to win, on average, 32 percent of the vote, according to our forecast.

Tonight, I think the other candidates will be out to poke holes in the Biden candidacy, particularly Bloomberg, if he can swing it, since it’s largely the former New York mayor who stands to gain from a Biden tumble in the polls. Biden has struggled in debates, too. Though in last week’s contentious one, he was able to hang back and watch the others swing at each other. He’ll have no such luxury tonight; one hopes he’s eaten his Wheaties.

Bloomberg took a lot of heat from other candidates in last week’s debate, and he at times struggled to respond.

But here’s why I think he’s likely to have a stronger performance tonight. First, I suspect many of the candidates (Biden and Buttigieg in particular) will focus on attacking Sanders because this is the last debate before Super Tuesday, a day when the Vermont senator could amass a large lead in the nomination contest. This means the former New York mayor won’t be as much of a focus. Second, Bloomberg has now faced the most obvious lines of attack against him: past homophobic and sexist remarks, nondisclosure agreements with women who worked at his company and the New York Police Department’s use of stop-and-frisk tactics when he was mayor. I’m not saying Bloomberg has addressed these issues well — only that they perhaps won’t be as damning since many people watching the debate will have heard them once before. Finally, Bloomberg could do better in a second debate simply because he hadn’t been in a forum like that since he left office in 2013.

All that said, just because Bloomberg won’t be on the defensive as much doesn’t mean that he will necessarily do well in the debate.

Tonight I’m watching Warren, who is in an interesting position. On one hand, she finished a disappointing fourth place in Nevada. On the other hand, some national polls taken immediately after the Nevada debate had encouraging numbers for her. I suspect that this was a direct consequence of her performance at the last debate, where she threw the sharpest elbows of anyone: It was Warren who set the tone of the evening by using her very first answer to call Bloomberg an “arrogant billionaire” and accuse him of “hiding his tax returns, of harassing women and of supporting racist polls like redlining and stop and frisk.” Warren also engineered Bloomberg’s worst moment of the night by pressuring him to release women who worked for him from their nondisclosure agreements. But it wasn’t just Bloomberg on the receiving end: Warren also unleashed rapid-fire criticisms of Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Sanders on policy issues like health care.

This strategy seemed to work for Warren, too, as many pundits crowned her the winner of the Nevada debate. Consequently, I expect more of the same from Warren tonight. Bloomberg is the perfect foil for her crusade against inequality. Meanwhile, she might want to hit Sanders even harder tonight. With less than a 1 in 100 chance (0.2 percent, to be precise) of winning a majority of pledged delegates, per the FiveThirtyEight forecast, Warren has little to lose tonight. Given that debates have historically been a strength for Warren and that this is the last such opportunity before a whopping 1,769 delegates are awarded, look for her to leave it all out on the field.

FiveThirtyEight writers are assigned randomly to watch a specific candidate, or so my editor claims. Last week, I got perhaps the most exciting assignment of the evening in Bloomberg. This time, I’ve got perhaps the most boring one in Buttigieg.

I don’t mean that as any offense to Buttigieg, who is generally a good debater. But, it’s not clear that there’s that much on the line for him tonight. Without any Midwestern states on the calendar on Super Tuesday save for Minnesota — home to his frenemy Amy Klobuchar — he doesn’t have a lot of natural strengths on the map next week. (Our model thinks the best chances for an upset win for him might come in Maine or Arkansas.) Nor is it likely that Buttigieg will be the center of media attention after the debate, with what will likely be a lot of focus on Sanders (as the other candidates finally seem to be treating him as the front-runner), Bloomberg (as he tries to recover from last week’s disaster) and Biden (as he tries to resurrect his chances with a South Carolina win).

Buttigieg also faces a little bit of a dilemma:

• On the one hand, he wants to present himself as a unity candidate: a compromise between the Sanders wing of the party and the Bloomberg wing;
• On the other hand, his chances of becoming the nominee depend heavily on the nomination process remaining drawn out, with there being no clear front-runner after Super Tuesday and possibly a contested convention.

The former consideration might call for him to try to be the nice guy while everyone else on stage bickers. However, the latter would mandate a lot more aggression — in particular, it’s in Buttigieg’s interest for Sanders to have a rough debate, which would make those messy post-Super Tuesday scenarios more likely.

If I were coaching Buttigieg, I’d suppose I’d opt for the latter approach and tell him to join the Sanders pile-on. As I mentioned, even a strong Buttigieg performance might not get noticed. But a weak Sanders one certainly would be, and would improve Buttigieg’s relatively slim chances at the nomination.

The main question for Klobuchar tonight is: How does she remain relevant in the race?

Klobuchar benefited from a last-minute polling surge in New Hampshire, thanks in part to her debate performance, and finished in third with about 20 percent of the vote. But she wasn’t able to parlay that into a solid showing in Nevada, receiving less than 10 percent of the initial vote preference and only around 4 percent of county convention delegates. Heading into South Carolina, there’s not much reason to think she’ll do well there, either: She’s at 5 percent in our South Carolina polling average and has less than a 1 percent chance of winning the most votes in the state, according to our forecast. So the pressure is on for Klobuchar to have a strong debate performance, akin to the one in New Hampshire that helped her win over late deciders and moderates in that state.

