What Went Down In The Fifth Democratic Debate

Welp, this debate is an awfully big moment for Buttigieg, who has risen to the top of various polls in Iowa and New Hampshire and is now a serious contender for the nomination.

Perhaps uniquely among the candidates, Buttigieg creates a more chaotic field because he potentially draws support from the two candidates previously seen as the front-runners: Biden and Warren. Buttigieg’s policies are comparatively moderate and often overlap heavily with Biden’s — although both candidates have platforms to the left of the ones President Obama ran on in 2008 and 2012. Demographically, however, Buttigieg’s mostly white, affluent supporters look more like Warren’s than Biden’s, who mainly draws his support from working-class whites and African Americans. Conversely, Buttigieg does not have much overlap with Sanders, so he may actually help Sanders by dragging Warren and Biden down to the pack. In Iowa, for instance, Sanders’s 17-ish percent support is more powerful when no one else has more than 20 percent or so.

So how should Buttigieg handle himself? It depends on who and what he’s engaging with:

• I think Buttigieg might actually welcome attacks from the left on policy if Warren and Sanders choose to go there. Usually a fairly affable debater, Buttigieg instigated conflict with Warren last time by positioning himself to her right. That seems to have worked, more or less: Polls find an increasing number of Iowa voters think that Warren is too liberal. At the same time, Buttigieg doesn’t want to go too far to the center and alienate voters who recently converted to him from Warren, and who may not be die-hard lefties but are not Joe Manchin-esque centrists either. Emphasizing that his ideas are continuations of Obama’s — a strategy Biden often employs — could do the trick.
• Attacks from Biden or others — maybe from Klobuchar, who would love to be the one surging in Iowa — on his age and experience could be more of a challenge. Fundamentally, Buttigieg’s résumé is unusual for a presidential nominee — and short on experience in high-profile elected office. And, perhaps relatedly, voters aren’t particularly confident that he can beat Trump. But such attacks on Buttigieg have the potential to backfire. If they come from Biden or Sanders, they may remind voters of how old Biden and Sanders are. And some voters may not necessarily see Washington experience as virtue. But these are questions that Buttigieg is almost certain to face, from the moderators or from other candidates, given the impressive résumés of some of the other candidates on stage.
• A third line of attack could involve Buttigieg’s record on racial issues or his lack of support among black voters. Such conversations could produce unpredictable effects on public opinion, as Harris’s critiques of Biden’s racial record did in the first debate. But they could also be some of the hardest criticisms for Buttigieg to defend; in my view, anyway, he’s often been a bit tin-eared on issues around race in previous debates.

Overall, I don’t think Buttigieg needs any particular gimmicks. He probably wants to come across as affable and humble and avoid playing into any “boy genius” caricatures. (Don’t speak Norweigian on stage, for instance.) To the extent he’s playing offense or counter-punching aggressively, it should be on policy substance, where his positions are fairly well-calibrated relative to the Democratic electorate.

But this is one of those debates where the media is going to be strongly inclined to place Buttigieg at the center of the narrative one way or another — and that puts things somewhat outside his control. A marginal misstep in the first 15 minutes could be blown up into something much bigger than it was, or just as easily, a merely competent performance could be described by cable pundits as a masterful, game-changing one.

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: