The NPR Politics Podcast - The 1st Democratic Debates: Night 1 Takeaways

Episode Date: June 27, 2019

NBC hosted the first Democratic presidential debate, which was split into two nights because of the sheer number of candidates running. In the first night, Sen. Warren stood front and center while lesser known candidates fought for face time with the country. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political correspondent Scott Detrow, political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover politics. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I also cover politics. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And the time now is 12.02 a.m. on Thursday, the 27th of June. And the first Democratic debate ended just a few minutes ago, and we have thoughts. But first, Danielle, you and I are here in the studio in D.C. That is true, yeah.

And Scott and Mara, where are you? We're in the spin room. We are in Miami. We're in the big filing center and the spin room where currently all of the candidates are continuing to talk. Elizabeth Warren's talking to MSNBC a few feet away, and I think Cory Booker is talking to CBS, and there's just a lot going on here. So before we get to the substance of the debate, let's just acknowledge that this was a very big debate with a lot of people on stage. Yeah, in quality and quantity, it was big. I mean, the first one and also 10 people, as we saw, led to a lot of talking over moments and just a lot of wide shots of everybody trying to get a word in edgewise. So, Danielle, it has become a tradition on this

podcast to have you go through the names of people who were part of the debate. But to make it even more interesting, I would like you to give us those names in order of their speaking time during the debate. I like it. Okay, have it right here. Here we go. All right, so I'm going to go in descending order, person with the most time to person with the least time. Person with the most time was New Jersey Senator Cory Booker with 10 minutes 58 seconds of speaking time. Oh, I wouldn't have guessed that. Yeah, he got it. I would have. Oh, well, Mara knows more than the rest of us. No, I mean, he seemed to really assert himself.

No, it just seemed like there was a while before he really got talking. So after that, we have Beto O'Rourke, former Texas representative, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, number four, former Housing Secretary Julian Castro. Now that I would be surprised at because Julian Castro, I thought, did the most to kind of introduce himself. Well, that's what's interesting here. We'll see who seems like, it's like when a person seems tall. It's the people who are punching above their weight.

I am very tall on the radio. Okay, continue. All right. Ohio Representative Tim Ryan was number six. Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard, number seven. Former Maryland Representative John Delaney, number eight. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, nine. And rounding it out, Washington Governor Jay Inslee with four minutes, 57 seconds. So that's less than half the amount of time that Cory Booker got at the top. That is less than half of 10 minutes of time.

Yeah. Also, that is how math works. So, okay, so we know who spoke the most. But guys, what are your big takeaways from this? My biggest takeaway is that I don't think what happened tonight changes the dynamic in the race in any big way. I think Elizabeth Warren came in as the leader of this particular group, and she left in the same position. I think some of the candidates who were polling in the low single digits might have gotten people to Google them more, but it doesn't seem like a game changer. And the reason I say that is because of the things that didn't happen. There were no attacks on Warren.

There were no attacks on Biden. I thought Joe Biden had a pretty good night. People didn't even take on his centrism in any theoretical way. And there were surprisingly few attacks on Donald Trump. If the job of every candidate tonight was to help Democratic voters envision them standing on a stage one-on-one against Donald Trump. I don't think they tried to do that very much. For me, I think the big theme of tonight was the race to the left. A friend texted that it was the woke Olympics.

You know, you had on health care, on immigration, on abortion, on several other topics, just a real clear indication of how far the candidate field is to the left, even if there's an open question of how much the Democratic electorate as a whole or the whole country, when it gets to the general election, is on the same page when it comes to, you know, getting rid of private health insurance, among many other things. And that brings us to what was an early key moment in this debate and one that it's quite possible that President Trump will still be talking about months from now. One of five moderators, Lester Holt, asked this question. Who here would abolish their private health insurance in favor of a government-run plan?

Just a show of hands to start off with. Show of hands, Danielle. Right. What were those 10 hands doing? Right. You can't hear it here, but eight of those hands did nothing, or I suppose 16 of those hands did nothing, but two hands shot up. Danielle's the math person. Once again, there's a margin of error on this. No, okay. No, two people's hands shot up, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. And their hands shot straight up. There was no hesitation. Now, Elizabeth Warren, I want to say here, this was, I won't quite say surprising,

because she's a co-sponsor of Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All single-payer health plan. But one thing she has done in recent interviews is that she has said, yes, I'm for Medicare for all, but slash and there are a variety of paths to get there. You could do it this way. You could do it that way. But tonight she was she did not equivocate on this. There are a lot of politicians who say, oh, it's just not possible. We just can't do it. It's have a lot of political reasons for this. What they're really telling you is they just won't fight for it. Well, health care is a basic human right. And I will fight for basic human rights.

