What Went Down In The Fourth Democratic Debate

Haha, but it’s part of Booker’s brand, Perry! I thought it was an interesting strategy when he launched his campaign, but I agree it doesn’t work well in a debate environment.

Booker is Mr. Above It All tonight. This is so annoying. It’s a debate — people are supposed to talk about their differences.

It is now one hour into the debate and we have not yet had a question about climate change. For context, that means we’ve talked extensively about three out of voters’s top four issues (per our poll). And, let’s remember, climate change polled almost the same as the economy and jobs there.

Also, Micah, “you didn’t build that” didn’t do a damned thing to hurt Obama and might even have helped him since Team Romney wasted a news cycle on it when they could have found a more effective critique.

About half the candidates on the stage have now hit Warren on something, whether it was health care or an aspect of the wealth tax. Welcome to front-runner status, senator.

Is it a bad look to attack Biden after the past three weeks of attacks from Trump? Because no one is doing it.

Bernie sometimes does seem like he wants to be punitive toward wealthy people. Whereas Warren is framing her responses in ways that explicitly don’t do that. In the long run, I think that’s smart rhetorically, in terms of appealing to Biden voters later in the Democratic primaries and/or to swing voters in the general election.

Warren re-upping her famous 2012 viral speech, the basic gist of which was, if you got rich in America, you didn’t do it on your own.

Yang is right that a wealth tax doesn’t have a great track record in other countries. If you’re interested in learning more, Planet Money had a good episode outlining the problems that European countries ran into when they tried them out.

Will what Warren just said be flattened to “You didn’t build that”????!!!! Oh god, I hope we don’t have to go through that dumb argument again.

Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have calculated how the different candidates’ tax plans would impact people affect people at various points of the income distribution. Their conclusion: Biden’s plan isn’t all that different from Trump’s, while there are pretty big differences between the Warren and Sanders plans.

Honestly I think part of why the playing field feels more level tonight between Warren and the rest of the field is just that the rest of the field has been pretty good tonight, after being kind of meh in the ABC News debate. Sanders has been good, Klobuchar’s been good, Yang’s been good … Biden (oddly) hasn’t spoken very much, but he’s been pretty good. People are mostly on their games tonight.

It’s really worth underscoring how radical a wealth tax would be. Warren has done a good job of selling it as something that wouldn’t be a big deal for most people, something that only affects the richest of the rich. But it’s a big departure, so it’s refreshing to see so much time spent on it tonight.

You’ll see that Warren is pushing harder and being more specific about the wealth tax than she was on health care. She says she doesn’t have a campaign pollster, but my guess is that she knows that the wealth tax is broadly popular, while abolishing private insurance is not.

Elizabeth Warren said Democrats should “dream big and fight hard” not “dream small.” A Quinnipiac poll from late September found that 50 percent of Democrats prefer that the Democratic nominee support policies that would result in major changes despite being more difficult to pass into law, while 42 percent of Democrats prefer a nominee who supports policies that result in minor changes but are easier to pass.

If you’re in that 1 percent crowd, you really need a breakout moment. Klobuchar is trying really hard to bring the passion and energy. She’s having her best night yet.

Warren with a good mix of populist mode and Voxsplainer mode in the wealth tax debate, showing her range of skills. But I also think Klobuchar has been strong overall tonight and in that segment, including the tie back to electability at the end.

Buttigieg and Klobuchar are going after Warren the most, and they’re in some ways the best suited to do that here — they’re the moderate Midwesterners on stage, after all. And I think they do represent a decent chunk of the upper Midwest (aka the key electoral states like Wisconsin and Michigan) when they voice a worry that Warren’s policies are too far left for her to succeed in those states.

Another strong line from Klobuchar this evening. “I want to give a reality check to Elizabeth. No one on this stage wants to protect billionaires. Not even the billionaire wants.” But then Klobuchar went on to add that “We have different approaches. Your idea is not the only idea.” This seems to me to be a recurring theme of the night, the moderates are attacking in full-force, and I felt like that hasn’t happened since when Delaney was on the stage, and he certainly wasn’t as effective.

I think this is interesting, in that I assume the more moderate candidates don’t want to embrace a wealth tax but don’t want to actually say that.

It’s true, Steyer’s blizzard of ad spending in the early states helped him get enough polls to make the stage. He hasn’t gotten a single debate-qualifying poll from a national survey.

Pete is saying he is clearly for a wealth tax and dismissing Warren’s question. Is Pete for a wealth tax? I don’t think he has proposed that.

It’s worth noting that a wealth tax would not be a slam-dunk to implement, and not just because it would be hard to get through the Senate. There are also questions about whether it would be constitutional, and the Supreme Court would almost certainly have to weigh in.

Elizabeth Warren just spoke about universal child care. A Morning Consult/Politico poll from February found that 76 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of Republicans support a universal child care bill that would establish government-funded care centers and guarantee free or discounted child care for poorer families. The poll did not refer to Elizabeth Warren, who has proposed such a plan. But when respondents were asked if they support paying for the proposal with a wealth tax that would apply to families with over $50 million in assets, as Warren has proposed, support fell to 73 percent among Democrats and 44 percent among Republicans.

