2nd DEM Debate Thread: July 30 & 31, Detroit (MI), CNN

[OneJ]

Night 1 is going to be pretty boring aside from Williamson. No one will attack each other that night either. Night 2, Harris, Booker, and I think even Castro are going to gang up on Biden.

[OneJ]

Does anyone else get tired of people on these shows pretending to give their "A+" level insight on which voters Sanders and Warren are going after then prove that they don't know anything at all about the dynamic? Just about the only thing that both of the candidates' current coalitions have in common is the high share of "very liberal/progressive" voters.

As I pointed out before, Sanders does better with lower-class voters, white and non-white, and without college degrees. Warren does better with college-educated whites with higher incomes. I mean is it that hard to not say that they're competing for different voters at the moment?

[OneJ]

My review of the second set of debates:

Debate 2A: It irked me that all of the poc candidates didn't get a spot here and got a spot at the other debate instead and the fact that Warren still doesn't get the chance to share the stage with Biden yet. Although I didn't think Sanders and Warren would go after each other, there was still a tiny piece of me that worried that it could happen this early. Thankfully, it didn't happen. This was a pretty good debate that already proved to be better than debate 1A which wasn't a bad debate by any means, but 2A is just better.

I think Sanders won this debate with Warren and Williamson behind him. The former two did well defending themselves and played nice offense while Williamson really outperformed my expectations and certainly improved over the last debate. She even got a good amount of applause this time. Speaking of improvement, Beto also did better here than in the previous debate and he didn't use Spanish this time! However, O'Rourke didn't say or do anything particularly noteworthy. Buttigieg did well, except for that "racial divide lives within me" comment that clearly rubbed people the wrong way.

Then you have Delaney who, for someone so minor, got so much time trying to be relevant and ended up getting used as a punching bag for Warren and Sanders. At least he tried to make his case, but he needs to get the message that no one cares about him.

Debate 2B: My expectations, as one might imagine, were a lot higher for this debate and I, therefore, looked forward to this debate more than Tuesday's. If you haven't watched this debate yet, don't watch the whole thing. Just watch the highlights and you good. This debate was a major disappointment and is by far the worst debate. It was pretty boring most of the time and I nearly fell asleep watching it.

I'd say the winner of this debate is Yang because he didn't get attacked like everyone else and focused on his issues with the little time he got. The 1st runner-up is Gabbard for having the guts to tackle Harris and tackling her on criminal justice while passing up on the opportunity to go after Biden possibly trying to become his running mate as weird as it sounds. 2nd runner-up might actually be Biden for coming a lot more prepared to fight back after that pitiful performance in debate 1B, even after almost everyone attacked him.

On the other hand, while everyone else did alright for the most part, I think we have a clear loser here: Harris. She really didn't do good at all this debate considering how high everyone's expectations of her were before the debate. Harris looked like she needed her 5-hour energy pronto. Her trying to go after Biden after underperforming expectations already looked desperate and she couldn't defend herself to well against Gabbard. She tried to improve later on, but it was too late.

Also, I want to give a shoutout to CNN for being CNN with not only those questions but also trying their hardest to pit Biden and Harris against each other...on the first question. I mean at least build up the tension throughout the debate. It really shows how desperate they were to get a moment like what happened on MSNBC.