PBS Democratic Debate: Live Coverage

The story about life expectancy for middle-age white people isn’t as simple as it’s being presented here. As Andrew Gelman explained at Slate, the finding that life expectancy is dropping for these Americans “resonated with both left and right,” but it may be a statistical artifact arising from the way that age categories are classified.

Hillary Clinton’s shout-out to coal country was presumably not accidental. Appalachia, a strong spot for Clinton in the 2008 primaries, could be one of the most interesting battlegrounds this time around, being poor and white (characteristics that might help Bernie Sanders) but culturally conservative (probably not helpful for Sanders). We don’t have a lot of polling from the region; Facebook data suggests that neither Clinton nor Sanders is very popular there, but that Sanders underperforms his national averages more than Clinton does.

The moderators posed a very interesting question regarding white economic strife. Lower-income white voters seemed to latch on to Bernie Sanders’s economic message in Iowa and New Hampshire. He did far better with those with lower incomes. That’s a reverse for Clinton from eight years ago, when she did better among white voters with lower incomes.

Sanders is right that African-Americans and other minority groups were hit especially hard by the housing crisis. Some of that is because they tended to be poorer and thus were more likely to lose their homes to foreclosure. But there is also evidence that banks disproportionately sold risky mortgages to minority borrowers. Wells Fargo and other banks have paid large fines for targeting minority borrowers for inappropriately risky loans.

Here’s more on why Gwen Ifill referred to Milwaukee as the most racially polarized city in the U.S., from Governing in 2014.

https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/697971873762545664

https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/697971139394449409

Reducing the U.S. prison population to levels more in line with other Western countries, as Bernie Sanders says he hopes to do, is harder than you might think. According to my colleague Oliver Roeder, the U.S. would have the highest incarceration rate in the world even if all drug offenders were released.

Sanders said that not enough police departments reflect the diversity of the communities they serve. Last year, Batya Ungar-Sargon wrote on our website about departments that have become more diverse — after collecting data showing just how many of the biggest departments diverge from their communities.

Bernie Sanders just spoke about the disproportionately high black male prison population. Blacks are his weakest demographic group against Hillary Clinton. In South Carolina for instance, Clinton only leads among white voters by 11 percentage points in the latest Marist College poll. She leads among black voters by 54 percentage points.

Sanders said he is “sick and tired” of seeing footage of police officers killing unarmed people on television. Even when the footage exists, police departments often work hard to prevent that footage from being made public, as the Chicago Police Department did with footage of the killing of Laquan McDonald before it was released in December.

Sanders cites the oft-repeated statistic that women make 79 cents for every dollar that men make. That number is accurate but simplistic; it doesn’t factor in differences in the hours women work, the types of jobs they do and other factors. When economists control for those differences, the pay gap shrinks substantially, but it doesn’t disappear. Harvard economist Claudia Goldin recently showed that no matter how many variables are factored in, women still make less on average than men.

My feelings about making profound demographic inferences from New Hampshire primary results are well reflected by this Roberto Ferdman tweet: https://twitter.com/robferdman/status/697414880568147968

Nate, it was mentioned that a majority of women in New Hampshire didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton. Do we have a sense of which demographic factors outweigh others? For example, was it income and not gender that was the dominant force in New Hampshire voting?

We asked Morning Consult, the online pollster, to survey Americans about gender and the campaign this week. We’ll have more results later, but with 1,600 interviews completed with registered voters as of Thursday evening, 60 percent of men and 60 percent of women said that whether a candidate is a woman would have no impact on their vote. Sixteen percent of men said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who is a woman, and 20 percent of women said so.

I feel like I’m in some time machine with Scott Walker getting mentioned. You might remember that he ran for president and then exited faster than you can say “Favre.” Walker left the race because he didn’t have the money. I have no idea where he would be if he had stayed in, though I do think a lot of conservatives who hate Donald Trump wish Walker was still in the race.

Harry, a Scott Walker reference! Would he have solved the current logjam on the GOP side if he had stuck with it?

