MSNBC Democratic Debate: Live Coverage

Quick commercial break programming note: Tune in tomorrow for our coverage of the monthly jobs numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Two things to watch for: How is the economic slowdown overseas affecting hiring in the U.S.? And are we seeing faster wage growth to go along with falling unemployment? Both questions have big implications not just for the primary races but also for November’s general election.

Hillary Clinton hit a chord among liberals with a memory earlier this evening by invoking the name of Paul Wellstone, the 1990s senator from Minnesota who died in a plane crash in 2002. She pointed out that Wellstone voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, a bill that allowed states to refuse to recognize the same-sex marriages allowed by other states. (Its key section was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013.) That one act, Clinton suggested, didn’t disqualify Wellstone from his membership in the progressive pantheon. In fact, Wellstone deeply regretted his vote on DOMA, as two of his sons have noted on their blog. “What troubles me,” Wellstone wrote in 2001, “is that I may not have cast the right vote on DOMA. When Sheila and I attended a Minnesota memorial service for Matthew Shepard, I thought to myself, ‘Have I taken a position that contributed to a climate of hatred?’” His sons wrote that they believe he would have proud of the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the law.

Wondering why Clinton name-checked the relatively small Turing Pharmaceuticals as among the companies “that are increasing prices without any regard to the impact on people’s health”? Because its former chief executive, Martin Shkreli, has become the face of the issue. Oh, and he threw a $23,000 yacht party while at the company.

Wall Street may “just be one street,” as Clinton said. But only one major investment bank, Deutsche Bank, still has its headquarters there; the rest long ago scattered to other parts of New York.

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Sanders’s focus on Glass-Steagall is popular with the Democratic base, but from a policy perspective it’s a bit odd. The financial firms that helped bring down the economy in 2008 weren’t the big, diversified banks that would be split up by Glass-Steagall, which keeps investment banks separate from commercial banks. They were pure investment banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and non-banks like the insurance giant AIG. It’s certainly true that banks were big before the financial crisis and have grown bigger since, and many economists remain concerned about the problem of institutions that are “too big to fail.” But it isn’t clear that Glass-Steagall itself would have much impact on that issue.

It’s interesting that this debate has been so dominated by economic issues when Democrats control the White House. I keep expecting Republicans to focus on the economy in their debates, given Americans’ deep-seated anxieties about their futures. Despite improvements in most major economic indicators under President Obama, there’s plenty of room for the GOP to criticize his record on wages, inequality and other issues. Yet it’s the Democrats who tend to focus their debates on pocketbook issues.

Sanders and Clinton just had a moment of head-nodding agreement when talking about what Sanders called the “antiquated” public financing system that we have in place for running for president. He said he decided not to use it because if he did, he would have virtually no chance of winning the presidency. Just a reminder that at one point, Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor and public intellectual, was in this race, though he was not a candidate known to most voters. His only goal was to change the campaign finance system. He dropped out in November because he couldn’t make any of the debates.

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Sanders isn’t unusual in opting out of the presidential public financing system. Al Gore, in 2000, was the last major-party candidate to fund a primary campaign with the public system. The fund had more than $292 million at the end of last year.

We’ve talked a lot about Hillary Clinton’s lead in endorsements, but the fact that she’s so dominant over Sanders among members of Congress is intriguing. According to the statistical system DW-Nominate, about 30 percent of Democrats in Congress are closer to Sanders than Clinton on the issues. And yet, Sanders has received only two endorsements from members of Congress so far.

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In the GOP debates, candidates keep attacking Clinton as the presumptive Democratic nominee, but tonight neither Clinton nor Sanders has attacked any of the GOP candidates. (Clinton had a zinger about making sure that “middle class kids, not Donald Trump’s kids” could afford college, but didn’t attack Trump as a politician.)

Bernie Sanders has railed against Wall Street for years. But Hillary Clinton dredged up the one vote he cast against financial regulation. In 2000, Sanders voted for the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which blocked the government from regulating “credit default swaps,” a then-obscure financial product that ended up playing a critical role in the financial crisis eight years later. The act was signed into law in December 2000 by – wait for it – President Bill Clinton.

