For many ’20 Dems, it’s make or break
20 candidates set to joust through 2 nights of debates
Joe Biden’s advisers have been preparing him for an onslaught. Bernie Sanders is looking to cut a clear cont rast on policy. Pete Buttigieg hopes to appear as “something completely different.” And Elizabeth Warren is all but certain to arrive in Miami this week with yet another new plan.
As for the 16 other candidates preparing to take the stage at the first Democratic debates, most can’t wait for a second chance to make a first impression.
“I feel like everyone needs a big moment,” said former Maryland Rep. John Delaney, who, like twothirds of the candidates taking the stage Wednesday and Thursday, has been toiling under the margin of error in most polls. “The debates can make people, and they can also break people.”
Nearly four years after Republicans captivated the nation with a 12-debate series starring Donald Trump that paved the way for a White House win, Democrats will finally get their own attempt at a ratings blockbuster.
Candidates have been digesting briefing books and consuming hours of old debate footage. They have been parrying around the table to get their answers under a minute or with mock contenders at separate lecterns in the case of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.
One debate will take place with five presidential candidates — a former vice president, three senators and a 37-year-old mayor — who have proved in recent months that they can gain traction with voters, drawing crowds, donors and volunteers.
The other debate will be a do-or-die fight to get noticed or go home this fall.
“At the top of the pack, they have to worry about not making any mistakes,” said former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean. “And, at the bottom of the pack, they have to distinguish themselves without being obnoxious.”
The complicating factor is that the 20 candidates competing in both groups will be shuffled across two nights, with four primetime hours divided into hundreds of 60-second answers and 30-second rebuttals, one-line zingers, lightning-fast policy summaries and the occasional barbed attack. All of it will be orchestrated by five moderators, while Trump threatens to live-tweet his insults from the White House.
The hunger for clarity must first survive quite a bit of televised chaos.
The candidates will not be allowed opening statements, props or prepared notes onstage, but there will be 45-second closing statements, according to debate rules circulated by moderator NBC News. The candidates will get timing lights, water to drink and pens and paper, as well as a chance to use the bathroom during longer commercial breaks.
The spotlight will burn brightest Thursday for former Vice President Joe Biden, who is polling at the top of the pack after weeks of stumbles that have repeatedly prompted the rest of the presidential field to call him out. He has been attacked for supporting a ban on federally funded abortions, before reversing his stance, for his voting record on trade and criminal justice and, most recently, for his boasts about his collegiality with a segregationist senator who described blacks as “an inferior race.”
Biden has made clear on the campaign trail how he will try to parry the slings and arrows, constantly seeking to refocus the debate on Trump and embracing his record of working across party lines.
In the second debate, Biden will be standing next to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who has made clear that he sees many of the former vice president’s accomplishments as liabilities. Though both men voted for the 1994 crime bill that Biden helped write, their records diverge on many fronts that are likely to be exposed.
Both men will be flanked by two relative newcomers to the national stage: Sen. Kamala Harris of California, who has been preparing for the debate with meetings at Washington media firm GMMB, and Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who spent most of the past week dealing with fallout from the police shooting of a black man in his hometown.
“He wants to present himself as a fresh face that is the complete opposite of Donald Trump both in style and tone,” said Lis Smith, a communications adviser for Buttigieg.
Harris, the former California attorney general who started her campaign strong but has struggled since, will get a clear chance as the only woman at center stage to reintroduce her message as a candidate who can prosecute Trump.
Warren will appear on a separate stage Wednesday night, a result of a random drawing that was widely seen as a setback for her, given the possibility of lower ratings. But her position as the sole candidate polling above 5 percent on the stage, flanked by former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, could allow her to dominate much of the discussion, which is expected to have a policy focus.
Advisers to multiple campaigns said Booker might prove to be the big winner of the debate sorting, since he will have a clear breakout opportunity to present his vision at the center of the stage a week after going toe-to-toe with Biden over his comments on cutting deals with segregationists.
Biden has refused to apologize and has instead asked Booker to apologize for suggesting he was insensitive, effectively elevating Booker’s position in the field.