What Went Down On Night Two Of The First Democratic Debates

Obama’s name has been mentioned 10 times already compared to just four times all of last night. Biden served as his vice president, so that’s obviously playing a part.

To expound a bit, I guess my view on Biden is that I don’t think he’s had too many problems tonight, but there’s something about the way he’s answering questions that makes me think he’ll get tripped up and run into problems sooner or later. Maybe not tonight, but at one of these debates.

Harris going after Obama policy on immigration is delicate, but also reflects more where the party is today, and undermines Biden.

Immigration might be an opportunity for Democrats given that Americans have generally favorable views of immigrants, especially compared to the past. This January, 62 percent of Americans said that immigrants strengthen the country, while just 28 percent said they felt that immigrants were a burden, according to the Pew Research Center. However, there’s a balance to strike: An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that just 34 percent of adults thought the border was secure while 50 percent felt it was not secure. You wonder if some of the plans brought up tonight and last night will feed into the “open borders” attack the GOP makes on Democrats.

Swalwell mentions the census, which the Supreme Court issued a decision on today. I wonder whether today’s rulings will come up in other ways?

Interesting. Kamala got nervous and halting, but looked at Biden and criticized Obama for deporting too many people.

Bernie Sanders put in a surprisingly strong showing in 2016. But with apologies to former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, he had the benefit of collecting the entire anti-Hillary vote. This time around, I’ll be very curious to see how he does outside his core supporters — and how many of those core supporters bolt for Warren or Buttigieg. So far, he seems very similar to his 2016 incarnation, at least to me.

The way the candidates are addressing immigration reminds me a lot of how Republicans addressed healthcare in 2012 and 2016. Essentially, don’t be specific about your own plan, but say that on day one you will undo everything the previous president did.

A lot of Biden’s answers have really just ignored the original question. He speaks his way forcefully through them, but they aren’t terribly responsive.

Funny you should mention that, Amelia. Is this the first time someone’s past has been brought up for them to answer for?

Less than an hour in, Trump has already been mentioned 15 times tonight. Sanders has contributed to a third of the total number of references.

For reference, Trump was mentioned 20 times by the end of last night.

The moderators seem unclear about whether or not Biden raised his hand to say he would making crossing the border a civil rather than criminal offense and Biden is not clearing it up for them. He’s saying that he wants to “surge” money to Central America, wants to reunite family. Not certain we got a clear policy answer from him.

Buttigieg going after the Republican Party for “suggesting that God would smile at the division of families.” He had a similar viral moment a couple months ago, attacking Mike Pence, and he just got big applause.

After the Top 4, the 5 through 10 candidates have been pretty weak in this debate so far — I think weaker than in last night’s group, when even de Blasio had a few good moments. Gillibrand is maybe the exception to that and has been pretty sharp so far when she can find the right moment.

As far as I could tell, all of the candidates wanted crossing the border to be a civil, not criminal crime, except for Bennet.

Williamson is hitting several outsider points at once — criticizing her fellow debaters for not having used their time in office to make the change they’re advocating for and criticizing U.S. foreign policy.

Biden leads in words spoken, followed by Harris, 40 minutes in.

I’m surprised no one has echoed Castro’s call to decriminalize crossing the border. Gillibrand almost sounded like she was going there, but not quite.

It seems to me that the candidates tonight are talking a lot more viscerally about immigration tonight. I think last night Castro set a tone of talking about policy, calling out O’Rourke for having poor knowledge of it, etc. Tonight has seen “kidnapping” and “”large-scale child abuse” were dropped.

Last night we didn’t get a lot of specifics on what to do about the increase in asylum seekers and the millions of immigrants already in the country illegally. (Castro, however, did get specific on decriminalizing crossing the border.) So far we aren’t seeing specifics tonight on those larger issues either. More commentary about how what Trump is doing is bad — even thought the original question was about what to do about the increase in asylum seekers.

As we were discussing last night, though, Chad, I think talking about executive action is smart. It’s something you can do on Day 1 if you’re president — even if Mitch McConnell is still in charge of the Senate.

