Today, Explained - Dem Debates 2: Election Boogaloo

Episode Date: August 1, 2019

Bernie yelled at Ryan. Biden defended Obama. Warren destroyed Delaney. Vox's Tara Golshan explains the "fight for the heart of the party" and Ezra Klein says the frontrunners missed the mark. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for this episode of Today Explained comes from KiwiCo. They're on a mission to not just empower kids to make a project but to make a difference. Their projects are designed to spark creativity, tinkering, and learning in kids of all ages. And they're offering Today Explained listeners the chance to try them out for free. To redeem the offer and learn more about their projects, go to joe3033... Oh, no, sorry, sorry, sorry. Go to kiwico.com slash explained. Tyra Golshin, politics reporter here at Vox.

We had another round of Democratic debates this week, and this time there were intros. Live from Detroit, it's the Democratic presidential debate. Really big, hefty intros. Live from Detroit, it's the Democratic presidential debate. Really big, hefty intros. It was like sports ball every night. Right now, the road to the White House drives through Detroit. Do you remember all the things that happened in these intros? I just remember really dramatic music and like awkward close-up shots of everyone's face.

Tonight, a fight for the heart of the party. This thing opened with a trailer, like the longest trailer for the worst movie ever, both nights. Yeah, well, that's politics in 2020. Every time they said, Cory Booker, it'd be like, here's a clip of Cory Booker talking. Trump wants us to fight him on his turf.

That's not how we win. Pete Buttigieg. Mayor Pete Buttigieg. I liked the rematch Kamala Harris versus Joe Biden. I was like, are they going to box? Tenant. A critical rematch. Kamala Harris not backing down after clashing with Biden over race. And then if that wasn't bad enough, it goes from there to an individual introduction of every single candidate. We had to watch 20 people slowly and awkwardly walk out on stage and sometimes shake hands,

sometimes not. From Vermont, Senator Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O'Rourke, Amy Klobuchar, John Hickenlooper, Tim Ryan, John Galecki, Marianne Williamson, Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Bill de Blasio. And then my favorite part. Do you remember what happens next? Please tell me. Did you forget?

I mean, I don't think so, but I don't know what you're talking about. It cuts to commercial. The debate will begin right after this short break. Call it fate. Call it luck. All I knew was I was meant to be his dog. I mean, CNN, really leaning into this. How else were these debates different

from the earlier ones from MSNBC? I think the first round of debates was really trying to put people on where they stand on the issues. Like they had this hand-raising phenomenon where they would just be like, do you support X? And then everyone had to raise their hands to gauge where they are on the spectrum. And this round of debate seemed a lot more, this candidate said this about your plan. What do you think? It wanted to kind of pit the different opinions against each other, get them to respond to each other and kind of start these little kind of party riffs on policy. And we saw that a lot more when it came to issues like health care, immigration, race.

Those all came under debate. So why don't we go through those issues that they really dug into one by one, healthcare, immigration, race, whatever else. Let's start with healthcare. So that's how both debates opened up. What was the crux of the conversation? What we saw over the two nights was this debate about how radically the candidates want to change the American health care system. And it really comes down to this idea of whether they're going to embrace Medicare for all or whether they're not. OK, so who's embracing it? So obviously you have the progressive firebrands like Senator Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

I mean, Bernie had this kind of viral moment where he was like, I know what's in it. You don't know that, Bernie. I do know, and I wrote the damn bill. And Tim Ryan had like this sad viral moment. I didn't say we couldn't get there till 2040, Bernie. You don't have to yell. Yes, which is just teeing up Bernie perfectly, because if Bernie is good at one thing in the race is defending why he's yelling.

Yeah, so Bernie and Elizabeth Warren are on a team together defending this idea of single-payer, which would move every American to one single government-run system and almost entirely eliminate private insurance. So they pitted that against, like, Delaney and Bullock, especially on night one, who want nothing to do with Medicare for All. Yeah, you had this strong contingent of people on stage like John Delaney, like Steve Bullock, like Senator Amy Klobuchar, who really are opposed to this idea of getting rid of private insurance and pushing back on Medicare for All because they're saying it's not feasible to pass in Congress. And they're saying that we should have more incremental change. Of course,

