Live Coverage Of The First Democratic Debate

That does it for us tonight, folks. Thanks for following along. If you missed the debate and are just waking up from a restful, apolitical slumber, start at the bottom of this live blog to get a sense for what happened in real time. If you don’t want to do that, here are a few highlights:

• Nate Silver on what the media got wrong about Hillary Clinton before and after the debate.
• Harry Enten’s post-debate thoughts.
• Clinton’s debating skills were on display.
• Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley tussled over immigration.
• CNN’s moderators focused the debate mostly on foreign policy and the economy.
• Clinton said she’ll go “beyond Obama” on reducing prescription drug costs.
• One candidate had more plans than all the rest.

And here’s who was being Googled over the debate’s two-plus hours:

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.