She even said, I am with Bernie. That was pretty much her break. That was the big tell. I thought what she did was really surprising because people are generally for a public option. They want people to have the opportunity to buy into Medicare. But there are 180 million people who have private health plans. And the idea of nationalizing the private health insurance industry and getting rid of all those plans is not popular. I think what she was doing was tactical. She was trying to close off an avenue for Bernie Sanders to attack her from the left on this issue. In terms of the politics of this, President Obama got in a lot of trouble for saying, if you like your doctor, you can keep

your diet. If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. And then it didn't turn out to be fully true. And he took a lot of heat for it. And here you now have a candidate, two candidates for president, one of whom has a very legitimate chance to become the major party nominee, raising your hand and saying, I would eliminate private health plan. Yes, which is quite different than saying I want a public option where people can buy into Medicare. I can tell you the Trump campaign was thrilled about that. Well, just to get at the numbers of this, just to show how controversial this is, I keep pointing to this poll from January, but it's still relevant, from the Kaiser Family Foundation. It showed that at the time, 56% of people said, when asked, do you support Medicare for all, they said yeah.

And then when Kaiser asked them, okay, but what if it eliminates private insurance companies, which Bernie Sanders, Medicare for All, would all but eliminate, would virtually eliminate private insurance, at least as people know it now. Then 37% of people, that's 20 points gone. Which is to say this is a big political risk

that Elizabeth Warren took tonight. And that's exactly how the Republican ads would play it, right? It would be like the DMV line as your medical provider would be the image painted in those ads. So this certainly would be painted in the worst possible way by a Republican machine that's going to have millions and millions and millions of dollars to spend on this. And they don't have to paint it that way. These candidates just said they want to eliminate private health insurance. That's pretty straightforward. And there are many Democrats who believe this is a total loser for the party in a general election. And I've even had people tell me that if the nominee, the top of the ticket, believes was former Congressman Beto O'Rourke

was, you know, a target of multiple other candidates sort of going after him. I think the choice is fundamental to our ability to get everybody. Private insurance is not working for tens of millions of Americans. When you talk about the copays, the deductibles, the premiums, the out-of-pocket expenses. It's not working. How can you defend a system that's not working? Just to get at what's going on there, you had Bill de Blasio, whose hand went up once again during that private insurance question, arguing with Beto O'Rourke. Beto O'Rourke supports a plan called Medicare for America. He is one of several candidates on that stage tonight, along with Amy Klobuchar, for example, who

supports a public option, allowing Americans to buy into plans like Medicare and Medicaid. So yeah, you had a real clash of the two health care ideologies there. And what was so interesting, Bill de Blasio listed all of the things that ordinary voters worry about with health care. Prices are too high. But instead of focusing on that, the Democrats got into a big debate about abolishing private health insurance. And that is a potential risk for them. I mean, Donald Trump is trying to say that he has a way to bring costs down. He just had an initiative to make costs more transparent, prices more transparent. But what voters care about is

the high cost of prescription drugs and health care, not necessarily how we're going to revolutionize the health care system and get rid of the private health insurance industry. I think we should add, before we move on to other topics, there are a lot of Democrats who feel like they have a lot of polling data that says the more that the campaign is about health care big picture, the better that is for Democrats, because health care is a winning issue for the party. They point to 2018 and feel like even if it's even if it's a more extreme end of the spectrum, they're happy to talk about that. Another one of these hot button issues that came up in this debate was abortion. You know, there isn't a lot of daylight between these candidates about

their views on abortion rights. Right. The candidates on that stage support abortion rights. And in fact, abortion came up tonight for the first time by Washington Governor Jay Inslee without even being asked. It was in the middle of the health care debate. I mean, because this is a topic, when you go out on the campaign trail in front of a Democratic crowd this is, some of these candidates get some of their loudest applause lines on abortion rights. This is a very energizing issue for a lot of Democratic voters. But we do have one candidate that's actually advanced the ball. And we've got to have access for everyone. I've done it as a public commentator.

