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.

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.

Clinton scandals were the subject of as many questions as immigration policy. But, as Planned Parenthood announced today that it will cease taking payments for fetal tissue donations, not a single question about abortion was asked.

https://twitter.com/micahcohen/status/654129029268815872

Although black and white marijuana use is comparable, black users are four times more likely to be arrested. FiveThirtyEight dug into the 11 million people buying marijuana once a month. Sanders said he’d probably support legalization or decriminalization; Clinton is in favor of implementing medical marijuana only. Would be interesting for the candidates to take a criminal justice policy look at marijuana policy.

My colleague Andrew Flowers is out, appropriately enough, on paternity leave, so I’ll take up his mantle on one of his favorite issues, paid family leave. Bernie Sanders is right that the U.S. is an outlier in its failure to require that new parents get paid time off. Parental leave is often painted as a women’s issue. But economists would caution not to forget fathers. That isn’t just because dads deserve the chance to spend time with their new sons and daughters; it’s also key to helping women succeed in the workforce. That may seem counterintuitive. But the risk is that if countries require paid leave for moms but not dads, companies will be reluctant to hire or promote women; after all, it costs money to have employees out on leave. Allowing — or even, as Catherine Rampell wrote in The New York Times a few years back, requiring — men to take the same leave as women could help ensure a level playing field.

https://twitter.com/ForecasterEnten/status/654127272392310784

Perhaps it’s not surprising, but recreational marijuana legalization is supported by the majority of Democrats. According to an April 2015 CBS News poll, 60 percent believe marijuana use should be legal. Even a majority of all Americans (53 percent) are now in favor of it. With regards to medical marijuana, 84 percent of all Americans are for it.

Since you brought that insider/outsider poll up, Harry, it’s also worth noting one other interesting thing about it. It found that in March, just 36 percent of Republicans wanted an outsider — but that number grew to 65 percent by September. So we may be confusing cause and effect. If Republicans became attracted to Trump and Carson, for whatever reason, they may then go ahead and tell voters that they want an outsider. Likewise, when Democrats say they prefer an insider, that may just mean they like Hillary Clinton.

Several of the GOP candidates have said during their debates and in public statements that some climate change may be caused by humans, but they oppose possible remedies that harm the economy. Among the Democrats, O’Malley aims for a 100 percent renewable energy grid by 2050. Clinton pledged to install 500 million solar panels as president.

No. According to a September Pew Research Center poll, 65 percent of Republicans wanted a candidate with new ideas and a different approach versus experience and a proven record. Only 42 percent of Democrats felt the same way.

We’ve heard a lot about Republican voters hankering for an outsider; do Democrats want one too?

Jim Webb is right that he’s being left out. Sanders and Clinton get three questions for every two the moderators direct at Chafee and Webb.

https://twitter.com/jodyavirgan/status/654124084503126016

We don’t usually blog about the commercial breaks (we have to refill our Diet Cokes sometime, after all), but the anti-immigration ad that just aired provides a good opportunity to make a point I’d hoped to make during the earlier immigration discussion: Just like in the Republican debates, this discussion has focused, at least implicitly, on familiar (some might say tired) issues of low-skilled immigration from Mexico. But as I wrote last year (and as Pew noted in a report last month), immigration has changed far more than the public conversation around it. The U.S. now gets more immigrants each year from Asia than from Latin America. Unauthorized immigration has slowed dramatically. And new immigrants are increasingly well-educated. One of these days, the debate will catch up to the reality.

Young voters part with Hillary Clinton on her stance on Edward Snowden, who she said made the wrong choice in blowing the whistle on his employers at the National Security Agency for snooping on Americans. Of millennials polled by the ACLU and Pew Research, a majority back Snowden. Clinton was on firm ground with many Democrats, though, when she defended her vote on the Patriot Act. A narrow plurality of Democrats in a May YouGov poll, and a majority of Democrats in a CNN poll that same month, backed extending the act. (The difference shows how sensitive polling results are to question wording.)

https://twitter.com/ForecasterEnten/status/654122750014046208

Clinton says she’ll go “beyond Obama” on reducing prescription drug costs, which is interesting because provisions in the Trans-Pacific Partnership that are friendly to the pharmaceutical industry are among the reasons she says she opposes President Obama’s signature trade deal. Health care has always been a key issue for Clinton. So far this election season, she’s taken on the high cost of prescription drugs and the “Cadillac” tax in Obamacare. She has the support of the people on drug costs: Nearly three-quarters of people in the U.S. think drug costs are unreasonably high and blame pharmaceutical companies for the prices, according to recent polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation. The Cadillac tax is the rare policy issue that Republicans and Democrats agree on, with legislators across the political spectrum calling for its repeal.