they also are proposing sort of big changes to the healthcare system themselves, like they want a public option to be introduced to the healthcare system. So it is this kind of interesting debate of how big and bold should we go with what we're saying. But still, I think everything we're talking about is still pretty bold and would be politically difficult to pass. It's just a matter of how they're framing that push. And this divide really sort of came to a head when Elizabeth Warren set her sights on John Delaney and said. You know, I don't understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can't do and shouldn't fight for. I guess one of the other major issues where you actually saw candidates disagreeing was on immigration. What happened there? So immigration has been a really

interesting debate in the Democratic Party, first because you have Donald Trump, who they're trying to beat, who has this extremely hard line anti-immigration agenda that he is executing. And there is a lot of the immigration debate in the Democratic Party that is about pushing against what Donald Trump's administration has done. But there is also kind of this similar tension that we saw a little bit with health care of how far should the party move on immigration to really clamp down on things like enforcement, on border security, on how we deal with asylum cases, on deportation. And that is what we saw on both nights. This conversation has really been pushed to the left by people like Julian Castro,

who right off the bat said that crossing the border without paper should be decriminalized. The only way that we're going to guarantee that we don't have family separations in this country again is to repeal Section 1325 of the Immigration Nationality Act. That is the law that this president, this administration is using to incarcerate migrant parents and then physically separate them from their children. And that has really framed the conversation of trying to pin how far candidates are trying to go. And unlike the last debates, this one didn't have parts where all the candidates were asked to raise their hands on various positions, which maybe helped people talk about their positions with some greater degree of nuance. And then it also gave room for people to either push back on people like Biden, who don't think they should decriminalize the border, and people like Beto,

who has tried to position himself as like one of the candidates who's leading issues and priorities as immigration, for him to have the opportunity to explain why he doesn't support something like that. And on night two, this kind of set up this tussle between de Blasio and Biden. I asked the vice president point blank, did he use his power to stop those deportations? He went right around the question. Mr. Vice President, you want to be president of the United States. So did you say those deportations were a good idea? Or did you go to the president and say, this is a mistake, we shouldn't do it?

Which one? I was vice president. I am not the president. I keep my recommendation in private. Unlike you, I expect you would go ahead and say whatever was said privately with him. That's not what I do. And it put Biden in this interesting position where he both really wants everyone to know how close he is to Obama, but also really has to answer for this very long record that is not what people think of necessarily when they think of Obama and is not necessarily in step with the conversations the Democratic Party is having right now.

Mr. Vice President, you can't have it both ways. You invoke President Obama more than anybody in this campaign. You can't do it when it's convenient and then dodge it when it's not. And it was interesting because similar disagreements were coming up when they started talking about criminal justice. And Biden went as far last night to just say, look, listen. Barack Obama knew exactly who I was. He had he had 10 lawyers do a background check on everything about me and civil rights and civil liberties. And he chose me and he said it was the best decision. Thank you, Mr. Vice President.

Yeah, it was this kind of crazy moment where he was being scrutinized for his record on criminal justice. And his defense was, hey, Obama picked me. I'm OK. I'm OK. Like Obama likes me. There's also this interesting facet of these debates where you had like white candidates saying like, listen, I may be white, but I'm woke on race. They obviously have to speak to this issue. And it was done to various degrees of awkwardness. I feel like what did Pete Buttigieg say? Like the racial divide lives within me. You see, he lives in you.

Which is just, yeah, I actually have really nothing to say on that. But Gillibrand, I thought, handled it a little more tactfully. So on the campaign trail, Kirsten Gillibrand had this viral moment where she was like, let me explain white privilege to you. And she translated that on the debate stage being like, I can go talk to white suburban Trump women. And I can talk to those white women in the suburbs that voted for Trump and explain to them what white privilege actually is. That when their son is walking down a street with a bag of M&Ms in his pocket wearing a hoodie, his whiteness is what protects him from not being shot. So that's how she approached it. Jay Inslee said that he would approach the issue of race with humility. Because I have not experienced what many Americans have. I've never been a Black teenager

pulled over in a white neighborhood. I've never been a woman talked over in a meeting. I've never been an LGBTQ member subject to a slur. So there were all these moments of clearly candidates were trying to speak to an issue that's very important in the Democratic Party that has been kind of exacerbated by the Trump administration. Warren also notably said. We need to call out white supremacy for what it is, domestic terrorism. So you have these kind of moments of the white candidates addressing it.

