--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Noel King: And I'm Noel King.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this episode comes from KiwiCo. They're on a mission to not just empower kids to make a project, but to make a difference.
--:-- Noel King: Their projects are designed to spark creativity, tinkering, and learning in kids of all ages.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they're offering Today Explained listeners the chance to try them out for free.
--:-- Noel King: To redeem the offer and learn more about their projects, go to KiwiCo.com slash explained.
--:-- Tara Golshan: Hi, I'm Tyra Golshin, politics reporter here at Vox.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We had another round of Democratic debates this week, and this time there were intros.
--:-- Tara Golshan: Live from Detroit, it's the Democratic presidential debate. Really big, hefty intros. It was like sports ball every night.
--:-- Noel King: Right now, the road to the White House drives through Detroit.
--:-- Tara Golshan: The Democrats... Do you remember all the things that happened in these intros?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I just remember really dramatic music and like awkward close-up shots of everyone's face.
--:-- Tara Golshan: 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.
--:-- Noel King: Yeah, well that's politics in 2020.
--:-- Tara Golshan: Every time they said Cory Booker, it'd be like, here's a clip of Cory Booker talking.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Trump wants us to fight him on his turf. That's not how we win.
--:-- Tara Golshan: Pete Buttigieg. Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
--:-- Noel King: I liked the rematch Kamala Harris versus Joe Biden.
--:-- Tara Golshan: I was like, are they going to box? A critical rematch.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Kamala Harris not backing down after clashing with Biden over race.
--:-- Tara Golshan: And then if that wasn't bad enough, it goes from there to an individual introduction of every single candidate.
--:-- Noel King: We had to watch 20 people slowly and awkwardly walk out on stage and sometimes shake hands, sometimes not.
--:-- Tara Golshan: From Vermont, Senator Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O'Rourke, Amy Klobuchar, John Hickenlooper, Tim Ryan, John Delaney, Marianne Williamson, Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Bill de Blasio.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then my favorite part.
--:-- Tara Golshan: Do you remember what happens next?
--:-- Noel King: Please tell me. Did you forget? I mean, I don't think so, but I don't know what you're talking about.
--:-- Tara Golshan: It cuts to commercial. The debate will begin right after this short break.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The debate will begin right after this short break.
--:-- Tara Golshan: Call it fate. Call it luck.
--:-- Tara Golshan: All I knew was I was meant to be his dog.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, CNN really leaning into this.
--:-- Tara Golshan: How else were these debates different from the earlier ones from MSNBC?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think the first round of debates was really trying to put people on where they stand on the issues.
--:-- Tara Golshan: Like they had this hand raising phenomenon where they would just be like, do you support X?
--:-- Noel King: And then everyone had to raise their hands to gauge where they are on the spectrum.
--:-- Tara Golshan: And this round of debate seemed a lot more this candidate said this about your plan. What do you think?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Tara Golshan: And we saw that a lot more when it came to issues like health care, immigration, race.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Those all came under debate.
--:-- Tara Golshan: So why don't we go through those issues that they really dug into one by one, health care, immigration, race, whatever else.
--:-- Noel King: Let's start with health care.
--:-- Tara Golshan: So that's how both debates opened up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What was the crux of the conversation?
--:-- Tara Golshan: What we saw over the two nights was this debate about how radically the candidates want to change the American health care system.
--:-- Noel King: And it really comes down to this idea of whether they're going to embrace Medicare for all or whether they're not.
--:-- Tara Golshan: OK, so who's embracing it?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So obviously you have the progressive firebrands like Senator Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
--:-- Tara Golshan: 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 when I wrote the damn bill.
--:-- Noel King: 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.
--:-- Tara Golshan: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah.
--:-- Tara Golshan: 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.
--:-- Noel King: So they pitted that against like Delaney and Bullock, especially on night one, who want nothing to do with Medicare for all.
--:-- Tara Golshan: 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 or pushing back on Medicare for all because they're saying it's not feasible to pass in Congress.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they're saying that we should have more incremental change.
--:-- Tara Golshan: Of course, they also are proposing sort of big changes to the health care system themselves, like they want a public option to be introduced to the health care system.
--:-- Noel King: So it is this kind of interesting debate of how big and bold should we go with what we're saying.
--:-- Tara Golshan: But still, I think everything we're talking about is still pretty bold and would be politically difficult to pass.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's just a matter of how they're framing that push.
--:-- Tara Golshan: 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 do and not fight for.
--:-- Noel King: One of the other major issues where you actually saw candidates disagreeing was on immigration.
--:-- Tara Golshan: So immigration has been a really interesting debate in the Democratic Party.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Tara Golshan: 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.
--:-- Noel King: 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.
--:-- Tara Golshan: And that is what we saw on both nights.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Tara Golshan: 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 and Nationality Act.
--:-- Noel King: That is the law that this president, this administration is using to incarcerate migrant parents and then physically separate them from their children.
--:-- Tara Golshan: And that has really framed the conversation of trying to pin how far candidates are trying to go.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Tara Golshan: 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.
--:-- Noel King: And on night two, this kind of set up this tussle between de Blasio and Biden.
