The top 2020 Democratic presidential contenders will finally be on same stage
Despite the miles traveled, the tens of millions of dollars raised and the ceaseless churn of policy papers, the Democratic primary has been remarkably static for months with Joe Biden leading in polls and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders vying to be the progressive alternative. That stability is under threat tonight (8 p.m., WPLG-ABC 10).
All of the top presidential candidates will share a debate stage, a setting that could make it harder to avoid skirmishes among the early front-runners. The other seven candidates, meanwhile, are under growing pressure to prove they’re still in the race to take on President Donald Trump.
The debate in Houston comes at a pivotal point as many voters start to pay closer attention to the campaign.
“For a complete [politics] junkie or someone in the business, you already have an impression of everyone,” said Howard Dean, who ran for president in 2004 and later chaired the Democratic National Committee. “But now you are going to see increasing scrutiny with other people coming in to take a closer look.”
It’s the first debate of the 2020 cycle that’s confined to one night after several candidates dropped out and others failed to meet new qualification standards.
Perhaps the biggest question is how directly the candidates will attack one another. Some fights that were predicted in previous debates failed to materialize with Sanders and Warren in July joining forces to take on their rivals.
The White House hopefuls and their campaigns are sending mixed messages about how eager they are to make frontal attacks on anyone other than President Donald Trump. That could mean the first meeting between Warren, the rising progressive calling for “big, structural change,” and Biden, the more cautious but still ambitious establishmentarian, doesn’t define the night. Or that Kamala Harris, the California senator, and Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, look to reclaim lost momentum not by punching upward but by reemphasizing their own visions for America.
Biden, who has led most national and early state polls since he joined the field in April, is downplaying the prospects of a titanic clash with Warren.
“I’m just going to be me, and she’ll be her, and let people make their judgments. I have great respect for her,” Biden said recently as he campaigned in South Carolina.
Warren says consistently that she has no interest in going after Democratic opponents.
Yet both campaigns are also clear that they don’t consider it a personal attack to draw sharp policy contrasts. Warren, who as a Harvard law professor once challenged then-Sen. Biden in a Capitol Hill hearing on bankruptcy law, has noted repeatedly that they have sharply diverging viewpoints. Her standard campaign pitch doesn’t mention Biden but is built around a plea that the “time for small ideas is over,” an implicit criticism of more moderate Democrats who want, for example, a public option healthcare plan instead of single-payer or who want to repeal Trump’s 2017 tax cuts but not necessarily raise taxes further.
Biden, likewise, doesn’t often mention Warren or Sanders. But he regularly contrasts the price tag of his public-option insurance proposal to the single-payer system that Warren and Sanders back.
There’s also potential home state drama with two Texans in the race. Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and former Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro clashed in an earlier debate over immigration. Castro has led the left flank on the issue with a proposal to decriminalize border crossings.
For O’Rourke, it will be the first debate since a massacre in his hometown of El Paso prompted him to overhaul his campaign into a forceful call for sweeping gun restrictions, complete with regular use of the F-word in cable-television interviews.