In the Nevada debate last week, Klobuchar and Buttigieg got into a number of back-and-forths, but I wonder if it would be better for her to take some swipes at Biden and Bloomberg. Klobuchar needs to pick up more support among moderate voters if she’s going to have any chance of clearing the 15 percent delegate threshold in Super Tuesday states other than her home state of Minnesota. Going after Biden and/or Bloomberg could help her make a dent in their support. She did go after Bloomberg to some extent in the last debate, but she probably needs to step it up this time around. Of course, there’s the risk that as a female candidate, going negative will be perceived more unfavorably than if a male candidate were to do so. It hasn’t stopped Warren yet, though, so Klobuchar might want to take a page out of her book.

Klobuchar will also want to try and broaden her appeal ahead of South Carolina, as she’s struggled to make inroads with voters of color. So far, her background as a prosecutor has been a liability on this front, and it’s unclear if she can connect with communities of color. After all, her campaign primarily focused on Iowa and New Hampshire, but it may not have an answer for how to do well in more diverse states. But whatever happens tonight, the bottom line is clear: Klobuchar needs some kind of boost moving forward and she needs it fast, as her path to winning the nomination is increasingly narrowing.

Steyer is back on the debate stage in South Carolina tonight, after failing to qualify for last week’s debate in Nevada. It’s something of a do-or-die moment for the billionaire activist, who has for months been lavishing money and attention on South Carolina — with a particular focus on the state’s black voters. He used a similar strategy in Nevada that didn’t get him very far: After spending almost $12 million on TV ads and regularly visiting the state, he still finished fifth behind Sanders, Biden, Buttigieg and Warren. But things could be different for him in South Carolina. He’s currently in third place, according to our average of state polls, so Steyer might want to brace himself for some heat at the debate from rivals who have mostly ignored him so far.

In past debates, Steyer hasn’t really scrapped with his rivals — if anything, he’s stood out for being strenuously agreeable. But he may find himself with a target on his back tonight. Biden has already been blaming Steyer for siphoning some of Biden’s support among black voters. And as the South Carolina primary approaches, Steyer’s strategy of blanketing the state with money has received more scrutiny, with some accusing him of trying to buy influence in the state.

Steyer and his supporters have been fighting back aggressively against these criticisms, saying that black voters are more inclined to consider him because of his message, including his support for reparations for slavery and pledge to invest $125 billion in historically black colleges and universities. But this hasn’t stopped Biden from hammering Steyer on other fronts, including his previous investments in private prisons, which Steyer said earlier this week were a mistake. Those attacks could come up again tonight — and with just a few days left before a contest that’s crucial for his candidacy, we’ll see how well Steyer holds up under pressure.

We’re back with randomly drawn candidate assignments, and tonight each of our politics reporters will be watching one of the seven 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, is Sanders finally the center of attention? Candidates are running out of time to make their cases for why they’re the best alternative to Sanders — and they need to make one fast if they want to overtake him.

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 Steyer.
• Geoffrey Skelley is watching Klobuchar.
• Nate Silver is watching Buttigieg.
• Nathaniel Rakich is watching Warren.
• Perry Bacon is watching Bloomberg.
• Clare Malone is watching Biden.
• Kaleigh Rogers is watching Sanders.

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, Kaleigh, Amelia and Geoffrey will also periodically check in on how they think their candidates are doing.

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’ve once again partnered with Ipsos to track how the debate affected likely primary voters’ feelings about the candidates. Using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, we interview the same group of voters twice, once on either side of the debate, to see how their attitudes shift in reaction to the events on age. As you can see in the chart below, the topline takeaway headed into tonight is that the largest share of voters are potentially considering supporting Sanders.

This marks a departure from previous polling with Ipsos, as in the past Biden has led in this metric going into a debate. Still, the former vice president isn’t that far behind Sanders, with 38 percent considering supporting him compared with the 46 percent who said they were considering Sanders. So a strong performance by Biden — or one of the other candidates — could shake up voters’ list of maybes. Be sure to check back on our poll tomorrow afternoon to see what voters thought of the candidates’ performance tonight and how that has (or hasn’t) changed the picture heading into South Carolina on Saturday.

Last week Bloomberg captured headlines, but this time around our money is on Sanders … or at least, that’s who we think the candidates will go after. At this point, Sanders is the front-runner and other candidates can’t afford to leave him be. Too much is at stake.

This isn’t just the last debate before South Carolina votes on Saturday — it’s also the last debate before Super Tuesday, when more than one-third of delegates will have been awarded. And Sanders seems to have an edge in several of the states slated to vote next Tuesday, including delegate-rich California (our forecast thinks he’ll win 31 percent of the vote, on average) and Texas (27 percent of the vote, on average). But Sanders’s margin in those states matter, and if his competitors are able to stop him from rising farther in the polls — or even land a few blows that hurt his standing — that could open up the race. Of course, it won’t just be Sanders in the hot seat. Biden currently has a 2 in 3 chance of winning the most votes in South Carolina (32 percent of the vote, on average), so expect candidates to come after him. Bloomberg is still running roughly neck-and-neck with Biden in our national polling average. In fact, maybe this week’s debate will be packed with even more drama than last week’s!

As always, thanks again 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.