Democratic Debate #2 Thread (Night 1)
welcome to debate #2, night 1. after a margin-moving first set of debates, the bar has been set for candidates. some candidates tonight are probably in a fight for their campaign hopes, while others are mostly looking to not get obliterated and stay the course. here are all the details you'd ever need, and probably then some:
i recommend you sort by newest first (or order posted) instead of the default since this thread will likely be semi-active and covering a live event.
How to Watch:
The debate each night will start at 8 p.m. ET and last two hours.
TV broadcast: CNN
Free online stream: CNN.com, CNN apps
Additional coverage: CBS News, NBC News
CNN's stream is here, ABC stream which may or may not be meta commentary
The Candidates:
The second Democratic presidential debate: July 30-31, 2019
Night 1 (Tuesday, July 30): Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, author Marianne Williamson, former Maryland Rep. John Delaney, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, and Montana Gov. Steve Bullock.
Night 2 (Wednesday, July 31): Former Vice President Joe Biden, California Sen. Kamala Harris, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, former HUD Secretary Julián Castro, business leader Andrew Yang, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet.
The Rules:
A candidate "who consistently interrupts" on Tuesday and Wednesday nights will be penalized by having his or her time reduced.
Campaign representatives have also been told there will be no "lightning round"-type questions requiring a show of hands or one word responses.
The debate will be moderated by Dana Bash, Don Lemon and Jake Tapper. Each of the 10 candidates each night will be allowed to make brief opening and closing statements, the network said.
The Analysis:
NPR has 5 questions for this debate:
- Will there be any distinctions drawn between Sanders and Warren?
- Will some of the air be taken out of Sanders' sails because Biden isn't onstage?
- How is race raised?
- Who breaks out?
- Without hand-raising, will we get answers that are as clear?
other pre-debate analysis pieces that may be pertinent to you:
- Refinery 29: Everything You Need To Know About The Second Presidential Primary Debate
- Vox: What to expect at the second Democratic presidential debate
- the Guardian: Democratic debates, round two: Sanders and Warren to face off for first time
- POLITICO: Speak up, stand out, get Iowa's attention: What each Dem needs out of Tuesday's debate
- CNN: Progressive frontrunners face off at CNN debate which may also offer opening for centrists
I think Sanders and Warren did an excellent job tonight defending their positions and fighting back. I will continue donating to both the campaigns because their vision is pretty much the same and both would make me proud to have as a President.
Amy Klobuchar lost me when she talked about free college for everyone but the wealthy, just as Pete Buttigieg did for me at the last debate. You cannot say education is a right if you put a qualifier on that right. That is classism based on wealth. If Donald Trump's kids wanted to go to Virginia Tech like me, I say go for it. It is a government institution, funded by taxpayers. We do not close off roads, fire stations, police departments, or a high school, based on how much money you have in the bank. Period. When 2024 rolls around, I want a president who include colleges and doctors on that list.
Tim Ryan lost me talking about unions and healthcare. The bargaining of healthcare in companies is additional leverage that a company has to use on the bargaining table. And to be charitable, that is because health care is also expensive to the companies as well! It is disingenuous to say that union workers love their insurance. I grew up on union health insurance, and on the one hand, I was more fortunate than many of the kids I grew up with because my parents could take me to the doctor whenever they needed to, but on the other hand, I had health care through an insurance company that would leave doctor's offices frustrated towards me because they had to spend sometimes hours negotiating with the insurance to pay the bill. Healthcare in this country is completely broken. My fiance slashed her leg open in three different parts in Italy 10 years ago, she paid nothing at the Italian hospital's ER as an American citizen. Last year, she had insurance and had to go to the ER for a scratched cornea with insurance. She paid nearly $2,000! It is so disingenuous to say because someone can bargain for health insurance, that is a good thing and we should keep it that way.
Don't get me wrong, I like and respect most of the candidates running for President. I will vote for any of them over Donald Trump in the general election and volunteer for them. However, if the next President isn't courageous and willing to fight against special interest groups, they will pave the way for the next Trump-like President the next go around.
We have been fighting for better health care for so long. If a Democratic candidate can't think as big or bigger than we did 60 years ago, I will be extremely disappointed.
Just read this small debate transcript from 1960:
Carter in 1976
Dukakis 1986:
Its just somewhere along the way, the Democratic party lost its vision on working class people. Look through the transcripts of the last 15 years of Democratic debates and find keywords like "climate change", "special interests", "unions", or "campaign finance reform". The Soviet Union is mentioned more after the year 2000 than unions themselves.