This “day one” question is the exact same as last night, right? I kind of appreciate that they are asking the same questions of all 20 candidates.

Harris is very into executive action on Day 1. Two and a half years ago, Democrats were not happy with that tactic.

To make what I hope is a super obvious point: There’s just so much more upward potential for a candidate like Harris who has the potential to resonate with African American voters, than for someone like Buttigieg who’s probably going to struggle with that.

Harris gets wild applause for saying “in her hand” in reference to the president of the United States.

Biden’s been away from the campaign trail for 7 years, basically, so you wonder if he’ll get stronger as he goes along in big events like this. I’d say he’s had a middling start, though that may be good enough for him.

One important fact to notice: We’re talking a lot more about people seeing asylum, and a lot less about people crossing the border without authorization to pursue jobs.

No. He’s been less of a target than Sanders, but on the other hand, he’s been less of a target than Sanders, which means he’s not setting the agenda or dominating the spotlight.

No, Sarah, I think it’s been much more even—maybe Bernie first, then Harris or Buttigieg.

Biden’s affect in this debate thus far is pretty affable! He nods to Sanders next to him when he’s talking about health care; he gives props to Buttigieg. He’s like that kind in your college lit class who always starts, “Building on Terry’s point…”

I think Biden has been fortunate so far that the other candidates haven’t been attacking him as aggressively as they could. But he also isn’t really commanding the stage the way Warren was at this point in the debate last night, so that’s not a good sign.

No.

So in the first wave of our poll from Morning Consult, we saw that most respondents thought Warren won the debate. Do we think Biden is holding the stage like Warren did last night?

Harris had a strong start. Swalwell’s attack on Biden was probably the juiciest moment. Will be interesting to see who else gets in shots on him

Harris is the obvious answer. Buttigieg has been decent. Both Sanders and Biden have been mediocre, I think.

With ten candidates, it’s so hard to stand out–but I agree that Buttigieg and Harris have.

The most forceful answers so far from Pete and Harris I think.

Harris.

Who’s standing out after the first commercial break?

A recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 87 percent of Democrats thought it was very important to talk about health care. The only other issue at 80 percent or more “very important” was issues affecting women.

According to a Fox News poll conducted in June, 73 percent of registered voters, including 85 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of Republicans, support conferring legal status to otherwise law-abiding residents who were brought into the United States illegally as children if they pass a background check. Twenty-four percent oppose doing so.

Amazing how having the two figureheads for the party’s schism — Sanders and Biden — have set tonight’s debate on more confrontational footing. Warren and Klobuchar are similar candidates, but the party’s agita isn’t as wrapped up in their political identities.

A perfect example there of my comment about how Harris used a personal anecdote to make the point about insurance companies more relatable to voters than Sanders has so far.

Interesting. I think all of the candidates are for providing health care to undocumented immigrants.

I thought Williamson made a perfectly valid point — that our health-care system is reactive, not proactive.

I am not kidding you, like Williamson, Mike Huckabee actually talked about poor health as an important part of the healthcare problem in America during one of the JV Republican primary debates of the 2016 cycle. It was, for some reason, a very memorable moment. Probably because often times actual health is not a big part of the health care debate.

Williamson seemed to be saying that Democrats need more than policies to beat Trump, they need a slogan, but then discussed policy.

So, that was Williamson’s first time speaking tonight. What did we make of her stance on Democrats’ relationship to policy in the primary? Did her comparisons to Trump make sense? Or …?

To jump back to Sarah’s question about whether Medicare for All is bad politics in a general election: This has been the conventional wisdom in political science for a long time — that most people have private health insurance and that makes it difficult to make a total overhaul politically plausible. But health care is an incredibly high salience issue, which we saw in the 2018 midterms. That’s not usually the case for an issue where the status quo is producing high satisfaction.

Bernie Sanders is talking about specific policies — primarily his variant of Medicare for All — so far. And that’s in keeping with how he ran in 2016. Then, his supporters named specific policies 29 percent of the time when explaining why they supported him, the highest number for any 2016 candidate.