Hillary Clinton just talked about Bernie Sanders’s plan for free college, suggesting that Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, for one, wouldn’t support the plan. Last year, a survey conducted by Gallup and published by Inside Higher Ed found that just 39 percent of community college presidents believed their state legislature was likely to support the plan, even with federal support. Wisconsin is one of the states where a free community college plan likely wouldn’t get much support from legislators — forget making all public colleges free.

Sanders says the “real unemployment rate” is 10 percent, not the 4.9 percent the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. Unlike Donald Trump’s absurd claim that the unemployment rate is really as high as 42 percent, Sanders is on relatively firm ground here. The official unemployment rate ignores people who have given up looking for jobs, and those stuck in part-time jobs because they can’t find full-time work. Add those people back in, and the unemployment rate rises to 9.9 percent. Is that number the “real” unemployment rate? Not necessarily; the definition of unemployment has been consistent for decades. But it’s a legitimate — and perhaps even better — measure of the pain many workers are still feeling in this economy.

Hillary Clinton loves to attach herself to President Obama. That didn’t work for her in New Hampshire where just 40 percent of Democrats wanted to continue Obama’s policies. One would think when the race moves down to South Carolina — and a majority African-American electorate — that Clinton will be happier that she’s decided to play up her ties to Obama.

Sanders is making some bold promises on health care that are sure to appeal to many of his supporters. Clinton is taking a much more pragmatic approach. Back in 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama criticized candidate Clinton for proposing a health care plan that mandated coverage. Eight years later, we have the Affordable Care Act, which mandates that most Americans get insurance. Congressional Republicans shut down the government in 2013 in an attempt to defund the the Affordable Care Act, which shares many characteristics with plans previously proposed by Republicans. The chances of a plan like the one Sanders is promising getting through Congress seems even slimmer.

Nearly 9 million people gained health insurance last year under the Affordable Care Act. But Sanders is certainly right that “Obamacare” hasn’t succeeded in guaranteeing health insurance for all Americans. Some 33 million people living in the U.S. still don’t have coverage. Many of them are people in groups that the act wasn’t designed to help, such as undocumented immigrants, or whom experts have long known are hard to cover, such as “young invincibles” who don’t want to pay for insurance. But millions are people who are falling through the cracks in the law, as my colleague Anna Maria Barry-Jester and I explained last year.

Hillary Clinton is defending the Affordable Care Act — aka “Obamacare” — but just how popular is it among Democrats? The answer is: reasonably popular. A December CBS News poll found 69 percent of Democrats approve of the ACA versus 24 percent who disapprove.

Clinton is making a play for President Obama’s supporters by promising to protect his health care program. In New Hampshire voting, Clinton drew strong support from many groups of voters who formed the backbone of Obama’s support in 2008.

Sanders just laid out an expansive vision for the role of the federal government in health care, higher education, infrastructure and more. He talked less about how to pay for it. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that under current policies, the federal deficit is on track to rise from 2.9 percent of the economy in 2016 to 4.9 percent.

I want to make a point about the influence of money in politics, which Bernie Sanders mentioned in his opening statement. No one would say money doesn’t influence politics, but I should point out that money without a message means nothing. If money was all that mattered, Jeb Bush would be leading in the polls on the Republican side. Instead, he had to claim a fourth-place finish in New Hampshire as some sign of strength.

Hillary Clinton opens by saying people are “angry about the economy, and for good reason.” One interesting thing about the upcoming contests in Nevada and South Carolina is that they are not only more representative of the country demographically than Iowa and New Hampshire, but also more representative economically. Iowa and New Hampshire both have low unemployment rates and generally strong economies. Nevada, on the other hand, was one of the states hardest hit by the recession and one of the slowest to recover. And while South Carolina is doing better than Nevada, it has a higher unemployment rate than the nation as a whole, and it has an important manufacturing sector that is now facing pressure from the weaker economy overseas. Much of the campaign so far, in both parties, has focused on the economy; the upcoming states will give a better picture of how Americans view the candidates’ messages.

Q: Any idea when we’re likely to see more polling in NV or SC? — Jim Hardy A: Over the next few days, we should start seeing the polls start to drop. I expect a lot more polling out of South Carolina. Nevada, on the other hand, is a much more difficult state to poll because it is a caucus and has low turnout. I think we’ll get some polls out of there, but not many.