I'm writing off any candidate advocating for private health insurance as a corporate shill.
Working in the “healthcare business”. Oxymoronic.
"I WROTE THE DAMN BILL" is definitely going to be a line people remember, if this debate keeps up this absolutely painful way.
I wasn’t able to watch the debate yet, but my twitter feed was posting that, Warren’s rubbing her hands together when they asked Delaney about how her tax bill would affect him (which is already a reaction gif now), and Warren saying “I have no idea why someone goes through all the trouble of running for President just to talk about all the things they don’t want to fight for.”
Apparently, it's already a t-shirt!
god bless campaigns and their ability to quickly monopolize.
I am so excited Bernie's pollsters told him to kick up his spiceiness level.
yes, it did, and it was hilarious and made hick look silly.
Also making Hickenlooper look silly? The fact that he hasn't dropped out yet and is polling sub 2%
takeaways from the first half of this:
I'm so glad someone else hates Delaney as much as me
just going off of the twitter punditry, it seems like in retrospect delaney is nearly everybody's big loser outside of the fact that he got to talk a bunch. lots of points about how he sounds like a republican which is... probably not the kind of splash you want to be making in a democratic primary that is one-half defined by standing firm against the trajectory of the republican party? it's still possible of course that what the punditry thinks isn't in line with what the people think, but at least doing the rounds it seemed to me like nearly everybody from the reddit randos to the twitter hot take artists to the CNN spin room people were pretty consistent on who won--and it certainly wasn't delaney.
(cc: @spit-evil-olive-tips)
Why does it anger you that someone wants to take a chance to see if they can make a run of it? Would you feel the same way if it was someone whose politics you agreed with that was at 1%? I don't remember many super progressives getting angry at Nader back in '00. They were all for his candidacy even if he was going to be a "spoiler".
there are several people who i agree with who are at <1%, and if they spent as much time and money as delaney has to be useless i'd tell them to fuck off too at some point, yeah. delaney has done literally nothing despite having a year and a half head start on this entire field, and the only reason he was even on this stage is because he can self fund, not because he has a vision people want--and he probably won't make it to the next debate stage accordingly. you could have really replaced him with any of the people who didn't make the cut and they'd have been more useful to the conversations that have been had than delaney.
Why do you care that Delaney has spent time and money, though? I don't get why it makes you angry.
i think warren put it pretty well: "I don't understand why anybody goes through all the trouble of running for President of the United States to talk about what we really can't do and shouldn't fight for."
a sack of flour with a smiley face on it could probably do more than delaney has so far in this campaign, and it's to the point where i'd say the dude has done less than even some of the people who literally didn't make the debates. his straits are so bad that he only just passed 30,000 twitter followers and is touting his increase in followers as proof that his campaign has momentum.
You've just told me again that you are angry and care a lot about this.
The question was, why do you care? Why does it matter to you that Delaney spent a lot of effort and isn't succeeding?
again, i think warren put it pretty well. if you just want to preserve the status quo with a few tweaks, why are you running for president and taking up time and effort and energy that could go to people who actually want to systematically advance the current state of our nation and actually improve it ultimately? delaney used to be a sitting congressperson and explicitly passed up his seat to run for president, but, based on what he's campaigning on, literally everything he wants to accomplish could be better served in that end.
Because as it turns out lots of people believe that improving the country would be done best with tweaks and refinements and not massive overhauls??
and yet somehow, klobuchar, hickenlooper and ryan--all of whom run on a similar notion of tweaks and refinements instead of sweeping changes--actually put forward a message last night which is more than just the "i love the status quo, we only need to change a few things, we can't do any of this" routine delaney put up. now, that said, i don't think any of their messages were really captivating and they at times blended together, but they at least made it clear that while they thought some things should stay as they are, other things desperately needed fixing like the opioid crisis or climate change or labor in the US and that we needed a president who would use the supreme power invested in the office of the presidency and the executive branch to fight for improvements like that. delaney couldn't do any of that, and of the like, three policies i remember him advocating, generously one of them might be part of a case for "i deserve to be president". the rest was him trying to shit on everybody else's ideas because they weren't "sufficiently pragmatic" or something, even though republicans are literally on the record as also calling him a socialist.
