Democratic Debate #1 Thread
welcome to debate #1, night 1. given tildes's small size, i'm not really sure how this will go, so my plan here on paper is to do two threads (one today, one tomorrow) for this set of debates, and then based on how active this set is make a decision on whether or not to consolidate them for the many future debates that will happen. if things go particularly well or poorly tonight though, i might expedite that decision (hence the un-specific title), but we'll see. anyways, here are all the details you'd ever need, and probably then some:
How to Watch:
The debate is being broadcast by NBC News, MSNBC and Telemundo, and will air live across all three networks starting at 9 p.m. ET.
Telemundo will broadcast the debate in Spanish.
The debate will stream online free on NBC News' digital platforms, including NBCNews.com, MSNBC.com, the NBC News Mobile App and OTT apps on Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV, in addition to Telemundo's digital platforms.
livestreams will also be available on Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube because the DNC mandated that of its partners for the debates.
The Candidates
Democratic Presidential Debate: See The 20 Candidates Who Will Be Onstage
- Cory Booker (Senator from New Jersey):
Booker is running on an aggressive optimism, promising to bring people together and fight for things like criminal justice overhaul, improved economic opportunity and LGBTQ rights.
- Julián Castro (Former secretary of housing and urban development):
The former Obama administration housing chief is running on hopeful notes. He promises students being saddled with less debt, veterans being respected, people of color being safe and immigrants being welcome.
- Bill de Blasio (Mayor of New York City):
Leading the country’s most populous city, de Blasio is running on putting working people first and is touting his record on minimum wage, sick leave, health care and universal pre-K. And he’s running against President Trump’s immigration and climate policies.
- John Delaney (Former representative from Maryland’s 6th District):
Delaney has campaigned in early states for nearly two years. He takes a pragmatic approach, especially on health care. He has spoken out against “Medicare for All,” a stance that hasn’t sat well with liberal activists.
- Tulsi Gabbard (Representative from Hawaii’s 2nd District):
The military veteran is running on a platform of “peace,” to end foreign wars and use the money to spend in America.
- Jay Inslee (Governor of Washington):
His campaign begins and ends with the threat posed by climate change. He argues that the economy and fighting climate change are not incompatible and that a green economy creates jobs.
- Amy Klobuchar (Senator from Minnesota):
Klobuchar believes in a pragmatism that’s rooted in her senatorial experience and a Midwestern optimism. She believes it’s necessary to reach out to solve problems and bridge divides between rural and urban communities.
- Beto O’Rourke (Former representative from Texas’ 16th District):
Best known for almost beating Ted Cruz, O’Rourke has a “positive, unifying vision.” He wants to fix American democracy with changes to campaign finance and voting, and to end wars, reduce gun violence, address climate change and guarantee women’s health care.
- Tim Ryan (Representative from Ohio’s 13th District):
He’s running on “rebuilding the American Dream,” and that means, in his view, blue-collar jobs, public education and health care.
- Elizabeth Warren (Senator from Massachusetts):
You name it, Warren has a plan for it. She’s not running to create a new system, but she is running on big, structural change, including increased regulation and scrutiny of Wall Street and banking.
The Rules:
Candidates will have 60 seconds to answer questions and 30 seconds to respond to follow-ups. No opening statements, though candidates will have a chance to deliver closing remarks.
Five segments each night separated by four commercial breaks.
The Analysis:
NPR has 5 questions of their 8 for the debates which apply to today's debate:
Does Warren make the most of commanding the stage?
Do the pragmatists or progressives win out?
How much of a focus is Trump?
How will foreign policy factor in?
Who will stick in voters' minds?
other pre-debate analysis pieces that may be pertinent to you:
Warren and Blasio have healthcare spot on.... keeping private insurance continues a system that separates the haves and the have nots. It is a universal right, it should be equal access to healthcare for everyone....full stop.
Why would you ever want that option? The US spends more money on healthcare per person than countries with socialized healthcare.
I'm going to bet your employer insurance pales in comparison to Tricare.
Need to go take kids to the docs? $0 out of pocket.
Broken Arm, broken hip, and concussion? $0 out of pocket.
Got cancer, and all the treatment with that? $0 out of pocket.
Compared to "good" health insurance I have from my employer:
Kids need to go to docs for strep? $50 co-pay.
Broken arm, hip, and concussion? $350 emergency room co-pay, $75 co-pay for all follow ups (~15 or so).
Got cancer, and all treatment? I'll tell you when I get done paying all of the bills still coming in... We're in the range of about 45K right now.
I don't think anyone actually is suggesting banning private insurance, but rather guaranteeing coverage for everyone.
