What Went Down In The Fifth Democratic Debate

Tonight, I’m watching two candidates on the periphery of the race: Klobuchar and Booker.

Klobuchar got good reviews for her assertive debate performance in October, and it may have moved the needle in Iowa, where she has averaged 5 percent in polls conducted there entirely since the last debate. Of course, that’s only good for fifth place, but she has already qualified for the December debate — which is notable, as only six candidates have so far. But still, she’s got a ways to go before she cracks the top tier, so she’ll want to stay on offense tonight. For instance, Buttigieg got an even bigger boost coming out of the October debate by framing himself as the same type of moderate alternative that Klobuchar is aiming to be, so she might want to box him out or even attack him directly tonight. Buttigieg’s recent surge in Iowa polls (and New Hampshire) suggests that at least a portion of the electorate is still open to changing its mind, and that, specifically, there may be an appetite for a someone who pitches themselves as a pragmatic, electable Midwesterner — like Klobuchar.

For Booker, on the other hand, this debate is probably do-or-die. As things stand, he looks like a long shot to qualify for the December debate — he has not reached the new fundraising threshold, but an even bigger problem is that he has yet to collect a single qualifying poll with only about three weeks left until the deadline. And the more I think about it, the more I agree with Sarah, who argued in a recent Slack chat that he might very well drop out once he stops qualifying for debates. So Booker needs a distinguishing moment tonight — maybe something along the lines of Harris’s attack on Biden in the first debate? — for his campaign to survive. His shtick in the previous debates (playing the happy warrior against President Trump’s divisiveness), while strong in my opinion, clearly hasn’t been cutting it.

Tonight, I’ll be watching Harris and Yang, two candidates fighting for continued relevance. Once polling as high as 20 percent in some national surveys, Harris is now trying to recover from her long slide in the polls to return to the front-runner conversation. Meanwhile, Yang has gone from being a rounding error in the polls to a candidate with a small but committed base of support, and his next step is to be taken seriously as a viable alternative for the Democratic nomination.

After the first debate, Harris looked like a top-tier contender, but oh, how times have changed. At the end of October, Harris trimmed staff and shuttered field offices to go “all in” on Iowa, and her campaign is struggling with back-biting over what’s gone wrong and who is to blame. But Harris isn’t done for — she raised nearly $12 million in the third quarter, so she’s got the resources to keep going. She’s also had a poll bounce before, so another strong debate performance could give her campaign a much-needed shot in the arm. Given her focus on Iowa, Harris might shape her debate approach to maximize her appeal there, too. That could include making direct references to the state, but also focusing on why she is the best candidate to defeat Trump, which a new CNN/Des Moines Register/Mediacom survey found was the priority for 63 percent of potential caucus-goers. In that same poll, 46 percent still said they were considering Harris, so she may well be able to grow her support there. Her poll numbers might be down, but her campaign still has the potential to stitch together different factions of the party. The clock is ticking, though.

The question for Yang is whether he can become more than a candidate who’s best known for proposing a universal basic income. Historically, candidates with pet policies or narrow political agendas haven’t had much luck in presidential primaries, but few (if any) of those candidates ever built up the kind of loyal small-donor base that Yang has mobilized. Yang raised about $10 million in the third quarter, nearly as much as Harris and much more than some candidates close to him in the polls, such as Booker ($6 million) or Klobuchar ($4.8 million). So tonight’s debate presents an opportunity for Yang to argue that he can win the nomination and defeat Trump. The debate is also an important opportunity for Yang to stay in the political limelight: He’s still one qualifying poll short of making the December debate. He already has the donors he needs, though, so a solid showing tonight could also help him, at the very least, secure a spot on the next debate stage.

We’re back with randomly drawn candidate assignments, and tonight each of our politics reporters will be watching one (or two) candidates. Biden and Warren each get their own correspondent as the two candidates at the top of the national polls, but the rest of the field is split up, with each reporter covering a candidate who is doing relatively well in the polls alongside someone stuck in the low single digits.

Our politics reporters will 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, did Biden successfully navigate conversation around his relatively low poll numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire, or about the ongoing impeachment inquiry and his family’s involvement in Ukraine? Or did someone like Buttigieg once again steal the spotlight?

To be sure, we’ll still be watching the debate for the big picture and key takeaways with plenty of reactions to things as they happen in the moment, but the idea here is that we’ll also have a few folks dedicated to following whichever candidates they drew, providing detailed insight on how well (or poorly) each of them are doing.

Here is who’s watching whom:

• Geoffrey Skelley is watching Harris and Yang.
• Nathaniel Rakich is watching Klobuchar and Booker.
• Nate Silver is watching Buttigieg and Steyer.
• Perry Bacon Jr. is watching Sanders and Gabbard.
• Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux is watching Warren.
• Clare Malone is watching Biden.

What follows is a series of posts on what our writers are looking for with each candidate tonight. Amid the general back-and-forth of the live blog, Clare, Nate, Perry, Amelia, Nathaniel 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.