Senator Klobuchar, I want to get you. That's a false claim. I'm fascinated by this, Senator Klobuchar. I just want to say there's three women up here that have fought pretty hard for a woman's right to choose. That was one of Amy Klobuchar's zingers from tonight. It's a thing she's known for. There were some ohs in the room here when she said that. And it does point out something,

that there were three female candidates on that stage. People who can reproduce. There was a Latino candidate on that stage. This was, you know, you talk about this big, diverse, democratic field. It was on display. Tam, speaking of all of the candidates, can I just say that as we are recording this right now, I can see one, two, three, I can see five of them with an eye shot,

and they are all moving around the open space in front of us with little placards hovering above them, held by aides, and camera crews surrounding them, and it's a very bizarre scene. Quick, pull it over. Do it. You want to come on this podcast. Are they, like, lining up trying to get on the podcast? They're more focused on TV right now, but that's okay. We've got our own candidate interview series. More to come next week. Indeed. And the conversation about abortion also led to a moment in the debate that really stood out for Julian Castro.

I don't believe only in reproductive freedom. I believe in reproductive justice. And, you know, what that means is that just because a woman, or let's also not forget someone in the trans community, a trans female. That was a really interesting moment. I'm not even going to focus on the trans moment here. The reproductive justice, I mean, that is a signal to the people who are listening.

Reproductive justice is about more than reproductive rights. It's a movement that's about, for example, women who might not have access to abortion or access to birth control, that sort of thing. For example, women of color, lower income women. So this is, in other words, a part of the Democratic Party and Democratic candidates very explicitly saying, no, we are reaching out to all of you. We are being inclusive. That's not just are we being inclusive in words, but also in terms of like systemic problems that might exclude people.

Yeah. And later on, Cory Booker made a point to talk about the fact that lots of trans women of color, especially, face violence, face death, have a high murder rate compared to other parts of the population. And I mean, I think there were just

like so many different topics. We can talk about immigration. We can talk about that. We can talk about health care, like we did for a while. Just like so many moments of this debate field just being far more progressive than any previous primary debate stage that we've seen. Well, I mean, just one example of that is how much Spanish was spoken in the midst of a debate

that was not a Spanish language debate. Telemundo was part of the TV networks putting this on, and we are here in Miami, of course, but it was certainly notable. Beto O'Rourke, right off the bat, gave part of his first answer in Spanish. This economy has got to work for everyone. And right now we know that it isn't. And it's going to take all of us coming together to make sure that it does. Necesitamos incluir cada persona en el éxito de esta economía. Now, this was a question about a 70% marginal tax rate for the wealthiest Americans. He didn't get into that in either language. Totally true. Yeah. But then Cory Booker, Julian Castro,

there was a lot of Spanish spoken on the debate stage tonight. And, you know, I've seen these candidates campaign in places like California with big Latino communities, and they have made a point to speak in Spanish pretty frequently. All right. We are going to take a quick break. And when we get back, more key moments, plus what last night's debate means for the second debate, which is tonight, because we're taping this after midnight. Support for this podcast and the following message come from ZipRecruiter. Hiring used to be hard. Multiple job sites, stacks of resumes. But today, hiring can be easy and you only have to go to one place to get it done.

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water bottles. Plus, Rothy's always come with free shipping and free returns and exchanges. Find out why BuzzFeed called them their forever shoes at rothys.com slash weekly. Hey, it's Peter Sagal. So you're listening to this NPR podcast because you want to be informed. You want to learn something. But what if you need a little break? Well, then you want to check out Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, the NPR news quiz. It's the show that lets your lizard brain enjoy itself for once. You can be serious again later. Listen to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me on NPR One or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. And let's talk about another major issue that was discussed in this debate and that is gone viral of a migrant father and his daughter who drowned in the Rio Grande River attempting to cross into the United States.

And it's an image that has already become politicized. And and it's also just completely heartbreaking to see. The candidates were asked both about that image and about immigration policy and what they were going to do about immigration. And it led to this moment with Julian Castro and Beto O'Rourke, where Castro, I mean, he got very deep into the policy weeds. The reason that they're separating these little children from their families is that they're using Section 1325 of that act, which criminalizes coming across the border, to incarcerate the parents and then separate them.