So, you want better insurance? Go buy it. Your always covered at a basic level.
The problem with the insurance market today is that it is so tightly coupled to employment.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And Yes.
The Obamacare exchanges made it possible to decouple them, but the premiums without an employer subsidy are unreasonably high for extremely ungenerous plans. It's not a coupling to employment problem, it's a cost problem. This shit is just too expensive. People who get it through their employment pay the price too, they just pay it in the form of downward pressure on their salaries since their employers are tilting their payroll cost into health benefits instead of wages.
People's salaries would creep up to be a higher if employers didn't have to manage all this insurance management overhead as part of their benefits packages, and small businesses would have a much easier time recruiting for talent against big businesses since less-generous benefits are one of their big challenges hiring capable people. Benefits cost overhead and administration, and big businesses can absorb those costs better due to scale.
Agreed. I wish they had built some way into the bill to just let employers not play the "just the basics" game, and say, "We're offering insurance... Via the exchange." So employees would still get subsidies, employer contribs, and not pay through the nose.
In reality, single-payer is the solution. But, we have too many "mah own bootstraps" people to do that.
No it doesn't optimize anything for individuals. Insurance isn't an individual consumer product, it's a mutual aid agreement among a collective of people to pool their risk.
If low-risk people leave the pool, it makes it more expensive for the remaining people to remain, which makes the next marginally low risk person leave the pool, and so on. This is called the adverse selection death spiral.
You get a system that's better optimized for people throughout their lives by putting everyone in the same risk pool.
What about all those people that don't have your employer's good insurance? Those are people paying through the nose for their healthcare.
Apparently it costs around $10k for someone to have a baby in the US? It costs them almost nothing up here in Canada. Imagine all those uninsured people paying $10k each time they have a baby. Just one is more money than Canadians directly spend on childbirth overall (assuming no complications throughout).
Universal heallthcare is not the same thing as government being the arbiter of good ideas for health insurance? I'm not sure what that's based on—universal healthcare is not insurance. Private health insurance still exists within universal healthcare, I have some through my employer that cover things that the universal healthcare does not.
Universal healthcare provides a reasonable baseline of healthcare. It is not a whole replacement for all medical costs.
Even medicare for all doesn't preclude rider policies.
Looking into it more, it seems we are. But realistically, the claim of "this will remove all private insurance" is a moonshot. It still exists just fine in every other system because (as far as I'm aware) no government has been able to cover as many healthcare situations as what Medicare For All is proposing.
The thing is, the elimination of private healthcare will decrease the price of public healthcare. You need pool wealthier, healthy people with low risk alongside lower income and/or people with preexisting conditions so that the latter's prices will go down comparatively.
That was the reason Obamacare had the individual mandate.
Personally, I don't think public only would be very popular in the general election, but there ARE reasons people push for it.
Then what happens if you become unemployed?
The relevance of the second statement is that it would be way cheaper overall to fund it through taxes than fund it the way it's done now, with each and every person paying for their individual insurance. Access to healthcare should be a right, in my opinion - everyone here in Denmark has that (except dentists when you're over 18, and also psychologists which the new government wants to make free for anyone under 24)
That's the whole point of universal healthcare though, to insure everyone has access to the same, high-quality care regardless of their employment status or wealth.
To fund universal healthcare, taxes will need to go up to pay for it. It will most likely be less in taxes than you're paying for your employer-provided healthcare.
I have great (by US standards) healthcare. I pay through the nose for it. I would give it up in a heartbeat for proper universal care, because so many other societal issues are caused by lack of mental and physical healthcare.
Yeah I think a lot of the anxiety people generally feel about healthcare comes down to how to transition from whatever we got now to whatever a "new" system might be, and I would bet cash that the lion's share of moderates on this issue don't trust that the government would transition effectively enough that they wouldn't be at major risk at a substantial reduction in healthcare coverage quality.
This is one of the benefits we tried to point to when it came to the ACA, but moderate people's anxiety levels were generally too high to hear it until we voted a Republican into office who wanted to dismantle it. Edit: And Obama saying that everyone could keep their health insurance if they liked it didn't exactly help democratic credibility on the issue.
Everybody could keep their policy, if they chose, as long as it met the basic minimums to be called "health insurance", whose requirements were minimal, at best.
No, he even admitted he exaggerated this point.
Except, you could keep your insurance, if you were the one who picked out your insurance.
Your employer could have kept the same plan, but they also could have changed it.
ie, at the time, I had no change in my health insurance. Even went down by ~$100/month. My employer chose to maintain their group plan.
Your insurer also had the option of keeping the plan in place, or cancelling it.
