The NPR Politics Podcast - Voters Of Color At The Center Of Heated Democratic Debate

Episode Date: February 8, 2020

At the end of a busy week in American politics, seven Democrats took the stage in New Hampshire ahead of the state's Tuesday primary.Each candidate made the case for his or her own electability in a still-crowded field, a topic that remains top of mind for Democratic voters after a chaotic caucus in Iowa. In particular, they spoke at length about how their platforms would help Americans of color.This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, and campaign correspondents Scott Detrow and Asma Khalid.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.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 the presidential campaign. And I'm Asma Khalid. I'm also covering the presidential campaign. And the time now is 1122 on Friday, February 7th. And a Democratic debate has just ended. It was at St. Anselm College, ABC News in partnership with WMUR and Apple News up in New Hampshire, where both you, Scott and Asma, are right now. We made it, what, with five minutes to go before the debate started? Oh, gosh, so many traffic, weather, flight delay issues today. But we got here, we covered the debate, and here we are.

Well, we are glad you made it. And, Scott, as is a tradition on this podcast, I am hoping you can run through who was on the stage and how long they spoke. And this was actually pretty interesting. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders spoke the most at just under 20 minutes, followed by former Vice President Joe Biden, 19 and a half minutes. Then former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 18 minutes. Then there's a little bit of a drop. And you've got Senator Amy Klobuchar and Senator Elizabeth Warren around 15 minutes, Tom Steyer at 13 minutes, and Andrew Yang coming

in last at 8 minutes and 13 seconds. And to me, this speaking time really answers the question. I know we really hashed out the point of Iowa, the outsized role of Iowa, but you can see right here how the Iowa caucuses, even in their dysfunctional form, set the narrative going forward. Because what was the conversation out of Iowa? Again, aside from the mess, it was that Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg basically tied at the top. And Joe Biden came in a distant fourth and raised a lot of questions about his viability going forward. And who talked the most? Those three people. What's also worth pointing out here is that Elizabeth Warren, who finished third in the Iowa caucuses, her campaign did not seem particularly pleased with some of the speaking

time that they felt she was allocated during this debate. At one point, one of her senior advisors wrote on Twitter, guy who came fourth in Iowa has gotten to speak for more than 50% more time in the debate than the woman who finished above him. Though guy who finished fourth in Iowa has gotten to speak for more than 50 percent more time in the debate than the woman who finished above him. Though guy who finished fourth in Iowa, and we're talking about Vice President Biden here, spent some portion of his time answering for his performance in Iowa. This is a long, long race. I took a hit in Iowa and I'll probably take a hit here. Traditionally, Bernie won by 20 points last time. And usually it's the neighboring senators that do well. But no matter what, I'm still in this for the same reason. You need to take a step back and think how remarkable it is that the guy running entirely

on electability, I'm the one who can beat Donald Trump, is conceding, yeah, I came in fourth in Iowa. Guess what? I might not do well in New Hampshire either, but stick with me. At some point, I'm going to win a state. Like, that that's really I sound like Mara now. That is remarkable. But I mean, it does speak to a point where also, you know, if are you trying to downplay expectations or are you sort of setting about, you know, perhaps self-fulfilling prophecy where there is some sense that, you know, Joe Biden may not perform particularly well here in New Hampshire, but he's saying it's because there's other folks who have kind of neighborly advantages. Those folks did not necessarily have those neighborly advantages in Iowa. And to Scott's point, you know, you've got to make the argument, I think, as an electability candidate that you can win in both Iowa and South Carolina.

That's the ideal electability case. It's what Barack Obama was able to do. So in terms of themes that developed over the course of the night who is so it's one of the spinner moments there's like a roving organism of like oh it's pete budaj that's why we just saw like 50 reporters all kind of shuffling and pete budaj was in the middle back in the day pete budaj used to give interviews to all and now he gets chased by 25 reporters and walks away behind the curtain. He's now behind the curtain, though, so we can continue. Sorry, just a roving gaggle.