Some of us on this stage have called to end that section, to terminate it. Some, like Congressman O'Rourke, have not. Okay, Danielle, translate. What specifically are they talking about there? Okay, so Julian Castro was talking about Section 1325, which is the part of the U.S. law that criminalizes crossing the border illegally. Julian Castro, Elizabeth Warren has joined him in this, has said, I do not want crossing the border illegally to be a criminal act. Now, it's not that it wouldn't be illegal. It would be a civil violation rather than a criminal violation. You know, we have obviously given Elizabeth Warren a lot of credit on this

podcast for the robust amount of plans that she has come out with. But Castro is another candidate that has regularly been churning out big, detailed policies. And this was one of the very first policies that he came out with when he launched his presidential campaign. And he has a particular position, credibility in this. He's from Texas, border state, he's Hispanic. And there was a lot of back and forth between him and the other Texan running. They happen to be on the stage together. There are a lot of intramural primaries going on. There's the race for the progressive lane between Warren and Sanders. But then there's the Beto O'Rourke-Julian Castro rivalry. And you really saw that tonight. It's kind of like the stage isn't big enough for two Texans. Tomorrow night we're going to see the same thing because we're going to see two Coloradans,

John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennett. And that matters for voter attention, but it also matters for donors. And it also matters when in both of those states there's a Senate race coming up next year that a lot of people say, hey, sure, it would be great if one of you ran for Senate and made it competitive instead of running for president. Before we go, I want to do a little short can't let it go. Because there was a moment in this debate that was just so weird. They switched moderators. So there was three moderators, then they come back from a break, and now there's two new moderators, Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow.

Is there a role for the federal government to play in order to get these guns off the streets? Someone's got my binder. What's happening? We are hearing our colleagues' audio. Wait, so somebody's talking about going to the bathroom. Somebody's talking about a binder. The nightmare scenario for a broadcaster. I mean, it could have been

so much worse. What if they had been throwing shade on Rachel Maddow and Chuck Todd at that moment? Or actively flushing. So I guess it could have been worse, but it was fine. It was extremely weird. They had to go to a commercial

break. This is what I cannot let go of. I loved it. It was great. Oh, yeah. And President Trump, of course, weighed in and had thoughts about production at MSNBC and NBC. Like, get your act together, more or less. So tonight we can only hope for another audio fail like that. But there is another debate happening tonight with 10 more candidates.

There are the big names that we talked about. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, a lot of other candidates as well who are trying to make their mark. And on that point, there was a moment today that I witnessed that was was kind of funny and kind of symbolic of this very crowded field. We were walking to the area where you get your press credentials, and the person in front of me was walking in, and the security guard says, oh, excuse me, are you here to pick up credentials? And the person said, no, I'm a candidate, because that person was, in fact, former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper,

who was mistaken for a member of the press trying to get in. So I tweeted this that became a legit viral tweet, which does not happen often for me. And John Hickenlooper actually responded later on saying, last time we elected the most famous candidate, let's try something new. All right. So we know John Hickenlooper is going to be there on that stage. Scott named a few other candidates. Danielle, who else are we missing? All right. The candidates Scott did not name. We have Colorado Senator Michael Bennett, author Marianne Williamson, California Representative Eric Swalwell, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, entrepreneur Andrew Yang, and former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, as Scott just named.

All right. Who does not have press credentials for this event. Let him debate. But tomorrow he'll have someone following him around with a big sign that says Hickenlooper in the spin room. So really quick, what are you guys looking for in tonight's debate? All right. I have two things. One, asking that health care private insurance question again, how many hands go up Bernie Sanders? One would expect, but who else? Number two, I personally looking for trade because trade was

a big deal in 2016. And it's an area where you could really see a lot of daylight, even conflict between candidates, especially Joe Biden, who is in the Obama administration, which pushed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and Bernie Sanders, who was very much opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership. So you could see, I think, some fireworks on that. Tonight's debate, to me, will have a lot of things that were missing from Wednesday night's debate. First of all, I think it's going to have obvious contrasts. You've got the Sanders-Biden ideological contrast. You've got the generational challenge of someone like Pete Buttigieg versus Biden. And I think those contrasts are going to be in much starker relief than what you saw them on Wednesday night.

And I think you will see candidates take on each other more than they did in Wednesday night's debate. All right. Well, that is a wrap for today. We will be back later this morning, we think, after the Supreme Court is expected to hand down decisions and cases about the citizenship question on the census and also political gerrymandering. And then we will be back again after the debate tonight. So keep an eye on your feeds for all the political news. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow.

I cover politics. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I also cover politics. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.