What Went Down At The Fourth Democratic Debate

You see the Democrats defending the Iran nuclear deal. That definitely lines up with the polls. Although support for the deal was at a low point nationwide in September, Democrats were 13 percentage points more likely to support the deal than not, per the Pew Research Center.

A somewhat more technical answer on O’Malley: The reason that he’s so low in our Iowa and New Hampshire forecasts — under 1 percent to win either state — is not just because he’s polling in the single digits. Some candidates have come back from the single digits to win primaries before, in fact. His problem, instead, is that there are not one but two really popular candidates ahead of him. For the most part, any losses that Clinton has from here on out will be Sanders’s gains, and vice versa. That makes it not just difficult but almost impossible for O’Malley to jump ahead of them both.