One thing that occurred to me after watching six hours of debates over the course of two nights was that like, if everyone's going to be going after Biden, he really needs to be on the stage with Warren and with Bernie so they can all sort of get into the mix. When is that going to happen? When is this stage of 20 candidates finally going to be winnowed down? So that was something that was really interesting about this second round of debates was that we had this first night of the more moderate candidates warring against the progressive firemen of Sanders and Warren, but it wasn't the candidates that have really registered

any level of attention or interest with the American public. No, there's still some lady talking about dark psychic forces on the stage. And this really does look like it could be the last debate where the field is so wide on stage. Good. The rules for the next debate are really different to qualify to get on the debate stage. And when the field starts to winnow down, we'll start to see the debates between the people that have been consistently leading in the polls. And it'll be a clearer way to differentiate the different candidates instead of six hours of just everyone having at it with a very confusing conversation. In just a minute, a not-at-all-confusing conversation with Vox's Ezra Klein about how all the Democratic frontrunners are kind of doing these debates wrong.

I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. KiwiCo.com slash explained. You know, all you need to do is open up a new tab. KiwiCo.com slash explained. And then you get to this website. It's friendly. There's lots of colors. It's got a picture of, I don't know what this is, like a 10-year-old making something that looks like a catapult. And there's like little green balls. It looks cool. And then there's a section about what you get.

Click a line to take a closer look. There's the tadpole crate, which is aimed at 0 to 36 month olds. There's the Koala Crate, which is aimed at ages 3 to 4. Kiwi, ages 5 to 8. Atlas, 6 to 11. Doodle, 9 to 16. And Tinker, which is also 9 to 16. I'm going to go with Doodle because that's the closest to my age group.

And then they sort of give you a bit of a sample of everything you can find uh you can make soap with the doodle crate you can make ink you can make a clock you can make stained glass i mean i'm glad i clicked on the doodle crate because clearly it speaks to me uh find out which crate speaks to you kiwico.com slash explained you can try it out for free. Ezra Klein, we spoke after the first set of debates and you said kind of like, we have to wait and see if this changes anything. Did anything change? One of the things that changed in between the first and

second debate was Joe Biden, and it changed twice. So after the first debate, Joe Biden got his head handed to him on a platter by Kamala Harris, and he suffered a really severe drop in the polls. And then slowly, in something that wasn't really noticed by most people until the end, he basically got all of that polling back. So coming into the debate, I think the big question was, was Biden going to seem weak again or was he going to pull it together? And I would say yes, is the answer to that question. I would say Biden did enough to retain his frontrunner status. I don't think this was a bad debate for him. I think if Joe Biden were really strong, that would really shape this primary. But he's right now operating in a funny middle ground in between being like weak enough to really lose support and strong enough to really consolidate it.

Is the Democratic Party going to have to choose between these progressive ideals on the left and Joe Biden sooner than later? Or is this going to continue on for like another year? Oh, it's going to continue. I mean, it's going to continue on forever. Like, let's say at the very least, it's going to continue out through March. And it's going to continue longer than that. I mean, there's a pretty big, sharp ideological divide in the party. And I think one thing that you should worry about if you're like a Democratic Party operative is that having such a deep ideological divide between the key candidates here is going to make unity hard. Now, I will say the saving grace here is Democrats really don't like Donald Trump. And the exact form of argument I'm making you could have made about Donald Trump in 2016 where he ran against the Republican Party in many ways.

It was a very divisive primary. And he ultimately consolidated his party pretty well. So one way of looking at it is it doesn't matter. Another way of looking at it, though, is that Democrats cannot win the election, given how the electoral map looks, by losing the popular vote by 3 million votes. So the sort of Trump-Democrat analogy is not a great one. Can Democrats learn anything from how to bridge an ideological divide from Donald Trump? Winning bridges a lot of ideological divides, at least for a little while.

I will say that the thing Democrats should be learning and doing, it is striking, striking how little they are talking about Donald Trump and his policies. And that is weird on some level, because the real choice in the election is between a democrat and a republican and the republican is donald trump and he has at this point a very thick record and they are not saying anything about that record they are barely talking about his tax cuts they're not really talking about what he's trying to do on health care they're not talking about his regulations what he's done on the environment, really about, they've like mentioned him pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords. It is not a debate stage where the different candidates are auditioning for how good they are at making the case against Donald Trump. It is a debate

stage mostly where they are auditioning at how good they are at making the case against each other. Is CNN partly to blame for that with this, you know, one minute answer format, constantly pitting candidates against each other like it's some sort of diabolical family feud? One of the issues here is the way these debates are structurally set up. So the way to get time at the debate is you attack someone else who attacks you back. And then mechanically, by attacking Joe Biden, Joe Biden gets a response. And then by saying your attack of him was wrong, Joe Biden gives you a response, which then gives you more time and allows you to have like a back and forth that gives you a moment. So there's a huge incentives right now in the way the debates are being conducted to fight with other Democrats as opposed to focus your fire on Donald Trump. So Democrats are responding very rationally to that incentive, but I think it's a very bad incentive for Democrats to be responding to.

