5 winners and 3 losers from the October Democratic presidential debate
Winner: Bernie Sanders. Loser: Joe Biden.
Tuesday night’s Democratic debate, the fourth the Democratic National Committee has held so far, was big. It was long — three hours that sometimes felt much longer — and absurdly crowded, with 12 candidates on stage, a record for a televised presidential debate.
But it was also arguably the most useful debate so far. It was unusually policy heavy, with spirited and detailed debates over automation and employment, the consequences of US withdrawal from Syria, wealth taxation, and more. It saw direct confrontation between candidates who had not previously squared off, like Pete Buttigieg and Tulsi Gabbard, or Andrew Yang and Amy Klobuchar, or Beto O’Rourke and Elizabeth Warren. And in the process it sharpened distinctions between the campaigns on issues where their platforms were blurry going in.
Here’s who ended the night better off, and who ended it worse off.
Winner: Bernie Sanders
Bernie entered this debate on the ropes. After spending most of the campaign solidly in second place behind Joe Biden in national polls, he is now a distant third behind Biden and Elizabeth Warren. He’s also in third in Iowa (which he nearly won in 2016) and in New Hampshire (which he won in 2016 in a huge landslide). By the numbers, he seems to be underperforming his last run, despite having a vastly more professional campaign infrastructure and not facing a juggernaut like Hillary Clinton.
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and former Vice President Joe Biden during the Democratic presidential debate.
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and former Vice President Joe Biden during the Democratic presidential debate.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
As if that weren’t enough, his biggest liability — being 78 years old, and 79 by the time he’d be inaugurated — came into sharper relief when he was hospitalized following a heart attack and had emergency surgery. It feels gross to hold someone’s health issues against them, and I’m extremely glad that Bernie appears in good health now. That said, being president is an uncommonly demanding job, and it’s reasonable for voters to wonder if a 78-year-old is up to it.
Sanders’s performance Tuesday night provided an answer to that worry. He was more animated and on his game than much younger candidates like Tulsi Gabbard or Amy Klobuchar. He was more effective than Warren at defending the Medicare-for-all plan they both support (but which, he’s quick to note, he wrote), replying to concerns about its realism, “I’m tired of people defending a system which is dysfunctional, which is cruel. 87 million uninsured. 30,000 people dying every year. 500,000 people going bankrupt. For one reason: They came down with cancer.”
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That answer is not fully accurate — the uninsured (actually “uninsured plus underinsured”) and death numbers are roughly right, but the bankruptcy numbers aren’t just due to cancer — but it was powerfully made. Even more powerful was his off-handed, “I feel great!” two hours in, prompting Erin Burnett to ask how he’d reassure voters who worry about his age. Just watch my next rally, Bernie replied.
The rally might be persuasive, but he might not even need it. Bernie gave a commanding, memorable performance that might have been enough to neutralize the health issue going forward.
— Dylan Matthews
Winner: Elizabeth Warren
If there was any lingering doubt that Warren has ascended to frontrunner status, this debate put it to rest.
Warren was certainly treated like the frontrunner of the debate, judging by all the attacks she took. The Massachusetts senator has replaced Bernie Sanders as the preferred punching bag of lower-polling moderate candidates who are hesitant to go after Biden. From the get-go, more moderate candidates including Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg jabbed at Warren, trying to pin her on whether she’d raise taxes in paying for Medicare-for-all.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg on stage during the Democratic presidential debate.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg on stage during the Democratic presidential debate.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
Later, Warren squared off against Sen. Kamala Harris, who wanted her to join Harris’s demand that Twitter deactivate Trump’s profile (Warren replied, “No,” and talked about breaking up big tech companies instead). There were also a couple weird moments with Tulsi Gabbard, who challenged the Massachusetts senator to adopt her pro-Assad and “anti-regime change war” stance in Syria, and confronted Warren on her commander-in-chief bonafides, before the moderators cut to commercial.
In past debates, Warren has largely emerged unscathed while Biden was swarmed by the others. Tuesday night was different; at one point, Sen. Cory Booker rushed to Biden’s defense and blasted CNN’s moderators for asking Biden a question about his son’s business ties in Ukraine.
The attacks shifting from Biden to Warren was a telling realignment — and signals a new political reality.
— Ella Nilsen
Winner: Pete Buttigieg
Pete Buttigieg emerged on Tuesday night as the marquee candidate of the centrist of the Democratic party, and he did so by emulating a political move from an unlikely model: Bernie Sanders.