It’s really remarkable how unscathed Clinton has been tonight by the other candidates. She skated right past questions on Benghazi and her private email server, and on one of her most vulnerable issues — her vote to authorize the war in Iraq — she drew only indirect criticism from Sanders and Chafee, who missed a huge opportunity to draw a sharp contrast with her foreign policy. The moderators have tried to get the other candidates to rough her up, but about the best they’ve been able to do is get O’Malley to say that she may be a little too eager to use military force. Sanders supporters are likely to disagree with Clinton’s support for the Patriot Act, but instead of criticizing her directly for that vote, Sanders loosed a familiar broadside at government surveillance and did not link her to it. Clinton’s skills at debating are clearly evident tonight, but she has benefited most greatly from a decorousness by the other candidates that is rarely on display during Republican debates.

“I go around the country and talk to all sorts of people” Sanders said. He’s certainly been spending time in the primary states of Iowa and the Vermont-adjoining New Hampshire, but many of the iconic Sanders crowds have actually been in large, liberal bastions — places like Austin, Texas; Los Angeles; and Portland (both of ‘em!). This is not just because that’s where the Sanders fans already are — it’s a buzz-building strategy. And with Sanders raising much of his money online, geography may matter less to him in these early stages. “The news of large crowds manages to make its way to people, particularly in Iowa and New Hampshire,” Sanders adviser Tad Devine told Politico. “It’s demonstrating that the message Bernie is delivering is connecting with a large audience.” And as Politico points out, that’s a strategy that Obama also employed as he was building momentum in 2007.

Yes, it’s a crude measure of candidate quality. But watching Lincoln Chafee struggle tonight — a man who has been elected both governor and senator in Rhode Island — is a reminder that it’s much easier to be elected in a little state than a big one. In fact, the average Democrat on stage tonight is from a state with just 12 electoral votes. (That average will fall to 11 if Joe Biden enters the race later.) By contrast, the average Republican this year hails from states worth 19 or 21 electoral votes on average, depending on whether you count Carly Fiorina as being from Virginia (where she currently makes her residence) or California (where she ran for senate in 2010).

David Leonhardt asks on Twitter: Not sure if it’s considered an effective move or not, but Clinton is the only candidate who has used the word “plan” in tonight’s debate:

• “I have a five-point economic plan because this inequality challenge we face … it hasn’t been this bad since the 1920s.”
• “The plan that I put forward would empower regulators to break up big banks if we thought they posed a risk.”
• “My plan would have the potential of actually sending the executives to jail.”
• “But I know if we don’t come in with a very tough and comprehensive approach like the plan I’m recommending, we’re going to be behind instead of ahead in the next crisis to be.”
• “Well, let me address college affordability because I have a plan that I think will really zero in on what the problems are.”
• “My plan would enable anyone to go to a public college or university twice free.”

Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley often seem to be competing over the same bloc of liberal voters (with Sanders seemingly getting the decisive upper hand). But one place they genuinely differ is immigration. O’Malley has laid out a detailed immigration plan that would offer legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants, reduce deportation and detentions, and expand access to health insurance benefits that are now denied to many immigrants. Sanders has likewise called for immigration reform and has endorsed President Obama’s “deferred action” policies that provide legal status to immigrants who entered the country illegally as children. But he has been far more cautious than O’Malley about promoting policies that might encourage more immigration. In 2007, he helped kill a bipartisan immigration bill that he worried would drive down wages for low-wage American workers. In July, he told the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce that “open-borders” proposals were a Wall Street attempt to suppress wages. Sanders stresses that he is not anti-immigration and, even more emphatically, not anti-immigrant. The immigration page on his Web site argues that the free-trade policies he opposes have hurt workers on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Still, Sanders has thus far struggled to win much support among Latinos. (O’Malley, despite his more full-throated support for immigration, hasn’t seen much support among Latinos either.)

Job creation, health care and climate change are issues that Democratic voters rank higher than Republicans, according to a May Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. The debate obviously still isn’t over, but health care and climate change haven’t gotten much time in the debate.

Candidates are talking about undocumented immigrants and health care right now. The undocumented don’t qualify for Medicaid (except in a few states like California, where DREAMers qualify), and aren’t allowed to buy insurance on the health insurance exchanges that were created by Obamacare. Of the 33 million people without insurance in 2014, 7 million were non-citizen immigrants (the majority of them undocumented). It’s one of the most uninsured groups in the country.