I guess a break from that sort of poorly incentivized structure came on the first night when Pete Buttigieg just kind of reminded everyone that all of these ideas that everyone ends up talking about on health care and immigration, the environment, whatever else, is just pie in the sky unless there's real structural change in Washington. When I propose the actual structural democratic reforms that might make a difference, end the electoral college, amend the constitution if necessary to clear up Citizens United, have D.C. actually be a state, and depoliticize the Supreme Court with structural reform, people look at me funny,

as if this country were incapable of structural reform. Does anybody really think we're going to overtake Citizens United without constitutional action? What did you make of him dropping that argument into the mix? I would say the two best answers of the two nights were one, Pete Buttigieg making this argument, which came in the context of the gun control debate, where he says, look, we've been having this debate for 20 years. We're getting nowhere here. And then the next night, Jay Inslee, the Washington state governor, said the key issue here is the Senate and Mitch McConnell. And if we don't win the Senate and get rid of the filibuster, none of this is happening. And like that is true. the finer points of ideas that will not pass in any composition of the Senate and the political

system as we can currently imagine it, given what the elections look like, it's a lot less important than the question of how will you make it possible to pass anything at all. The degree to which the Democrats do not seem to actually be interested in the fact that the electoral deck is stacked against them and their geographic disadvantage is only getting worse and Mitch McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat and now an activist Supreme Court conservative bloc is gutting public sector unions and greenlighting gerrymandering. The degree to which that is not the overriding context of this, even though that is why Donald Trump is in the White House, why Republicans control the Senate, why American

politics and policy looks the way it does. It's wild to me. It's wild. It just feels kind of dumb to me that everyone stands on this stage and agrees that someone on the stage has to beat Donald Trump no matter what, and then they just surrender to this system where they attack each other,

which makes everyone look worse except Donald Trump no matter what. And then they just surrender to the system where they attack each other, which makes everyone look worse except Donald Trump. Vox should be hosting, moderating all the debates. I completely agree. But seriously, what would it take to actually have these Democrats have a more functional and healthy debate? Why are they slaves to like whatever CNN and MSNBC want to do? I will say that the debates are going to winnow down. The next debate has a higher threshold where I think you need to be polling at 2% and you need 130,000 donors. Only seven candidates, if I'm remembering correctly, have currently cleared that for September. So maybe a couple more will. But it looks like you'll see the debate stage cut down by more than half or about half for the next debate. I think that will make this make more sense. I mean, the other thing is you really at this point need to see the key candidates on stage

together. It's a luck of the draw and of candidate strategy that Joe Biden has not had his like big showdown with like the tag team like killer match of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the other side yet. Yeah. But that's actually some of what we need to see. And we need to see then the with like the tag team, like killer match of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the other side yet. But that's actually some of what we need to see. And we need to see then the other candidates around that deciding their strategies within that. So your Cory Booker's, your Kamala Harris's, your Pete Buttigieg's. And then as it winnows down further from there, because they're going to keep raising up the threshold, you're going to get these debates that are, you know, five, four people on them. And then there's going to be a lot more time to talk, a lot more time to make your arguments against Trump.

And also, they're just going to get more natural. So you don't think, as the field winnows, it won't exacerbate the situation where you just have everyone attacking each other and attacking progressive ideas? Instead, they might start to shift more towards Donald Trump? I think that would be wise. And because I think that is an obvious thing for them to do,

I think some of them are eventually going to try to do it. But I have been wrong about Democrats doing wise things before. You can hear more from Ezra Klein on today's episode of The Weeds Podcast from Vox, and of course the Ezra Klein Show from Vox. This is Today Explained from Vox. Thanks to KiwiCo for supporting the show today. They really do have a ton of projects from stuff on Steam to whales to designing your own Halloween costume.

And, you know, it's August now. You've got to start thinking about your Halloween costume. KiwiCo is offering today, Explain listeners, the chance to try them out for free at KiwiCo.com slash Explained. That's K-I-W-I-C-O.com slash Explained.