A great fun fact about Pete Buttigieg is that he once won a “Profiles in Courage” essay contest in high school with a piece celebrating his political hero: Sanders. And while the two are clearly running in different lanes in 2020, they have gone through a similar experience as candidates. Sanders began 2016 as a protest candidate, only partway through realizing that he could actually, truly win the whole shebang. He had to pivot from being a gadfly to a plausible nominee.
Democratic presidential hopeful Mayor of South Bend, Indiana Pete Buttigieg speaks during the fourth Democratic primary debate of the 2020 presidential campaign.
Democratic presidential hopeful Mayor of South Bend, Indiana Pete Buttigieg speaks during the fourth Democratic primary debate of the 2020 presidential campaign.
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
So too with Buttigieg, who probably knew when he entered the race that “mayor of the fourth largest city in Indiana” is not a traditional qualification for the presidency. He began by doing interviews with anyone who asked and proposing flashy ideas like court-packing, and before he knew it he was out-fundraising the former vice president. He had to make the same pivot as his erstwhile hero, from longshot to serious contender.
And this is an especially critical moment for that transition, as Elizabeth Warren has overtaken Joe Biden as frontrunner, who appears to be fading. That leaves a huge opening for a center-left candidate who opposes Medicare-for-all and avoids clear class conflict language (and gets the big donor support that comes with that) to take Biden’s place and emerge as the primary alternative to Warren (and, to a lesser degree, Bernie Sanders).
He’s running as an Indiana pragmatist, not the heir to Sanders’s legacy his teenage self would’ve been excited about. And while this surely annoys Beto O’Rourke and Amy Klobuchar, he is the candidate in that lane with the most fundraising prowess and the most plausible path to the nomination in the polling (especially in Iowa, where he’s in fourth, but not that far down from first). If Biden fades out, Buttigieg stands to take his place.
Buttigieg used Tuesday night to make an argument for himself in that role. He attacked Warren on Medicare-for-all. He decried Beto O’Rourke’s gun control platform as unrealistic. He also decried Tulsi Gabbard’s approach to Syria, not because she’s de facto pro-Assad but because he thinks “American leadership,” by force if necessary, is important. In fact, it’s hard to identify a time this evening he made an identifiable argument from the left.
And yet he convened the centrist rally with focus and verve, and the effort seemed to win the in-person audience over. It probably won’t be enough to win him the nomination. But it might be enough to displace Biden.
— Dylan Matthews
Winner: opioid epidemic activists
Before Tuesday, we had gone through three debates with no substantial mention of the opioid epidemic. That changed tonight, when the moderators asked multiple candidates about what they would do about the crisis.
It certainly wasn’t perfect. The candidates mostly focused on cracking down on pharmaceutical companies for their role in causing the opioid epidemic, with Harris and Castro calling for locking up pharmaceutical executives — a grabby way to talk about the issue, but one that sidesteps the other serious discussions we need.
Members of P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) and Truth Pharm protest outside Purdue Pharma headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, on September 12, 2019.
Members of P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) and Truth Pharm protest outside Purdue Pharma headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, on September 12, 2019.
Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images
I would’ve, for one, preferred a more substantive conversation about the dire state of addiction treatment. This is a big part of the problem: Treatment is both inaccessible, with just 1 in 10 people with a drug use disorder getting specialty care, and often of poor quality, failing to follow evidence-based practices like offering medications for addiction. (For more on this, follow Vox’s Rehab Racket project.)
But given the issue’s absence in previous debates, it is good the opioid epidemic got some attention on the national debate stage.
In 2017, America hit a new record for annual drug overdose deaths at 70,000 — a figure so high it contributed to the third year in a row of declining or stagnating life expectancy. (Some preliminary data suggest that 2018 was a bit better, with a 5 percent decline in drug overdose deaths. But that would still make 2018 the second-worst year of all time for drug overdose deaths.)
President Donald Trump, however, has not done much on this issue. He’s committed only a few billion dollars here and there in additional funding, which is far from the tens of billions experts say is needed. And the bulk of his focus has been on policy proposals — like executing drug traffickers or building a wall — that most experts say would do nothing to combat the epidemic.
The Democratic candidates have promised to do better, putting out a range of plans to that end. And on Tuesday, they finally got to talk about those plans to a national audience.
— German Lopez