What Went Down In The Fifth Democratic Debate

Sanders is very much a major figure in this race. He is third in most national polls, and he’s effectively in a four-way tie with Biden, Buttigieg and Warren in Iowa and New Hampshire. Even a heart attack didn’t really hurt his poll numbers.

I’m watching for three things from the Vermont senator. First, he and Warren have not attacked each other in the previous debates, instead essentially presenting a unified front in defense of the party’s more liberal ideas — particularly Medicare for All. Do they continue on that course, tonight, or does one of them try to differentiate themselves from the other? Secondly, with Biden and Buttigieg really leaning into their opposition to Medicare for All and even Warren touting a more modest version of the idea, does Sanders try to distinguish himself by passionately and unequivocally defending his health care plan tonight? Finally, does the angst from wealthy Democrats like Michael Bloomberg about the party’s 2020 field provide fodder for Sanders to spend much of the debate bashing billionaires?

Gabbard, the other candidate I’m watching tonight, is well behind in the polls, but as Harris learned in the July debate, she can attack clearly and sharply. I wonder if she brings the heat to Buttigieg, a fellow veteran and 30-something? After all, Buttigieg is an ideal foil for Gabbard, both because he is rising in the polls and because the South Bend mayor has the kind of traditional foreign-policy views that Gabbard strongly rejects. At the very least, it’ll be interesting to see whether she can maintain her momentum to qualify for the December debate. She’s already more than halfway there — to qualify, she needs just one more poll and to hit the 200,000 donor threshold.

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.