YOU always had the choice you had before, however. People just didn't realize how dependent they are on the choices of OTHERS for their insurance.
You're not even gonna give an inch on what was clearly, and widely accepted by all the participating parties to be, an exaggerated claim? I am not here to litigate what was and wasn't possible when it came to keeping a healthcare plan or not being able to. It was an obviously exaggerated claim that Obama himself admitted was exaggerated and that meaningfully impacted how trustworthy Obama was seen to be as a messenger when it came to the ACA (by 15 points, if you didn't read the link).
So I don't know what you're trying to do here, but you're not exactly making a good case for why Obama saying that helped alleviate moderate voters' concerns. Since, you know, it was an exaggeration and was reported and admitted to be one.
No, I'm not. Because, it's not really an exaggerated claim.
People who CHOOSE their insurance ALL BY THEMSELVES could keep their plan. For better or worse, most people in the US don't choose their plans... Their employers do. Their employers could have chosen to keep the same plan, they chose not to.
Pro-tip democrats: Stop talking about Trump, mentioning his name gives him power.
seems like most of them have heard you. 538 is tracking trump mentions and they're at:
Jay Inslee 3
Amy Klobuchar 2
Cory Booker 2
Tulsi Gabbard 2
Julián Castro 1
Bill de Blasio 0
John Delaney 0
Beto O’Rourke 0
Tim Ryan 0
Elizabeth Warren 0
That's impressively low actually, good for them.
i neglected to update it last night, but i think the final total mentions of trump was around 20 on the night? so more than that, but still pretty low when you consider it was a 2 hour debate and trump looms extremely large over a lot of the issues that were discussed.
impressed so far about how much policy discussion there's been, even though it's been obviously watered down and condensed to hit the 60 second time limit. they're even focusing on and leveraging some of their differences, which was not something a lot of the punditry really expected!
Warren won this debate for me, Tulsi was flatter then I hoped, Booker did well, but was also given A LOT if time.
Felt Castro was strong, Beto was given a lot of time but didn't feel as strong.
Everyone else felt flat
Castro did it for me, and I didn't know who he was prior to watching.
Edit: I'll probably re-watch it.
Castro came out swinging, I like that about him.
I felt like Warren was ignored the second half of the debate by the panel. I am worried about her being to polite.
well, she got a ton of speaking time early (and even across the board she talked second or third most of the ten up there), which probably contributed to why she was nearly silent for the second half of the debate.
I felt the same politeness thing from Inslee.
Personally, I am not a Warren fan, and I cannot pinpoint why.
Warren came in with a lot of momentum, so no candidate wanted to challenge her.
Totally agree with you, she was a little too polite. I think Booker came out assertive and in command and it played well for him. Warren was great when she spoke, straight and to the point (except her closing speech that was a little too sacchariney), but she didn't get all that much time
gotta go warren > castro = de blasio > booker > everybody else > beto > gabbard, personally.
warren was basically untouchable, and it really fucking showed because nobody attacked her or even really engaged with her; she didn't really bomb any question either, although she could have done better on the gun question. castro and de blasio both came off as punching well above their weight class. booker wasn't the best, but he held his own to me. everybody i didn't bother to name is kinda bleh and neither over nor underperformed.
beto and gabbard were the clear losers to me. beto got kinda bodied on healthcare by de blasio and delaney, then he got into an exchange he lost with castro on an issue castro is knowledgeable about; he also didn't really have any standout answers. gabbard honestly just sucked across the board beyond the healthcare question.
I'd put Gabbard over Tim Ryan, but only because I think Gabbard in office would be a weird wild-card while Ryan would be guaranteed to be dumb.
If you were a voter who had never heard of Tulsi Gabbard but this debate was the first introduction to her, what exactly did she do/say in this context that made her come off as a Russian shill candidate?
Inslee taking a lot of credit for things the state legislature did here in WA that he signed.
I'm not from Washington, and to me he sounded really condescending every time he mentioned stuff like that but I couldn't figure out why. I think you got it though, it's because he didn't. He certainly helped/enabled, but it was the state congress that was a huge part of it.
I'm not looking for superhero candidates who claim they can fix everything themselves, that's fantasy. I want candidates who have humility, ask for help, and can work with people who are hard to work with.
Delaney with the /r/enlightenedcentrism take about how we need to pass bipartisan bills and also pass universal healthcare.
Some gold from Nate Silver on the 538 liveblog:
Serious facepalm from Booker not wanting to get back into the Iran deal, just offering some vague Trump-esque "I could get a better deal". The reason the original Iran deal succeeded is that it was multi-lateral. Renegotiating it can't be done unilaterally.
