PBS Democratic Debate: Live Coverage

My guess is that the low-key but wonky and detail-oriented tenor of the conversation tonight is more helpful to Hillary Clinton than to Bernie Sanders. Compare the candidates’ “issues” pages on their respective websites: Clinton’s is an alphabetized laundry list of topics, while Sanders’s is prioritized, with the top two issues being income quality and free college tuition. This has been a substantive but laundry-list type of debate so far.

It’s true, as Clinton just said, that super PACs are technically independent of the campaigns they support. But in this campaign cycle, more than ever before, many of the PACs are clearly coordinating with campaigns and splitting up duties. As the Washington Post reported last year, Clinton’s campaign is coordinating with a super PAC that is supplying it with opposition research. Many Republican candidates are going even further and having the super PACs pay for television ads while they spend their money on other expenses.

The debate moved onto senior citizens for a little bit. A lot of the focus of this campaign has been on Clinton’s problem with young voters. Sanders, though, has a problem with older voters. He lost them by 11 percentage points in New Hampshire, despite winning statewide by over 20 percentage points. In Iowa, he lost them by 43 percentage points even he basically tied the state with Clinton