Micah, I think it was contentious and substantive but still within the broad realm of civility. The fact that this debate is a two-person format is really the game-changer. There’s an unfettered ability to joust and parry that simply wasn’t possible with O’Malley on the stage.

Yeah, and it seemed like that was more about Clinton working to undermine the premise of Sanders’s campaign than to necessarily curry favor with New Hampshire voters (I have no idea how it will play in the near term). She thinks he’s all talk and no action, she takes that personally, and she wants her voters to know it.

It was a strong moment from Clinton, but she’s trying to pull off a complicated argument: She is in favor of campaign finance reform, but she rejects the insinuation that she could be influenced by campaign finance, and calls it a “smear.” Why support reform if politicians can’t be influenced?

Absolutely. Which I think says something about how kid-gloves-y these two candidates have been so far. But Clinton was smart to basically draw the line at “provide concrete proof that I’m bought” instead of letting Sanders paint a general picture of her as too enmeshed with big money interests.

Yeah, Clinton was basically baiting Sanders into attacking her personally by saying that he should just come out and say what he means about people being bought by Wall Street … and he didn’t really bite. But I mean, he spun into talking about Wall Street deregulation in the 1990s, aka, when her husband was president.

That seemed like the most contentious moment of this campaign so far, no?

“Secretary Clinton does represent the establishment,” Sanders said, touting members of the progressive caucus as his own supporters. The definition of who’s progressive seems destined to become a running verbal battle between Clinton and Sanders throughout tonight’s debate. But remember Elizabeth Warren? That senator resisted calls from progressives to draft her into the presidential race. And not only that, she has remained neutral thus far. Her politics are arguably closer to Sanders’s, particularly when it comes to her perspective on the banking and finance industry. But Clinton supporters have exhorted Warren — one of 20 women in the U.S. Senate — to stand up for Clinton in the hopes that her doing so will buoy the chances of a first female president. My question is this: As Clinton and Sanders battle for the title “progressive,” who will be seen as the most important endorsers for undecided Democrats who care about the label?

Sanders talks a lot of smack about Super PACs but there is one — National Nurses United for Patient Protection — that’s supporting him. It’s associated with the union National Nurses United and has brought in around $2.3 million.

Sanders got the substance of his earlier claim about that 1988 House race right, if not the exact numbers. He said that when he ran as an independent, the Republican candidate beat him by three points and the Democrat was the “spoiler.” Sanders lost by four, but he did indeed have twice the vote total of the Democratic candidate, Paul Poirier, suggesting he was the more plausible challenger to Republican Peter Smith.

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If the policy differences between Sanders and Clinton seem relatively minor, that’s because they are. The two of them voted the same way 93 percent of the time for the two years they were in the Senate together, according to research by Derek Willis.

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“The reality is that we have one of lowest voter turnouts of any major country on Earth,” Sanders said. He’s right that U.S. voter turnout is remarkably low compared to other developed nations. According to a Pew Research Center report last year, just three of the other 33 members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development had lower turnout rates in their last national elections.

I absolutely think he should be looking past New Hampshire. There are times when the margin of victory matters for the spin that comes out of a state, but Sanders is winning by SO much that I’m not sure anyone’s going to care if he wins by 15 or 20 or 25 points. He should be thinking about Nevada and South Carolina instead.

Nate and Clare, what do you think Sanders’s and Clinton’s strategic goals are tonight? Should Sanders (and Clinton) be looking past New Hampshire?

Sanders says 29 million Americans still don’t have health insurance. Different sources produce slightly different numbers, but that’s about right. Last fall, we looked at who those remaining uninsured are. Many are immigrants, documented and otherwise. Many others live in states that didn’t expand Medicaid under the health law. And many more are young people who have decided health insurance costs too much to be worth buying. But there are still 14 million uninsured Americans who don’t fall into any of those categories. It isn’t clear why they don’t have insurance.