Bernie Sanders says that a college degree has become what a high-school diploma was in the middle of the 20th century. He isn’t far off. In the 1970s, about a third of American adults (ages 25-64) had less than a high school diploma; another third had a diploma and no more; and the remainder had at least a few college credits. Only about 6 percent had a bachelor’s degree or more. (All data is from the Current Population Survey, via IPUMS.) Today, just 10 percent of Americans have less than a diploma, and a third have a bachelor’s degree. Well over half of American adults have at least a few college credits. And although some question the value of a college degree, it still carries clear advantages in the labor force. Americans 25 and up with a bachelor’s degree have an unemployment rate of 2.5 percent, versus 7.9 percent for those with less than a high school diploma.

Hillary Clinton is right that Social Security is particularly important to women. That’s a matter of life expectancy: Women, on average, outlive men. According to the Social Security Administration, women make up 56 percent of all beneficiaries ages 62 and up, and two-thirds of beneficiaries ages 85 and up. Unmarried women 65 and older are also less likely than unmarried men 65 and older to get income from pensions other than Social Security.

College affordability is a big issue regardless of political affiliation: An April Gallup poll found that while 61 percent of U.S. adults believe that education beyond high school is available to anyone who needs it, only 21 percent believe it’s affordable.

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.

https://twitter.com/gov/status/654115703289741312

Bernie Sanders is in favor of a $15 minimum wage. That’s a very popular position among Democrats. A July YouGov poll found that 68 percent of Democrats came out in favor of a $15 minimum wage. It’s less popular among all Americans, however. Only 48 percent of adults are in favor of it.

Sanders has benefited most from other candidates mentioning him. No one has bothered talking about Chafee, so he hasn’t gotten any bonus replies. And Clinton passed up a chance to reply to him.

The Democrats are now talking about race, and Bernie Sanders just said “black lives matter.” Unfortunately for Sanders, African-Americans have not rallied to his candidacy. The good news for Sanders is that the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary electorate have very few minorities. It’s possible that Sanders can win both without addressing his current weakness among black voters.

The critique of Clinton’s actions regarding Benghazi sounds very different coming from Democrats than from Republicans. Where Republicans have accused her of a criminal coverup leading to the deaths of Americans, Jim Webb said the problem was the Obama administration’s attack on Libya, and O’Malley said the dead diplomats in Benghazi didn’t have the tools they needed. As a result, Clinton was able to respond to the question on the subject with a drawn-out history lesson, rather than the kind of angry defense she has used in Republican-led hearings on Capitol Hill. Similarly, she quickly won some welcome support from Sanders when he said the country was sick and tired of hearing about her emails, and O’Malley was happy to change the subject to wages and affordable college. Only Chaffee raised a mild criticism of her email decisions, which Clinton parried to the applause of the crowd.

There has been a lot of email talk:

I agree with Hayley on the email issue. A high 58 percent of Democrats in a May 2015 ABC News/Washington Post poll said it was not a legitimate issue to be discussed in the 2016 campaign.

Yeah, Jody. Controversy over Hillary Clinton’s private email server has been one of the main talking points about her presidential run, but it’s much more of a sticking point among Republicans than it is among Democrats. A Rasmussen poll from August found that 46 percent of overall voters believed that Clinton should suspend her campaign until all of the legal questions on the issue are resolved, while 44 percent disagreed. But when the polling was isolated to Democratic voters, only 24 percent believed she should suspend her campaign.

Count me surprised that we reached the first commercial break without a round on Hillary Clinton’s email server (they just got to it!). Is there any polling on whether Democratic voters care about the issue?

It’s usually pretty hard to judge the “winners” of the debates immediately after the event is over — much less partway through. But we’re roughly a third of the way through the Democratic debate, and my editors are asking me what I think. My answer: So far, I think the debate has mostly preserved the status quo. Clinton is not dominant, exactly, and she’s playing a lot of defense. But she’s easily the most polished candidate on stage — she’s pretty good at this — and has the message that’s likely to resonate most broadly with Democratic voters. Sanders is rough around the edges — take that answer on guns, for instance — but still has plenty of appeal to the liberalmost half of the room. The other three candidates are flatlining; if this was Martin O’Malley’s one chance to break out, he hasn’t taken it so far. But we’ll see; I’m prepared for the second and third periods to be more decisive.

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.