That is a completely valid take, and I'm surprised alayza (not sure how to tag on Tildes) didn't advance that as xer main point.
Seriously.
My father is a retired member of the Boilermaker Union. He had to retire 10 years early at 55 because his body is giving out after 30 years of the hard physical labor. His biggest challenge right now is getting healthcare which costs an obscene amount of money after retirement but before Medicare (unless he somehow got disability). So yeah, instead of bargaining for human rights in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, we can focus on bargaining for better working conditions so someone doesn't have to retire 10 years early because the work is too demanding.
When has Tim Ryan ever picketed with union workers or fought on behalf of workers for better wages?
Bernie has got some fight in him tonight and I love it
delaney keeps swinging at warren and sanders, and literally every time he's come at them he's given one or both of them a big applause line to smack him over the head with. just stop, dude, your "exposure wins the day" strategy only works if you don't look fucking terrible every time you get into an exchange.
Best part was when Warren absolutely roasted Delaney when she questioned why people were running if they just keep talking about what they shouldn't or can't do.
I really feel like we could have had a way more productive debate if we weren't constantly checking in with Another Centrist White Dude on what they think. Imagine the conversations we could have between the actual progressive candidates
Also, it's been a long time since I've watched cable news. I was kind of startled by how obviously sensationalized it is now; it felt like I was watching a reality show, not a debate among presidential candidates.
I’m just happy CNN didn’t ask nearly as many (any?) “raise your hand” bullshit questions like MSNBC. That was one small improvement.
Honestly I wish there was a rule or law or something where if you are airing a debate you can’t run commercials. I recognize 100% this doesn’t make sense and would probably be illegal in some way but it would be nice to have networks not hunting after ratings and just giving some airtime to a process that is nominally important to our democracy.
It's pretty surprising to me you feel this way. In my own country we have some debates on public channels without commercials. The commercial channels obviously have them during debates, but at least we have the option. It is not at all unreasonable to ask for a public, non commercial and non sensationalized debate. I'd love to see the same thing on commercial channels, because it's a public service.
I suppose I should clarify: As long as private networks are broadcasting debates for what is nominally a private organization (the Democratic Party) I don’t think it’s probably legal to say they can’t advertise during it. If it was on a public channel like PBS or CSPAN (?) I could see it.
They should have made that a law when the government granted access to the airwaves in the first place, and stuck it to nightly news as well. No advertising at all 30 minutes before, during, and 30 minutes after news broadcasts or political debates. That would have dampened the infotainment aspect of news and helped keep it more objective, I think. It's a moot point now that television is dying anyway.
NBC's debates were a shitshow. CNN at least managed to keep something of a handle on the flow of the conversations.
I had trouble watching - men raising their voices gives me anxiety, apparently, something I didn't know until these debates. But I listened as much as I could while scrolling through Twitter.
My feed is populated by a lot of disabled activists, so the commentary I got was mostly in that vein. People are annoyed that yet again a debate completely ignored 20-25% of the population, especially in areas like healthcare. Warren mentioning Ady Barkan was something, but as far as I could tell no one actually talked about disabled people as a group.
The other common theme is folks talking about how dangerous Williamson is. From what little I've read she's anti-vax, peddled harmful beliefs during the AIDS crisis, and seems to think you can fix depression with positive thinking. I confess I haven't read very far into things myself. But every time she talks about focusing on health care vs sickness care (or however she puts it), I just hear all the people who tell chronically ill people like me that we could be cured by yoga and a special diet.
The same things can be said about lots of politicians and lots of Americans. The problem is that she speaks to the uneducated, "love will heal all" people out there. She comes across as the typical suburbanite who had very little interest in politics until the current debacle started taking airtime away from the latest celebrity fiasco. She speaks to the people that swear by Essential Oils and Goop. Just from personal experience, these people tend to not vote, or to vote however their SO tends to vote. I think she could be helpful if she turned her support for a realistic candidate and rallied her fan base to actually vote.
