About Last Night: Democratic Debate in LA Edition

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire and his food writing website Yonder and Home. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast. Subscribe to Andrew's Heard Tell SubStack for free here:

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13 Responses

  1. atomickristin says:

    Ok, I feel the need to point out that what Biden was actually doing was imitating a child with a stutter that he supposedly talked to on the phone. He prefaced it by saying he got a call from a little boy saying that. He was not accidentally stammering, he was imitating someone with a stutter.

    So it wasn’t that Huckabee-Sanders was mocking him for stuttering, she was mocking him for imitating a stuttering person. Biden’s response is basically “it’s ok for me to say that because I have a stutter”.

    I think this is a pretty important distinction to make.Report

  2. North says:

    I generally agree with your analysis. I didn’t see much of the debate because the unit above mine decided to have a pipe burst and flooded my condo with water raining down from every ceiling. Must be a trumpian pipe.

    Based on the feedback I’ve seen over all I think your take is pretty good and, of course, as a moderate I’m pretty pleased with how this went. Bernie advances, Warren wanes or vice versa; despite right wing squalls to the contrary the Democratic Party is still a moderate left entity and Bernie and Warren can’t win this if they split the left between them.Report

    • Brandon Berg in reply to North says:

      There is a danger, however, that one of them drops out, unifying the free-stuff vote, while the (relatively) reasonable vote remains split.

      This is basically what happened in the 2016 Republican primary, isn’t it? Trump’s 45% share of the Republican primary vote was only slightly greater than Sanders’ 43% share of the Democratic primary vote. If O’Malley had remained viable longer and if Clinton hadn’t had the name recognition and establishment support that she did, Sanders might have pulled a Trump.Report

  3. George Turner says:

    I’ll be curious to see what the ratings are. They’ve tended to drop from debate to debate as people lose interest, and impeachment may have left a lot of potential viewers too burned out to care.

    The Democrat party perhaps need to exercise a bit more control of the moderators’ questions. As I understand it, the one from Politico was asking candidates about their plans to relocate entire US cities due to climate change. Those are the kind of crazy questions that get crazy answers that get featured in Republican attack ads in the fall. A simple pre-debate test might be “Does this question look like it was planted by Karl Rove to make us look stupid?” If so, don’t ask it.

    One answer that caught my eye was Biden’s pledged to shut down fracking, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of jobs, saying that those workers can find better jobs that actually pay well. There are barbers in the Dakotas making six figures just giving haircuts to oil workers, who are making big bucks. There’s been a ripple effect through whole regions. With his politically correct answer, Biden may have just ceded Pennsylvania and possibly Minnesota and Wisconsin to Trump. “Vote for the candidate who’s going to toss me into the unemployment line, or vote for their opponent? Hrm….”Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      For those who want to see it but don’t want to click:

      Did they get into numbers for other demographics, Saul?Report

  4. KenB says:

    I heard an interesting comment on a podcast re Warren vs Sanders on progressives — this person was saying that Sanders draws most of his support from the part of that population that genuinely doesn’t have much money, whether due to class, youth etc., whereas Warren’s progressive support mostly comes from the more well-to-do side. So Sanders doesn’t have to soft-pedal the cost of his M4A plans and such, because his base largely won’t be paying; but when Warren’s voters hear some specifics about the price tag, they start to get nervous.

    I didn’t look for any poll data to see if it checks out, but it seems like it has some explanatory power.Report

  5. Jaybird says:

    The wine cave thing?

    Report

  6. Jaybird says:

    Holy cow.

    Report

    • George Turner in reply to Jaybird says:

      Many Asians are white. Sergei Brin, the billionaire who runs Google, is from Moscow, a city that is arguably in Asia. Parvis Omidyar (eBay) is from Iran (though born in Paris). That may seem silly, but there was upset because Warren listed Shahid Khan as white. He’s from Pakistan.

      What her campaign should probably do is have the billionaires submit to DNA tests to see if they’re 1/1024th Indo European.Report