Want to renegotiate the Iran deal? Much harder than it looks
He just wanted to talk more.
This is about face time, u at least remembered that, cannot say that about the rest of them
i have no idea what he was thinking with that one, tbh. i think he was the only one that didn't raise his hand at the question, and the fact that he bombed it isn't a great look even if it has no staying power.
I expected more from Inslee on climate change considering that's his platform.
probably the crunch of the 60 seconds there, honestly. his plan is pretty sweeping, and there's only so much you can say in a minute short of literally listing things off, which isn't the best way to appeal to voters i'm guessing.
I would think that by now he would have his 60 second sound bites. On the other hand he has never done well in debates.
tim ryan just committed what's probably the first genuine gaffe of this debate by saying that the taliban did 9/11 in an exchange with gabbard:
Gabbard: I was in the military.
Ryan: I was in the military too. We can't let the Taliban grow.
Gabbard: The Taliban has been there for a long time.
Ryan: I didn't say squash them!
Gabbard: They didn't attack on on 9/11. Al Qaeda did.
I really liked her rejoinder about Saudi Arabia just after that as well. Similar to Inslee and climate change, I don't really support her and think she has no chance of winning - but I'm glad she's there to push everyone else in a more anti-war direction.
apparently tim ryan is still actually very upset with gabbard over this, lol:
This is some real Bravo reality tv level drama right here.
When that exchange happened though I was kind of like “man, you just got owned by Tulsi Gabbard. How must that feel? Embarrassing?”
some early observations, with thirty minutes before this starts happening:
Honestly, it’s kinda awful so far imo. Too many people. Faces, names, and answers are just blending together for me.
This is Elizabeth Warren vs. a bunch of chump blockers.
Half of them can’t even tie their canned speeches to the questions they’ve been asked.
Also all these people struggling to demonstrate their Spanish fluency. It would be nice if it wasn’t so transparently pandering. What do they expect non-Spanish speakers to do?
I know! It felt pretty forced and embarrassing.
Thank you for using the term "chump blockers" outside of MTG and other similar games. That's exactly what they were.
Medicare for All (While this creature is in play, any damage dealt to creatures you control is reduced to 0).
When Elizabeth Warren attacks, all candidates who can block Elizabeth Warren must block Elizabeth Warren.
yeah. i can't tell the difference between half these god damn people, and i pay attention to politics way more than i should! they should probably get a chyron for who's speaking instead of just relying on naming and podium position.
I'm not sure why they don't keep their name up the entire time they are talking.
hopefully, they will learn from this and either do that tomorrow or next month, because yeesh things get hard to follow otherwise.
slightly-past halftime roundup of stuff:
Drinking game rules:
Every time they don't answer the question they were asked.
Tulsi so far is the winner of the question-dodge-o-meter after she got asked about pay equity for women and talking purely about her military record and anti-war-ness.
Halfway through her answer my friend said “m’am this is a Starbucks” and it might be the most appropriate use of that meme ever.
Oh god. I thought I must have misheard the question. She reallllllly didn’t answer.
i assume she was setting up who she is more than genuinely dodging the question, since she has super low name recognition. she answered the healthcare question just now pretty well.
It was a really a horrible question for her, so I think she just said fuck it, this what will get my name out there better then that question
What is she gonna say that will distinguish her from the rest of the candidates.
so far, the answer seems to be nothing. on my scorecard so far, she's definitely my worst performer because she's really only had one good response and kinda bombed the rest while not coming off as particularly distinctive.
god, you're gonna fucking die if you do that, lol. you'd already have to take one, maybe two shots just because of beto's first question there (and we're only 10 minutes in) where he didn't really answer the question directly and also half-answered the follow up.
fivethirtyeight's got a words spoken counter so far through the first quarter of an hour (in response to questions only, i think). if it seems like warren is getting lots of time to speak and speaking lots, it's because she is:
Elizabeth Warren 408
Cory Booker 323
John Delaney 230
Tim Ryan 207
Beto O’Rourke 202
Amy Klobuchar 197
Tulsi Gabbard 188
Jay Inslee 180
Julián Castro 173
Bill de Blasio 0
fifty minutes in, o'rourke passed warren:
Beto O’Rourke 1041
Elizabeth Warren 986
Cory Booker 917
Julián Castro 833
Amy Klobuchar 733
Bill de Blasio 527
John Delaney 464
Tulsi Gabbard 362
Jay Inslee 272
Tim Ryan 212
also of interest, someone on reddit is keeping track of questions and interruptions, which is as follows:
"I'm not counting failed interruptions (where they tried but where talked over or owned by the moderators), but I'll list them here) Castro 1, Delaney 2, de Blasio 1
Warren 5, and one interruption (6 total)
Beto 6
Klobuchar 5
Booker 5
Gabbard 3
de Blasio 1, and two interruptions (3 total)
Ryan 2
Delaney 1, and one interruption (2 total)
Castro 3, and two interruptions (5 total)
Inslee 2, and one interruption (4 total)"
I can’t tell if she’s just really good at staying within the time limit or if they just aren’t stopping her. They haven’t called time on her once as far as I could tell.
she got called once, but yeah she's also been very good about staying in the time limit so far.