Thanks for the link and specific quotes! They really are scary - I hate that to people who don't know better, she sounded almost reasonable in some of her answers last night.
i mean, it's not that she was almost reasonable--it's that she was on most of the questions she got (most likely because she doesn't have to worry about sticking to a script and being a politician since she's running as an outsider). like i've said a couple times in this thread, if she wasn't fucking trash on shit like this in a way that's unavoidable and not really able to be explained away, she'd be a reasonably good candidate specifically for that reason.
added to the OP.
added.
this started okay, but after warren it's gotten increasingly shambaholic and useless and it's arguably worse than MSNBC's first go-around already. fucking let them speak a bit, you don't have to literally stop them mid-sentence!
it definitely improved after awhile, although i'm not sure if that's because they got a bit less stringent about enforcing the time when candidates were finishing their points, candidates internalized stopping better, or a mixture of both.
i don't think so, because williamson's woo is mostly concentrated in spiritual healing over medication and medicine and vaccination. i don't know what's with her chemical policies bit, but i tend to lean toward her having a valid point about them (since she lumps them in with environmental and sociopolitical policies) that's just phrased in a kinda dumb way. that said, she hasn't really expanded on what it's supposed to mean, so that might be me giving her charity where she doesn't deserve it
yes. one of those being that he self-taught himself in norwegian, afaik.
why are we doing this walkout thing again? did people not learn from that whole debacle from the republican debates in 2016 that this is an awful idea that becomes a trainwreck if someone messes up their cue? lol
for that matter, why are we doing all this pageantry? we could have just started the debate by now and knocked out an entire series of candidates answering questions.
i appreciate that marianne williamson's opening statement sounded about quarter reasonable, quarter populist, and half "what the fuck are you doing?". she's definitely on base tonight, which suggests we're in for the authentic marianne experience of being reasonable at times but also clearly leaning way too much into woo.
honest to god, if williamson wasn't so unavoidably terrible and kinda anti-science on certain things in her past and present, she'd probably be in the running for my vote specifically because she seems to be able to, when you let her, speak truth to power in a way that even candidates who have lived the experiences she's talking about cannot. her CNN interview post-debate, even, was basically her going off on how sociopathic trickle-down economics are and why we need a new economic system which prioritizes people and the environment, something that even warren and sanders didn't really talk about and haven't really talked about so directly in the campaign so far.
the problem with having this many "pragmatic" and "electable" candidates is that all of them sound the fucking same. you can't all be the pragmaticest and most electable.
I'll say this for him - he's remarkably well spoken and even-tempered. I'd like to see him progress to the next round of debates. I haven't dug heavily into his policies yet, but he seems to be on the same page as yang with a lot of his answers (more choice/capitalist-centric) which is a plus for me.
buttigieg shouldn't have problems qualifying for any of the future debates unless he takes a nosedive in his polling or the DNC does something weird. he easily vaulted the requirements for donors and outside of the front four, he's the only candidate consistently polling at more than 3% at this point from what i can tell.
I don’t get that at all.
my power rankings: williamson = sanders = warren > everybody else > delaney
williamson, sanders, warren, and delaney were the only people who stood out particularly across the entire debate; williamson i think did the best relative to where she polls but of course she's uh... a loon, so i suspect that she won't move too much (and if she does, she'll revert). warren and sanders did enough and got plenty of good soundbytes; warren will probably keep rising, sanders might keep falling or slow. delaney is just an annoying asshole that most people don't like, and i don't think his strategy tonight of just getting screentime is going to work since he got dunked on badly several times. the rest did okay to mediocre. beto's probably the big loser because he needed a big win and that did not happen to me; buttigieg kinda underperformed, i think, relative to his potential.
i'm going to revise this slightly and say that warren, in sum, won the day--not necessarily because of her debate performance alone, but because of the fact that she stayed on CNN for almost an hour in the spin room making a pretty compelling case for her plans after literally just spending 2 hours and 30 minutes doing that against 8 other people in front of... i dunno, 15 to 20 million people like it was nothing? probably someone you want to have in a position to win the presidency.
Bullock seems unfomfortable, his speech just seems unnatural
Is there not a VOD of this up anywhere? It looks like ABC's link is just useless commentary and google also returns a bunch of videos of talking heads.
Found some unofficial reposts. Who knows how long they'll be up for.
https://www.youtube.com/user/karim22464/videos
Not sure if anyone has posted this, but this seems to be a good transcript: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcript-of-july-democratic-debate-night-1-full-transcript-july-30-2019
Do you know how they decided who would be in night 1 and who would be in night 2? My quick search didn't yield an answer.
CNN spent a whole, televised hour basically drawing lots with cinematic cameras based on 3 tiers of candidates split between each night.
marianne williamson might be a bit of a whackjob woo-artist, but when she goes off she goes off spectacularly, and she just did exactly that with the question they gave her.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zrzv83W7pMY