What Went Down In The Fifth Democratic Debate

Much of the current ‘instant reaction’ to political events happens on Twitter. So to get a better handle on how the Twitter-verse responds to events, our friends at Ipsos are working on developing a real-time tracker of sentiment — and for the Democratic debates, they’re parsing all of Twitter to find what is being said of the candidates on the debate stage, separating Tweets into “positive” or “negative” categories, using a natural language processor.

This allows Ipsos to follow both the volume of conversation about the candidates — and whether that conversation is to a candidate’s benefit or detriment.

Here’s what they’ve found so far:

One of the two candidates I’ll be watching tonight is Steyer, although in many respects, he’s perhaps the least interesting candidate on stage. Polls show he does have a bit of a pulse Iowa and other early states, however, no doubt largely because of the massive amount of advertising money he’s spent there.

But frankly, I think Steyer’s job tonight is not to appeal to real Democratic voters but to “Morning Joe”-watchin’ elites who are clamoring for Bloomberg to enter the race. Steyer can plausibly claim to have several advantages over Bloomberg: He has already been running for several months, he doesn’t have Bloomberg’s problematic history with black voters because of New York’s stop-and-frisk policy, and he’s 62 years old rather than 77. I don’t really think Steyer has much of a chance anyway, but his chances probably go from slim to none if Bloomberg runs. So if you’re Steyer, you say whatever you have to say to appeal to these Acela-ridin’ elites, which probably involves some combination of liberalism on social policy and “common sense” (read: centrism) on fiscal policy. Then you hope folks decide that you’re a more viable candidate than the former mayor.

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.