What Went Down At The December Democratic Primary Debate

Here’s the question of the night: Which candidate will be the first to make a Star Wars joke? My money’s on Yang, but maybe it’ll be Bernie — or, as his supporters are calling him, “Obi Bern Kenobi.” (You may groan.)

Biden remains comfortably ahead of his opponents in national polls. In the early primary and caucus states, he is second in Iowa (Buttigieg is first), third in New Hampshire (trailing Buttigieg and Sanders) and in the lead in both Nevada and South Carolina.

The former vice president is in a fairly strong position in my view, not only because of his own strengths but also because Buttigieg’s rise doesn’t threaten him all that much. The South Bend, Indiana, mayor is in position to win Iowa and New Hampshire — states Sanders and Warren really need to win if they want to take on Biden. But because Buttigieg shows no signs of making gains among voters of color, he is a weaker contender once the primary process moves past the overwhelmingly white states of Iowa and New Hampshire.

As for his debate strategy tonight, I would expect Biden continues to employ the strategy he has pursued throughout the year — suggest he is the candidate best-positioned to defeat Trump, play up his ties to former President Obama and argue some of the more liberal policy ideas of Sanders and Warren won’t work and actually make it harder for Democrats to win the general election.

My big question tonight is this: How will Biden deal with Buttigieg, and vice versa? The former vice president, perhaps aware of what I laid out above, has not attacked Buttigieg all that much, even as the mayor has surged in polls. But I wonder if tonight Biden takes some jabs at Buttigieg, or plays up his experience to contrast with the 37-year-old. I tend to think Buttigieg winning in Iowa and/or New Hampshire, as opposed to Warren or Sanders, helps Biden, but of course, the safest course of action would be for the former vice president to win those states himself. And if the mayor starts more directly attacking Biden, casting him as a figure from an older generation that needs to give up power, how does the vice-president respond?

There is one big caveat to all this, though: It’s not clear this debate (or any of the upcoming ones) has big stakes for Biden, especially considering he has had bad moments in some of the previous debates and those have not really affected his poll numbers. Biden has remained between 25 and 28 percent in the polls for months now, suggesting his lackluster debate performances aren’t turning off his supporters. (Or perhaps they are only lackluster in the minds of journalists like me!)

I’m watching Sanders in tonight’s debate. And although he’s currently at a high point in his campaign (18.0 percent support, according to our national polling average), his standing has been remarkably steady, hovering between 14 and 18 percent. He really needs to break out of that range, though, to transform from a factional candidate into a nomination-bound front-runner. The problem for Sanders is that Biden’s numbers have also been remarkably steady, remaining between 25 and 28 percent. Something’s gotta give, probably for both Sanders and Biden, if Sanders is to surpass the polling leader.

Working to his advantage is the fact that Sanders is a consistently strong debate performer who delivers a message of economic justice in a rousing style — but that has only taken him so far. If Sanders wants to use tonight’s debate to break out of his usual polling range, some potentially effective tactics could include attacking Biden on electability or racial issues, where he might be vulnerable, or coopting the messages of other liberal or outside-the-establishment candidates.

According to an Emerson College poll conducted earlier this week, almost 60 percent of Sanders’s 2016 supporters aren’t supporting him this time around. Fifteen percent of Sanders 2016 supporters are currently with Warren, 16 percent with Biden, 10 percent with Buttigieg and 6 percent with Yang, so they seem like the best candidates for Sanders to attack — and Warren is at the head of that list. In my opinion, their friendship continues to hold Sanders back politically, causing them to play nice with each other when Sanders could potentially gain a lot from a weaker Warren. It’s probably no coincidence that Sanders’s recent uptick in the polls has come amid a Warren polling collapse.