Clinton said she’s “been fighting for universal health care for many years.” It’s a smart statement during the primaries: 81 percent of Democrats said in a December Kaiser Family Foundation poll that they support a form of universal health care called Medicare-for-all. But 63 percent of Republicans oppose it.

How much does it help Sanders in New Hampshire to be from a neighboring state? More than you might think. On average, candidates from New England have beaten their national polling average by 15 points in the New Hampshire primary.

In differentiating herself from Sanders, Clinton just said: “I also believe in affordable college, but I don’t believe in free college because every expert that I have talked to says, ‘Look, how will you ever control the costs?’” Community college presidents agree: In a survey last year, just 39 percent of community college presidents said they believed their state legislature was likely to support a free community college plan, even with federal support.

One interesting bit of context for those economics-focused opening statements: Earlier today the Pew Research Center released a report showing that 77 percent of Democrats think the federal government does “too much” to help rich people, while 68 percent say it doesn’t do enough for the middle class. (Republicans have starkly different views: Just 44 percent say the government does too much for the rich.)

Sanders hit campaign finance reform in his opening statement, and indeed, his fundraising looks very different from Clinton’s and most Republican candidates’.

A: It’s hard to know what would be seen as a disappointing performance for Sanders, but since the press pack tends to think in big, round numbers, something in the single-digits would look less impressive than a double-digit margin. I’m not sure how much it matters, though. It’s not like anybody’s going to declare the race over if Sanders wins by “only” 8 percentage points. The question remains how high his ceiling is once we get to more diverse states.

A: Patricia, in 2008, about half of Democratic voters in the primaries identified as liberal, though the proportion varied significantly from state to state. The share has probably increased to some degree now, as a variety of measures suggest that Democratic voters have become more liberal. Still, Democratic voters perceive Clinton to be slightly closer to them on the issues than Sanders, on average. So it’s a little bit surprising to me that Sanders is calling Clinton out for being a moderate when lots of Democratic voters are moderate, too, and Sanders needs to gain headway with that group.

While there’s a fair amount of uncertainty in the Republican race in New Hampshire (Donald Trump leads, but Marco Rubio is gaining, and multi-candidate races can change in a hurry) there’s little doubt about who’s likely to prevail on the Democratic ballot here. Bernie Sanders leads Hillary Clinton by nearly 21 points in our weighted polling average and is approximately a 99 percent favorite to win the New Hampshire primary next week, according to both our polls-plus and polls-only forecast models. But wait — what about Clinton’s famous comeback in New Hampshire in 2008? That year, she was only about 8 points behind Barack Obama; her deficit with Sanders today is more than twice as large. We aren’t ruling anything out, but if there’s going to be a 21-point shift back to Clinton, she’s going to have to start by knocking it out of the park tonight.

CORRECTION (9:00 p.m.): An earlier version of this chart incorrectly gave the net favorability figure for Hillary Clinton. It is 53 percent, not 59 percent.

Greetings from an anonymous Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire! Your FiveThirtyEight team is here on the ground and a mere 35 miles away from the debate stage in Durham (we can almost smell the hair spray and flag pin polish), where tonight, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders will debate one-on-one for the first time this election, having lost third wheel Martin O’Malley earlier this week after his dismal showing in the Iowa caucuses. This is the first of four additional debates that Sanders and Clinton have agreed to — there will be a debate in March in Flint, Michigan, the site of a massive public health crisis affecting the drinking water of thousands of residents, and two more in April and May. (Clinton announced just before tonight’s debate that she will take time out of her New Hampshire schedule to visit Flint this weekend.) What to look out for tonight: the tone between these two after a darn close result in the Iowa caucuses on Monday. Last night they squared off at a CNN town hall event and squabbled over who was more progressive, and, more existentially, what the meaning of progressive even is. Sanders hit Clinton for her Wall Street funding and connections, while Clinton said that Sanders has positioned himself unfairly as “the gatekeeper of who’s progressive.” Expect to see that tension continue tonight — differences over approaches to health care, guns and electability are sure to come up. Let the fun begin!

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