Life in the spin room. Well, and he did just co-win Iowa or whatever we call it. As best as we can tell. As best as we can tell. And to that point, Tam, he got a lot of tough questions tonight. To me, it was really clear tonight that a number of other candidates on stage saw Pete Buttigieg as a real threat. And in some ways, you know, to me, what was interesting is that both Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg, you could say they co-tied out of Iowa. You know, they both seem to be the winner

there to some degree, or they're both declaring themselves to be the winner there. But we largely saw the criticism focused on Pete Buttigieg. And so that raises the question of, you know, do you see the fact that Bernie Sanders has this locked in level of support? And do the other candidates see Pete Buttigieg's support potentially as more malleable, potentially support that they could peel away? And, you know, we saw one line of criticism I thought that was particularly sharp from Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar. She made the argument that, you know, he kind of talks a lot about his non-Washingtonian experience, but in her view, having experience in Washington, she feels matters. You said, Pete, as you were campaigning through Iowa, as three of us were jurors in that impeachment hearing, you said it was exhausting to watch and that you wanted to turn the channel and watch cartoons. Yeah, though, I think he really handled

himself well on one of the areas where being the mayor of a relatively small city could be at its most glaring, and that's the area of foreign policy. He's someone who comes across and is a very thoughtful, measured person, and also, I think, most importantly, is the only one on the stage with military experience having served in Afghanistan. And I think he walked through a lot of questions kind of giving nuanced views of foreign policy. And the one moment that jumped out to me was when one of the hosts, David Muir, kept pressing him on the question of whether he would have ordered the killing of the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, as President Trump did. Buttigieg spoke kind of generally the first time, and then

Meir comes back and pushes him and says, would you have ordered the strike? It depends on the circumstances. It depends if there was an alternative, and it depends what the different effects would be. That's my point. This is not an episode of 24. This is a situation that requires that you actually evaluate the entire intelligence picture. This president has insulted the intelligence community, but they put their lives on the line to gather the information that will help a decision maker evaluate whether or not something like that is justified. And I don't think he even reads it. In answer to the same question, Biden said, well, we didn't see any evidence that there was an imminent threat. And Bernie Sanders gave a long, nuanced answer as well on how he would really systematically scale back the U.S. military presence across the entire region.

You cannot go around saying you're a bad guy, we're going to assassinate you. And then you're going to have, if that happens, you're opening the door to international anarchy, that every government in the world will then be subjected to attacks and assassination. I thought this was a really interesting segment of the debate and a lot more revealing than that first foreign policy conversation in the immediate wake of the Soleimani killing. All right, we are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, all of the candidates were in New Hampshire. Some of them had their eyes on another state. Support for NPR and the following message come from Rothy's.

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It's Oscar season and we don't want you to show up on the red carpet unprepared. That's why NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is here to help you sort through the nominees and separate the best from the rest. Listen now, and we might even help you dominate your Oscars pool. And we are back, and Asma and Scott, you are in New Hampshire. But there was a lot of talk about South Carolina. Well, indirect talk, Tam. I mean, in part because they just were discussing the fact that, you know, there should be more of a conversation around voters of color and race. Tom Steyer in particular had this moment where he called out the moderators and said, you know, we have not said one word tonight about race. Are you kidding me? And Tom Steyer, we should point out, has been making quite a play for African-American voters in

South Carolina, as our colleague Juana Summers has been reporting. Out of narrative comes policy. We need to repair damage that's been done officially. And pretending we're all the same is not accurate. We got here a certain way. Let's talk about Jim Crow. Let's talk about Martin Luther King. Let's talk about Barbara Lee, the congresswoman from Oakland, who's one of our great leaders. And then let's figure out how to repair the damage so we can move forward together. At one point, Steyer and Biden were getting into it about something that's not even really worth explaining related to South Carolina politics. And Biden's response was basically voters of color support me.

