Live Coverage Of The First Democratic Debate

The Democratic candidates just discussed Benghazi, but Democrats nationwide are very split about whether we should be talking about Hillary Clinton’s handling of that incident. In a May 2015 ABC News/Washington Post poll, 51 percent of Democrats said it was a legitimate issue, while 43 percent it was not.

Bernie Sanders notes that he has chaired the Senate’s Veterans’ Affairs Committee and that he has seen up-close the costs of war. No state is more familiar with those costs than Sanders’s home state of Vermont. According to The Guardian’s count of war casualties, 19 Vermonters have been killed in action in Iraq, and an additional three have died in noncombat settings there. On a per capita basis, that’s the highest toll of any state. (The U.S. territories of Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands have seen even higher death tolls.) Four more were killed in Afghanistan, and more than 140 Vermonters have been injured in the two conflicts.