What Went Down At The December Democratic Primary Debate

Not a ton of millionaires are sending their kids to public colleges, as others have noted. So this argument from Buttigieg is a bit overdone. Buttigieg does not support a wealth tax, but has been smart about kind of pivoting away from that position to more popular ones that are also contrasts with Warren and Sanders (Medicare for everyone who wants it, rather than Medicare for All, and free college for most people as opposed to free college for everyone).

Buttigieg sets himself apart from some of the other candidates by saying that college should be free for lower-income Americans but not for everyone. As former FiveThirtyEighter Ben Casselman wrote today, when you give people more options in a survey, that’s actually a reasonably popular position:

I mean, Micah, the thing about health care is that it doesn’t necessarily make a ton of sense to put it on a pedestal. Democrats’ opportunities to pass anything ambitious are going to be limited, with what would either be a narrow or non-existent majority in the Senate. It’s sort of served as a proxy for all other sorts of issues. But it’s also an issue where Sanders really outflanked the other liberals by getting them all to sign up for his health care plan! So by luck or design, it’s something that’s turned out really well for him. Will that change? I don’t know. Polls do show that voters care about health care a lot.