Live Coverage Of The First Democratic Debate

Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders clearly see a political advantage in attacking Hillary Clinton as being soft on Wall Street. They want to break up the big banks and reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act’s separation of commercial and investment banking operations. Clinton has said that “too big to fail” remains a problem but hasn’t endorsed bringing back Glass-Steagall. Clinton’s defense: O’Malley and Sanders are living in the past. The financial crisis showed that many of the biggest threats to the economy come not from banks but from enormous non-banking financial institutions like the insurance company AIG. And in recent years, numerous studies have highlighted the risks posed by the “shadow-banking sector” and other, less-regulated corners of the financial industry. That argument may or may not play politically, but it’s one that many experts endorse.

How do voters feel about Glass-Steagall? It’s difficult to say because it has been polled so infrequently. A search of the Roper Center Archive reveals that only one poll question has been devoted to “Glass-Steagall” dating back to 1935.

Republican candidates can deflect a lot of issues during the primaries by blaming the media for their problems, especially if they also characterize the issue as a partisan attack from Democrats. Democratic voters place more trust in the media than Republican ones do, so this can be a trickier path forward for Democratic candidates. But Hillary Clinton is fairly unique in that a high percentage of Democrats think the media is biased against her. Tonight, it was Bernie Sanders — not Clinton herself — who critiqued the media’s coverage of Clinton’s email server. Still, it was significant that his remarks got the loudest applause of anything said in the debate so far.