--:-- Tara Golshan: I asked the vice president point blank, did he use his power to stop those deportations?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He went right around the question, Mr. Vice President, you want to be president of the United States.
--:-- Tara Golshan: 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.
--:-- Noel King: Which one?
--:-- Tara Golshan: I was vice president. I am not the president.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I keep my recommendation in private.
--:-- Noel King: Unlike you, I expect you would go ahead and say whatever was said privately with him.
--:-- Tara Golshan: That's not what I do.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Noel King: Mr. Vice President, you can't have it both ways.
--:-- Tara Golshan: You invoke President Obama more than anybody in this campaign.
--:-- Noel King: You can't do it when it's convenient and then dodge it when it's not.
--:-- Tara Golshan: And it was interesting because similar disagreements were coming up when they started talking about criminal justice.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Biden went as far last night to just say, look, listen.
--:-- Tara Golshan: Barack Obama knew exactly who I was.
--:-- Noel King: He had he had 10 lawyers do a background check on everything about me and civil rights and civil liberties.
--:-- Tara Golshan: And he chose me and he said it was the best decision.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you, Mr. Vice President.
--:-- Tara Golshan: Yeah, it was this kind of crazy moment where he was being scrutinized for his record on criminal justice.
--:-- Noel King: And his defense was, hey, Obama picked me. I'm OK. I'm OK. Like Obama likes me.
--:-- Tara Golshan: There was 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They obviously have to speak to this issue.
--:-- Tara Golshan: And it was done to various degrees of awkwardness.
--:-- Noel King: I feel like what did Pete Buttigieg say?
--:-- Tara Golshan: The racial divide lives within me. You see, he lives in you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which is just, yeah, I actually have really nothing to say on that.
--:-- Tara Golshan: But Gillibrand, I thought, handled it a little more tactfully.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So on the campaign trail, Kirsten Gillibrand had this viral moment where she was like, let me explain white privilege to you.
--:-- Tara Golshan: And she translated that on the debate stage being like, I can go talk to white suburban Trump women.
--:-- Noel King: And I can talk to those white women in the suburbs that voted for Trump and explain to them what white privilege actually is.
--:-- Tara Golshan: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So that's how she approached it.
--:-- Tara Golshan: Jay Inslee said that he would approach the issue of race with humility.
--:-- Noel King: Because I have not experienced what many Americans have.
--:-- Tara Golshan: I've never been a black teenager pulled over in a white neighborhood.
--:-- Noel King: I've never been a woman talked over in a meeting.
--:-- Tara Golshan: I've never been an LGBTQ member subject to a slur.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Tara Golshan: Warren also notably said, we need to call out white supremacy for what it is, domestic terrorism.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So you have these kind of moments of the white candidates addressing it.
--:-- Noel King: 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.
--:-- Tara Golshan: When is that going to happen?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When is this stage of 20 candidates finally going to be winnowed down?
--:-- Noel King: 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 firebrands of Sanders and Warren.
--:-- Tara Golshan: But it wasn't the candidates that have really registered any level of attention or interest with the American public.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, there's still some lady talking about dark psychic forces on the stage.
--:-- Tara Golshan: And this really does look like it could be the last debate where the field is so wide on stage.
--:-- Tara Golshan: The rules for the next debate are really different to qualify to get on the debate stage.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Tara Golshan: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Noel King: I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained.
--:-- Tara Golshan: So if you're curious about KiwiCo.com slash explained, you know, all you need to do is open up a new tab.
--:-- Noel King: KiwiCo.com slash explained.
--:-- Tara Golshan: And then you get to this website.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's friendly. There's lots of colors.
--:-- Noel King: 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.
--:-- Tara Golshan: And there's like little green balls.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It looks cool.
--:-- Noel King: And then there's a section about what you get.
--:-- Tara Golshan: Click a line to take a closer look.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's the Tadpole Crate, which is aimed at 0 to 36-month-olds.
--:-- Noel King: There's the Koala Crate, which is aimed at ages 3 to 4.
--:-- Tara Golshan: Kiwi, ages 5 to 8.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Atlas, 6 to 11.
--:-- Noel King: Doodle, 9 to 16.
--:-- Tara Golshan: And Tinker, which is also 9 to 16.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm going to go with Doodle because that's the closest to my age group.
--:-- Noel King: And then they sort of give you a bit of a sample of everything you can find.
--:-- Tara Golshan: You can make soap with the Doodle Crate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can make ink.
--:-- Noel King: You can make a clock.
--:-- Tara Golshan: You can make stained glass.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, I'm glad I clicked on the doodle crate because clearly it speaks to me.
--:-- Noel King: Find out which crate speaks to you.
--:-- Tara Golshan: KiwiCo.com slash explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Did anything change?
--:-- Ezra Klein: One of the things that changed in between the first and second debate was Joe Biden.
--:-- Noel King: And it changed twice.
--:-- Ezra Klein: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then slowly in something that wasn't really noticed by most people until the end, he basically got all of that polling back.
--:-- Ezra Klein: So coming to the debate, I think the big question was, was Biden going to seem weak again or is he going to pull it together?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I would say yes is the answer to that question.