Steyer knows all about billionaires buying access. He wouldn’t be on this stage without spending a bunch of his own cash.

I do wonder if Steyer needs to own the billionaire thing a bit more. Like, on the one hand, talk about how you still believe in how the capitalist system can create prosperity. But also talk about how you know the system is rigged. I just thought saying “Hey, I’m for higher taxes on billionaires, too!” wasn’t a particularly effective response to a question he had to know was coming.

According to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll from July, 88 percent of Democrats think a wealth tax — a higher tax rate on income above $1 million — is a good idea. Thirty-two percent of Republicans and 61 percent of independents think the same. Moderate Democrats support it slightly less than progressive Democrats (82 percent to 93 percent), but still strongly favor a wealth tax.

Yeah, Lee and Perry, there’s been nary a mention of the Senate outside of a removal vote in an impeachment trial, and the upper chamber would be the main impediment to a progressive agenda if the GOP controls it, or maybe even if Democrats narrowly control it and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin has to be relied upon to vote for a liberal agenda.

Biden wisely ducks Erin Burnett’s invitation to defend billionaires.

Sanders released his own version of a wealth tax last month, and it is much more aggressive in taxing the rich than Warren’s plan. It would apply to more households, impose a higher rate, and raise more money. When he was asked as part of that rollout if he thought billionaires should exist, he said “I hope the day comes when they don’t.”

With all this talk of GM and Lordstown, it’s hard for me not to imagine what Sherrod Brown would be saying if he were up on stage tonight. Part of his stump speech back in the day was talking about how all the component parts of the Chevy Cruze, manufactured in places across the state and assembled at Lordstown, showed the strength of Ohio’s manufacturing base and workers. There’s something missing in the way some of the candidate are talking about the bad trade deals, UBI, minimum wage. I think there’s not a lot of time for them to talk about stories … but none of them seem to be soaring when talking about the injustice from the point of view of Ohioans/upper Midwesterners on these issues.

Support for candidates differs across income groups as well, according to the FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll conducted this week. It’s notable that wealthy respondents are likelier to be considering Warren, despite the wealth tax and her other policies.

Seriously, Nate. If I was someone concerned about his health, I’d be feeling confident tonight. I wonder if he’ll tick back up in the polls after this.

“Taxing billionaires out of existence” is not really Sanders’s goal, I don’t think. The wealth tax is fairly popular — more popular than Medicare for All, if I recall correctly. A decent number of Republicans support it.

Perry, I agree. It’s like the moderators don’t understand that the president is not a legislator. The president has certain powers through executive action. The questions should reflect that.

The unemployment rate is currently at a 50-year low at 3.5 percent. It’s interesting, though, that so many of the talking points of the Democratic Party on jobs are the same ones that were born out of the Great Recession.

Sanders very sharp tonight!

Here are the most common words spoken by each candidate so far. Castro’s emphasis on “jobs” and “work” seems noteworthy, as does Harris’s on “women” and Warren’s on the middle class.

Warren isn’t the only candidate who’s discovering what it’s like to have their policies challenged tonight — Booker just (gently) challenged Yang’s universal basic income proposal, arguing that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would do more for workers. But Yang didn’t really get a chance to respond — we’ll see if he tries to re-engage with Booker (who is polling lower than he is) later.

In the FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll conducted this week, 13.1 percent of people said wealth and income equality was the most important issue to them in the Democratic primary. Here’s who those respondents thought would be best at handling the issue. (See other results from the poll here.)

Interestingly, American views of unions are about as positive as they’ve been in the past 50 years, according to Gallup. So talking up unions makes sense for appealing to the Democratic base and maybe to the broader public, too.

This economics conversation has not been great, in terms of the questions. The president has a lot of influence on tax policy and government spending, not much on automation of jobs or where GM locates its plants.

According to a Pew Research Center poll from July, just 17 percent of Democrats said big corporations have a positive effect on the U.S., compared to 45 percent of Republicans who said the same thing. That’s down from the 26 percent of Democrats who said in 2016 that corporations have a positive impact.

Maybe in 2024, we can have an AI cliche bot competing in a debate. Take away a few jobs from so many people running for president.

There definitely does seem to be evidence that automation is increasing. And the robots are getting massively cheaper — the cost of industrial robots are expected to fall by 65 percent over the next five years.

Someone could support UBI, guaranteed jobs and private-sector jobs to replace those that are automated. That conversation was framed as a choice between different options. It’s not.

Yang eagerly jumped into the conversation about automation — not hard to see why, as the threat that he believes automation poses is at the center of his campaign. But it’s noteworthy because he hasn’t been always been proactive in the debates so far. Maybe he’s getting more comfortable with the format.

Yang is quite popular among college students, as are Warren (and Sanders) — so it makes sense that she’d respond in a sympathetic way to the idea of UBI in an effort to co-opt some of his supporters.