And I'm asking you to join us. Be on the right side. I'm asking you to join me and join in the support I have from the overwhelming number of the members of that black caucus. I have more support in South Carolina, the black caucus and the black community than anybody else. Double what you have or anybody else. You know, that is true. But this is one of the storylines that we are going to be keeping a close eye on over the next few weeks, especially if, as he said at the beginning of this debate, Biden does not do particularly well in New Hampshire. All of last year, other campaigns, particularly Kamala Harris and Cory Booker's campaign,

were waiting for Joe Biden to fade, right? And the argument was, if he starts to fade in the polls, he might lose some of that solid support from older African American voters in particular. You saw, as Biden said, that Bernie Sanders' hands shoot up and Tom Steyer's hands shoot up. The fact is, poll after poll shows that Bernie Sanders does very well with voters of color as a whole. He did really strongly in Latino communities in Iowa last week. And Tom Steyer has really been spending a lot of money trying to make inroads with African-American voters in South Carolina. So I think you could see a scenario where Joe Biden's support, which has been a key part of his platform to win the nomination, could become more tenuous.

And during the part of the debate where they were talking about issues of race and criminal justice, Pete Buttigieg was asked again, and he's gotten these questions a lot, but he was asked about his time as mayor of South Bend, Indiana. How do you explain the increase in black arrests in South Bend under your leadership for marijuana possession? And again, the overall rate was lower. No, there was an increase. The year before you were in office, it was lower. Once you became in office in 2012, that number went up. In 2018, the last number a year that we have a record for, that number was still up.

Yeah. And one of the strategies that our community adopted was to target when there were cases where there was gun violence and gang violence, which was slaughtering so many in our community, burying teenagers, disproportionately black teenagers. We adopted a strategy that said that drug enforcement would be targeted in cases where there was a connection to the most violent group or gang connected to a murder. So when you hear these conversations among the Democratic candidates about race, I think there's often an assumption that these conversations are catering or trying to reach out to voters of color. And I've done some reporting on this, and I would say it's worthwhile to remember that actually this is an attempt to reach specifically to white liberals.

I mean, we've seen in surveys that white Democrats in particular, even more so than sometimes voters of color, tend to support, you know, more liberal immigration policy, say, or embrace racial diversity. What's interesting is, is I don't think that these conversations around race are necessarily exclusively meant for voters of color, even though that is what is on the surface ostensibly what they are talking about. And Andrew Yang jumped in in this part of the conversation, too, and brought up his universal basic income proposal, which is something that he cited Martin Luther King as supporting this concept back during the 1960s. What we have to do is heed the writings of Martin Luther King, whose birthday we just celebrated. He said that capitalism forgets that life is social. And what he was championing was a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans of $1,000 a month or more. Yang does find a way to come back to his UBI. He started with it. He ended

with it. It was a central part of his debate performance, as it always is. Yeah. And, you know, we've talked a lot about kind of the specific lane and support the gang has carved out for himself. I'm really curious to see how that plays out in New Hampshire. He didn't really do that well at all, registering somewhere around 1% in Iowa. He was really hurt by those viability rules of the caucus, where a lot of his support just wasn't at 15%. That is not an issue in New Hampshire, of course. So I'm really curious to see. I think this is a good test of how much Yang has been able to make that case for himself. And he has certainly been campaigning hard in New Hampshire. Another person who put a lot and has been putting a lot into New Hampshire is Amy Klobuchar, who is the senator from Minnesota, is sort of a more moderate voice on that stage.

And you got a sense that she was making her closing argument in this debate that this is it. Like she needs to do well in New Hampshire. I mean, the thing is, Amy Klobuchar has had a couple of really strong debate performances, and we haven't necessarily seen that always translate into a huge uptick in the polls. And even in the Iowa caucuses, I mean, the difficulty for her is that this is a pretty crowded race with a number of frontrunners. And so my big question is, even if she performs well in New Hampshire, what does that mean? Does performing well mean third place? And if it does, you know, is that really enough as we move on into more diverse states where, you know, you talk about some candidates not having a lot of support from black voters.

Amy Klobuchar is also one of those people who doesn't really have much support, it seems, amongst African-American voters. All right, guys, I know that you have a lot more work to do. So let us end this podcast here for now. That is a wrap for this week. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the campaign. And I'm Asma Khalid. I'm also covering the campaign. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.