MSNBC Democratic Debate: Live Coverage

Our staff scored tonight’s debate as a tie, with both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders getting a B+ grade. (Grades are meant to reflect how much we think the candidates helped themselves toward winning the campaign.)

CANDIDATE	AVERAGE GRADE	HIGH GRADE	LOW GRADE
Hillary Clinton	B+	A	B
Bernie Sanders	B+	A	B-

Personally, I was slightly on the lower end of the group consensus, giving both candidates a B. As I’ve said after almost every Democratic debate, I’m still looking for signs that Sanders can expand his coalition beyond his predominantly white, liberal base. And I didn’t see a lot of those; instead, Sanders was too willing to indulge in questions about who’s the bigger progressive, when almost half of Democratic primary voters identify as moderate or conservative. Clinton, meanwhile, spent a lot of time in the first half of the debate trying to defend her “theory of change” and making Sanders seem as though he was all talk and no action. It’s important long-term strategic work for Clinton to turn Sanders’s ideological purity into a disadvantage. But I’m not sure that it will pay immediate dividends or how the testier exchanges will play. It’s hard to know. As I said after the GOP debate last week, we’re in the phase of the campaign where reporters aren’t hearing the debate with fresh ears, and that makes it hard to know what voters at home will think.

The moderators tonight tended to step back and let the candidates question each other, so I tracked the topics being covered each time someone spoke, rather than by what the moderator said. Defining who counts as a progressive took up 20 percent of speaking slots, and discussion about the horserace and scandals made up an additional fifth of the comments. Still, more than 50 percent of comments spent on the issues is probably a win.