FiveThirtyEight:
Who Won The Third Democratic Debate?
We’re partnering with Ipsos to poll voters before and after the candidates take the stage.
Warren was one of the better-liked candidates going into the debate, but her performance was still rated higher than we’d expect based on her favorability alone. The same was true of Booker, Buttigieg and (especially) O’Rourke. Interestingly, Klobuchar didn’t get a great debate rating, but it’s not bad considering her pre-debate favorability, which was pretty neutral. Biden (who’s very popular among Democrats) and Castro stand out for performing worse than expected given their pre-debate favorability.
My view is the Democrats won, Obama won, Trump lost. There was a lot of presidential material on that stage, rank them in order as you will.
Here’s your main newspaper responses, focusing on the front runner (and guns):
- WaPo Margaret Sullivan: Biden’s debate performance was either ‘presidential’ or ‘disqualifying’ — depending on your media source
- NYT: It was the best of Biden, and the Biden of Biden.
- WaPo James Hohmann: The Daily 202: Castro’s kamikaze mission makes Biden more sympathetic – and six other debate takeaways
- WaPo Dan Balz: For most of the night, Biden weathers a volley of attacks
- WaPo: Republicans seize on O’Rourke’s emphatic call for mandatory buyback of assault weapons
David Mastio and Jill Lawrence/USA Today:
Democratic debate in Houston: From A to F, Mastio & Lawrence grade the 2020 candidates
Jill: The best parts of this debate were the beginning and the end. In their opening statements and closing remarks on professional setbacks, these candidates distilled their essence and showed who they are. And that is what regular voters want and need to know. Even devoted policy junkies might have taken a popcorn break during an argument over automatic enrollment versus opting in to a hypothetical plan of Medicare for whoever wants it. But, in the personal moments that framed the debate, anyone looking for an alternative to President Donald Trump probably would have found more than one successor who would do.
David: The health care discussion was a disaster for Democrats, making the party look like a gaggle of socialists bent on beating each other to the far left flank. The remaining moderates, former vice president Joe Biden and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, came through the night with the most bruises. Sure, there are plenty of plausible alternatives to Trump, but how extreme will the last person standing appear after more of these debates? Trump is smiling.
Now, on to the grades ...
Fun because liberals (Jill) and conservatives (David) obviously saw completely different debates with different personnel 😇.
Josh Kraushaar/National Journal:
Joe Biden Has Met His Political Moment
He’s not a particularly strong candidate. But he’s running under ideal political circumstances.
He’s made a string of embarrassing gaffes on the campaign trail, including misremembering the state he’s in and botching critical details about a war story.
But he’s the beneficiary of old-fashioned luck, the kind that’s eluded him in his last two presidential campaigns. He’s running as the heir to President Obama, against a field of weak or ideologically extreme opponents, and at a time when his shortcomings simply don’t matter as much as they once did.
Biden would never be a leading contender in any other political environment. Yet he remains a formidable front-runner more because of the limitations of his rivals than as a result of his innate political talent.
Ronald Brownstein/Atlantic:
How Pundits May Be Getting Electability All Wrong
Democrats are obsessing over which candidate is most capable of beating Trump. But how voters gauge that is far more complicated than it may seem.
“So much of the Beltway chatter about electability is about race, gender, and ideology,” says Lanae Erickson, Third Way’s senior vice president for social policy and politics. “That was not what people talked about.”
But the research also indicates that however voters assess electability, it looms as an overriding factor in the decision making for most Democratic voters. That suggests former Vice President Joe Biden’s consistent lead in polls on the question of which Democrat is most likely to beat Donald Trump could be a sturdier cushion under his candidacy than his opponents may think.
“If those numbers don’t change,” Erickson told me, “it is going to be very, very hard for someone to overtake [Biden], because this is the question on Democrats’ minds: How do we beat [Trump]? I don’t think those numbers are set in stone at all, but that’s the argument [other candidates] need to make.”
Geoffrey Skelley/FiveThirtyEight:
What’s Going On With Trump’s Approval Rating?
Given the consistency of Trump’s approval rating, I wouldn’t read too much into the latest downward trend. It could tick back up a notch or two before too long. At the same time, his approval rating was mediocre, even when it sat a couple points higher, so steadiness isn’t exactly a great sign for Trump. If it doesn’t notably improve, Trump’s approval might sink him in 2020.
The Economist:
What a Republican victory in North Carolina means for 2020
Both parties may recalibrate after a close House race
Yet when it comes to election time, voters behave in ways all too easy to generalise about. Between the previous election in North Carolina’s 9th district in November 2018 and the special election on September 10th, which Dan Bishop, the Republican candidate, won narrowly, the news cycle has been dizzying. The trade war with China has intensified, the Mueller investigation concluded, the president has sent 4,800 tweets. The net effect of all this, at least in nc-9, was that the Republican increased his vote share by one percentage point. For all the effort poured into campaigning, and the speculation over whether this or that will hurt or help Mr Trump with voters, the overwhelming majority of people just voted for the party they supported last time. …
One-off elections are not always good predictors of what comes next, but the mid-term results in 2018 were in line with the special elections that preceded them. If the Democratic Party were to do as well next year as its candidate did in nc-9, it would secure a huge majority in Congress. There are 32 seats currently held by Republicans that Mr Trump won by fewer than 12 points.
WaPo:
‘This isn’t just a stupid story, it’s a big story’: An oral history of Sharpiegate
The hurricane destroyed homes and claimed lives. The deluge of presidential tweets caused a different kind of chaos — superficial to some, serious to others. We compiled an oral history of the two storms. Not everyone went fully on the record, and the White House ignored multiple requests to comment.
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
Why Are Democrats in Disarray Over Impeachment?
There’s no secret scheme in the House to prevent a vote. But there is a lot of incompetence.
To be fair: Trump’s stonewalling of legitimate House oversight is unprecedented, and a legitimate reason for impeachment and removal from office. The House has never had to deal with anything this extreme, and is fighting back in court. But there’s simply no excuse for their failure to dramatize Trump’s misconduct in ways that would really catch the attention of voters.
There’s still the problem I’ve discussed before, and that Sargent addresses in his item, that an impeachment inquiry really does imply an eventual next step of either clearing the president or moving to a vote, and Democrats probably don’t want to do either right now. But muddling through sometimes works out in the long run even if it looks like a mess to careful observers. Remember that hardly any voters are paying attention to anything Congress does, including impeachment investigations or inquiries or whatever they want to call it.
Whether there’s a train wreck ahead for Democrats or not, figuring out how to hold effective hearings would help in the meantime. Eventually, it’s really going to take some better results from Nadler and the rest of his party.
And your UK Brexit fix from Ian Dunt:
Week in Review: A deal is as unlikely as ever
Nothing is impossible and in British politics things now change very quickly. But you would need an optimism close to pathology in order to believe that a deal was in any way likely: the incentives are not there, the ideas are not there and the votes are not there. The rest is just hopeful chatter.