Live Coverage Of The First Democratic Debate

Did anything change because of tonight? It’s difficult to say: One of the most important factors affecting public opinion after past debates has been the media’s reaction. We’ll be watching how that plays out over the next several days. So far, the media consensus seems to be that there weren’t any “game changers” tonight. This is perhaps summed up best by this exchange on Twitter: Bernie Sanders is likely to continue to appeal to a sizable minority of the Democratic base, particularly white liberals. Nothing happened tonight that will change that. The flip is probably also true: I’m not sure Sanders did or said anything to push his support much higher. Perhaps more importantly, Hillary Clinton, who seemed to have stemmed the bleeding before the debate, is getting good reviews. In other words, tonight’s debate is unlikely to cause Clinton any media headaches. The one loser from tonight’s debate? It might be Joe Biden, who wasn’t in the debate. Nothing happened on stage that would obviously coax Biden into the ring. These are just first reactions, but so far the mainstream media does not see the race changing much after this debate. And that seems about right to me too.

“We cannot afford for a Republican to succeed President Obama as president of the United States,” Clinton said. And she mentioned Republicans a lot in this debate — more than all the other candidates combined. She mentioned them 15 of 27 times they came up by name: “Republican” or “Republicans.” (We’re not counting Chafee’s references to his prior membership in the Republican Party.) One of many ways Clinton projected the confidence of a front-runner in the debate was by using it to start making her general-election case — by focusing on the other major party as much as she focused on her opponents for the Democratic nomination.

Thanks to the demise of Intrade, betting markets are less robust this year than they were four years ago. But the betting market PredictIt has Clinton’s chances of winning the Democratic nomination up by about 3 percentage points after the debate tonight, while Sanders’s number is unchanged. Clinton’s gains come from Joe Biden, who the market now regards as less likely to run. All of this sounds fairly reasonable — I’ll have more to say a bit later tonight.