In response to Nate’s thoughts on Nevada, I find it absolutely hilarious that the Clinton campaign is downplaying her chances there. They even tried to claim that the state was whiter than it is — a claim that was thoroughly debunked by the great Jon Ralston. I don’t know why Team Clinton did that, but if it’s because their internal polling doesn’t look good, then that’s very bad news for her.

Bernie Sanders is big online — he beats Hillary Clinton in Facebook likes and, lately, in Google searches. And in the next two states in which Democrats will cast votes, Sanders has widened his lead over Clinton in Google searches since winning the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday.

What does this mean for Sanders’s electoral prospects in Nevada and South Carolina? It’s too soon to say. This kind of data is relatively new, and it picks up searches from people who can’t vote in the primary — or who may be searching for candidates they dislike. Still, Google Trends picked up rising interest in Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio relative to Donald Trump before the Iowa caucuses, when Cruz and Rubio outperformed their polls; and searches for Republican candidates on the day of the New Hampshire primary were strongly correlated with candidates’ vote shares. So it’ll be worth tracking this search data as the Feb. 20 caucus in Nevada approaches.

Tonight’s debate is in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but the next state where Democratic voters will cast ballots is Nevada, which holds its caucuses on Feb. 20. There’s no recent polling in Nevada, and I’m not sure how much I’d trust the polls anyway for a state holding a low-turnout caucus. But based on its demographics, Nevada figures to be a much fairer fight between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders than the two overwhelmingly white and liberal states, Iowa and New Hampshire, to have voted thus far. In Nevada’s 2008 caucuses, 35 percent of voters were nonwhite, fairly close to the average for Democratic primaries and caucuses that year. And 55 percent of Democratic voters identified as moderate or conservative rather than liberal, a somewhat above-average figure. Clinton’s campaign may be lowering expectations for Nevada, but a loss there would be an unambiguously negative sign.

“I know I have some work to do, particularly with young people,” Hillary Clinton said in her speech after losing to Bernie Sanders in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday. She got the votes of just 1 in 6 voters under 30, according to exit polls. She’s unlikely to do much work with young people during the debate tonight, though, simply because not very many of them are likely to be watching.

Voters under 35 averaged just 11 percent of television viewers for the five Democratic debates so far, according to Nielsen ratings, even though they make up 24 percent of the U.S. population. Meanwhile, nearly two out of three TV viewers of the debates have been over 55, even though they make up less than one-third of the population. Half of TV viewers of the average debate have been over 62. The only age group Clinton won in New Hampshire was voters 65 and older; perhaps they’ve been impressed by her debate performances so far. The Nielsen numbers might slightly understate viewership among younger viewers, since they don’t count online viewership. (Side note for media nerds: The online numbers also aren’t audited and are self-reported by channels. And they’re often not comparable to TV audience counts, which are the average number of people watching at any one time; online stream counts usually count any stream, no matter how long it lasted, and the results can be five times the average number watching online at any one time.) The channels that carried the debates don’t know how old their online viewers are for any particular program, but the online audience generally is younger — for instance, the average age of viewers of CBSN, the streaming channel for CBS News, is 39, according to a spokeswoman for CBS Interactive.

Hello and welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s live coverage of tonight’s Democratic debate! Your usual host, Micah Cohen, is spending his night off watching “Veep” reruns while reading “Game Change” for the 13th time. (After he read it for the 10th time he burst out of his office and said, “I finally understood the tragic elements in Steve Schmidt’s character arc this time!”) Tonight, two candidates enter … and two candidates will leave. Hillary Clinton is coming off a loss in New Hampshire that political journalists are calling a “rout,” while Bernie Sanders is attempting to make inroads with demographic groups that until now have been resistant to his message. What comes next is unclear — the polling in Nevada and South Carolina, the next two states to caucus and primary, has been very sparse. But the demographics suggest Clinton is favored. Before things start, be sure to read Nate, Harry, Clare and Micah’s kaffeeklatsch on the confusion in the Republican race. And if you’re eager for more, earlier today we mapped every county’s favorite candidate on Facebook. You can find the debate on PBS, and it starts at 9 p.m. Eastern. We’ll be blogging right here all night long. Stick around a while!

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