She is getting more time. Boo.
a lot of it seems to be that people are playing into her talking points and she's getting chances to respond with them, and the moderators are also basically distinguishing her against the field with some of these questions, although she's also had more questions.
Looking forward to watching this. I'll try to keep active here to help keep a discussion going!
I'm curious to see how Tulsi and Warren does.
beto's already distinguishing himself with the bilingual answer there, even though he didn't exactly answer the question that was asked of him and didn't do much with the follow up either. that'll probably get him places with latino voters, and he's already not doing especially badly with them.
Good on the moderator to ask the direct follow-up, "yes, no, or pass", after Beto obviously didn't answer. Boo on O'Rourke for dodging it again.
He surprised me!
and there's booker, also speaking spanish. his spanish, purely based on how it came off to this gringo, seemed a bit worse than beto's, but hey. he definitely needs latino voters (although honestly he also needs every kind of voter, he's only polling like 4%). decent response to the question also.
Oh here we go. They’ve started interrupting each other.
...omg. Delaney’s smile is soooo weird.
it was inevitable. also, ouch did that interruption lead to de blasio making beto look kinda ridiculous on healthcare, especially since delaney followed de blasio up with a relatively good response on the fact that private healthcare can coexist with an M4A system or something similar.
Yeah. Beto is sounding a bit more nervous now. Talking faster and with a more clipped voice. Like he’s running out breath.
Castro's first mention of that specific section of the immigration law was good...he's turning into a bit of a one-trick pony on it though.
Also him and Beto talking over each other is really annoying.
Who is the guy arguing with Beto?
Julian Castro, former mayor of San Antonio and HUD Secretary under Obama
Anyone know why Sanders isn't in this debate?
He’s in tomorrow’s debate
because it's the first of a series of two due to the size of the field. he goes tomorrow, same time, same place.
Thanks!
I have to say, I am impressed with all of the candidates tonight with how policy focused the debate was. It was really refreshing and I feel I actually have a better sense of what each candidate wants. I went into the debate liking Warren the most, and think I still do. That being said, Castro really had a great night as did Booker. I was pleasantly surprised by Inslee as well - I’d love to see him as Energy Sec or EPA Chief.
Watching the closing statements now, and Warren’s was the best I think. I’m really excited about her.
As an immigrant, I totally agree on immigration. Asylum seekers is one thing, but completely opening the border and allowing economic illegal immigration like what Castro was pushing for is not only wrong, it is also impractical. As much as I agree about immigrants generally making the country stronger, a big part of the country does not. Paternalistically telling them that they're wrong plays directly into Trump's base.
Yeah, Warren seems very practiced. She’s been getting me to pay attention more than the rest anyway.
It's annoying, after the DNC talked so much about randomizing the debate lineups between the two nights, this first night ended up being a bunch of also-rans plus Warren (and maybe Booker depending on how you want to draw the line).
Yeah… it’s kinda weird when combined with how many of the mainstream media pundits have been talking about Warren recently. She leads over Sanders in like 1 poll and they’re all talking like she’s number 2 now. Being the only one with a chance on stage might help her.
Ah well. I’m probably paranoid.
I'm just tuning in now, but does anyone know why the stream is steadily being disliked into oblivion?
Russia? Lol
Yeah I'm guessing Russia, 4chan, or both.
I'll tell you what, I was very surprised how much I liked Inslee. His pro-green and pro-worker policy was very appealing to me.
Highlight of the night had to be when Gabbard went off on Ryan about how we don't need to be in Afganistan any longer. It blows my mind to think there are people out there that think they can win the ticket when they are preaching for us to continue the endless war.
Lowlight of the night had to be when Booker spoke Spanish. When O'Rurke spoke it at first it was neat and genuine, but as he went on it just felt kinda awkward to watch. When Booker tried to follow it up AND stammered the first few words it felt like obvious pandering.
some early morning aftermath:
Warren/Castro might be a strong ticket, though she'd probably need to balance herself out with someone with more "heartland" appeal. Would probably depend on how well Warren polls in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, etc.