--:-- Ezra Klein: I would say Biden did enough to retain his frontrunner status.
--:-- Noel King: I don't think this was a bad debate for him.
--:-- Ezra Klein: I think if Joe Biden were really strong, that would really shape this primary.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But he's right now operating in a funny middle ground between being like weak enough to really lose support and strong enough to really consolidate it.
--:-- Ezra Klein: Is the Democratic Party going to have to choose between these progressive ideals on the left and Joe Biden sooner than later?
--:-- Noel King: Or is this going to continue on for like another year?
--:-- Ezra Klein: Oh, it's going to continue.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, it's going to continue on forever.
--:-- Ezra Klein: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, there's a pretty big, sharp ideological divide in the party.
--:-- Ezra Klein: 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.
--:-- Noel King: Now, I will say the saving grace here is Democrats really don't like Donald Trump.
--:-- Ezra Klein: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was a very divisive primary.
--:-- Ezra Klein: And he ultimately consolidated his party pretty well.
--:-- Noel King: So one way of looking at that is it doesn't matter.
--:-- Ezra Klein: 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 three million votes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the sort of Trump-Democrat analogy is not a great one.
--:-- Ezra Klein: Can Democrats learn anything from how to bridge an ideological divide from Donald Trump?
--:-- Noel King: Winning bridges a lot of ideological divides at least for a little while.
--:-- Ezra Klein: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that is weird on some level because the real choice in the election is between a Democrat and a Republican.
--:-- Ezra Klein: And the Republican is Donald Trump and he has at this point a very thick record.
--:-- Noel King: And they are not saying anything about that record.
--:-- Ezra Klein: They are barely talking about his tax cuts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're not really talking about what he's trying to do on health care.
--:-- Ezra Klein: 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.
--:-- Noel King: It is not a debate stage where the different candidates are auditioning for how good they are at making the case against Donald Trump.
--:-- Ezra Klein: It is a debate stage mostly where they are auditioning at how good they are at making the case against each other.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is CNN partly to blame for that with this you know one minute answer format constantly pitting candidates against each other like it some sort of diabolical family feud?
--:-- Ezra Klein: One of the issues here is the way these debates are structurally set up.
--:-- Noel King: So the way to get time at the debate is you attack someone else who attacks you back.
--:-- Ezra Klein: And then mechanically, by attacking Joe Biden, Joe Biden gets a response.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Ezra Klein: It gives you a moment.
--:-- Noel King: 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.
--:-- Ezra Klein: So Democrats are responding very rationally to that incentive, but I think it's a very bad incentive for Democrats to be responding to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Ezra Klein: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does anybody really think we're going to overtake Citizens United without constitutional action?
--:-- Ezra Klein: What did you make of him dropping that argument into the mix?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Ezra Klein: And then the next night, Jay Inslee, the Washington state governor, said, the key issue here is the Senate and Mitch McConnell.
--:-- Noel King: And if we don't win the Senate and get rid of the filibuster, none of this is happening.
--:-- Ezra Klein: And like that is true.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All these candidates debating 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.
--:-- Ezra Klein: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Ezra Klein: It's wild to me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's wild.
--:-- Ezra Klein: 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.
--:-- Noel King: And then they just surrender to the system where they attack each other, which makes everyone look worse except Donald Trump.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Vox should be hosting and moderating all the debates.
--:-- Ezra Klein: I completely agree.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But seriously, what would it take to actually have these Democrats have a more functional and healthy debate?
--:-- Ezra Klein: Why are they slaves to whatever CNN and MSNBC want to do?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I will say that the debates are going to winnow down.
--:-- Ezra Klein: The next debate has a higher threshold where I think you need to be polling at 2% and you need 130,000 donors.
--:-- Noel King: Only seven candidates, if I'm remembering correctly, have currently cleared that for September.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So maybe a couple more will.
--:-- Ezra Klein: But it looks like you'll see the debate stage cut down by more than half or about half for the next debate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that will make this make more sense.
--:-- Ezra Klein: I mean, the other thing is you really at this point need to see the key candidates on stage together.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's the 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.
--:-- Ezra Klein: But that's actually some of what we need to see.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we need to see then the other candidates around that deciding their strategies within that.
--:-- Ezra Klein: So your Cory Booker is your Kamala Harris is your Pete Buttigieg is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then is it windows down further from there because they're going to keep raising up the threshold?
--:-- Ezra Klein: You're going to get these debates that are, you know, five, four people on them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then there's going to be a lot more time to talk, a lot more time to make your arguments against Trump.
--:-- Ezra Klein: And also, they're just going to get more natural.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Ezra Klein: Instead, they might start to shift more towards Donald Trump.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that would be wise.
--:-- Ezra Klein: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Noel King: This is Today Explained from Vox.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thanks to KiwiCo for supporting the show today.
--:-- Noel King: They really do have a ton of projects from stuff on Steam to whales to designing your own Halloween costume.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And, you know, it's August now. You've got to start thinking about your Halloween costume.
--:-- Noel King: KiwiCo is offering today, Explained listeners, a chance to try them out for free at kiwico.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's K-I-W-I-C-O.com.
