Democratic Debate Live Updates: Candidates Clash

Biden focuses on race — and then gets testy.

Mr. Biden, who is competing hard for support from black voters in South Carolina’s primary on Saturday, was given an opportunity to talk about race in America and his priorities.

“My entire life I have been involved with the black community. I was a public defender. I worked in the projects. I came along, and the first thing I did as the chairman of the Judiciary Committee was extending the Voting Rights Act eventually for 25 years.”

Referring to black Americans, he said: “We’ve got to help them create wealth, and that’s why we double the amount of money that is available for young entrepreneurs and black entrepreneurs are as successful as any other group of people in the country.”

As the moderators sought to move on, though, Mr. Biden grew testy over the tendency of other candidates to violate the debate rules and talk at length.

“I know how you cut me off all the time but I’m not going to be quiet any more. OK?” he said.

Was that a ... joke?

Mr. Bloomberg, it seemed, made fun of his abysmal performance in his first presidential debate last week.

“I really am surprised,” he said, “that all of my fellow contestants up here, because I would have thought after I did such a good job in beating them last week that they would be a little bit afraid to do that.”

It’s not immediately clear what Mr. Bloomberg was talking about, given the beat-down that Ms. Warren and others put on him during the debate last week in Las Vegas.

A topic rarely discussed in debates: education.

And now for something completely different: The candidates talking about themselves and their plans, and not attacking each other.

It took the issue of education, an issue on which the candidates have few major differences.

Mr. Bloomberg went first. He defended his stewardship of the New York City public schools system, in particular the expansion of public charter schools.

“We’ve cut the gap between the rich and the poor, we’ve made an enormous difference in the options the parents have,” he said, adding that he raised teacher salaries and helped address poverty in the city.

“Rather than just talk about it in New York we actually did it,” he added.

Ms. Warren followed up, saying she would appoint an education secretary who has taught in public schools. Mr. Buttigieg went next, saying that he’d also value public school educators.

They finished the segment with no attacks and no candidate referencing a rival.

Warren and Buttigieg press Sanders on the filibuster.

Ms. Warren and Mr. Buttigieg pressed Mr. Sanders and, to a lesser extent, Mr. Biden on their opposition to rewriting the rules of the Senate to make it possible to pass major legislation with only 50 votes.

“Understand this,” Ms. Warren said. “The filibuster is giving a veto to the gun industry. It gives a veto to the oil industry. It’s going to give a veto on immigration. Until we’re willing to dig in and say that if Mitch McConnell is going to do to the next Democratic president what he did to President Obama.”

After the conversation veered elsewhere, Mr. Buttigieg returned to it.

“I want to come back to the question of the filibuster because this is not some long-ago bad vote that Bernie Sanders took,” he said. “This is a current bad position that Bernie Sanders holds.”

He questioned whether, without eliminating it, much would get done.

“How are we going to support a revolution, if you won’t even support a rule change?” Mr. Buttigieg said.

Biden sharply criticizes Sanders on gun control.

Mr. Biden tried going after Mr. Sanders on gun control in the last debate and got cut off by the moderators. He didn’t tonight.

“A hundred and fifty million people have been killed since 2007 when Bernie voted to exempt the gun manufacturers from liability,” Mr. Biden said. “More than all the wars, including Vietnam, from that point on. Carnage on our streets. And I want to tell you, if I’m elected N.R.A., I’m coming for you, and, gun manufacturers, I’m going to take you on and I’m going to beat you.”

Mr. Sanders tried to pivot into an attack on Mr. Biden’s votes on free trade — drawing boos from some in the audience — before acknowledging that he was wrong on gun control votes earlier in his career.

“I’ve cast thousands of votes,” Mr. Sanders said. “That was a bad vote.”

And if there was an attack on Mr. Sanders tonight, you could be sure Mr. Bloomberg was going to try to pile on.

“I have a six million-person organization around this country. Moms Demand Action, in every town,” Mr. Bloomberg said, citing legislation his organization has backed in state legislatures across the country.

Bloomberg on Pelosi’s majority: ‘I bough — got them.’

Mr. Bloomberg sold himself as the candidate to win over moderate Republicans and keep the House of Representative in Democratic control, noting he had backed nearly two dozen House Democrats last year.

“Let’s just go on the record. They talk about 40 Democrats. Twenty-one of those were people I spent $100 million to help elect,” he said. Then he almost had a slip of the tongue.

“All of the new Democrats that came in,” he said, “put Nancy Pelosi in charge, and gave the Congress the ability to control this president, I bough — got them.”

Klobuchar goes after Sanders as a “socialist.”

Ms. Klobuchar, who didn’t speak much in the first half-hour of the debate, took sharp aim at Mr. Sanders as she sought to make a case for electability.

“I am the only one in the New Hampshire debate when asked if we had a problem with a socialist leading the ticket that raised my hands,” Ms. Klobuchar said. “I like Bernie. We came in together to the Senate. But I do not think that this is the best person to lead the ticket.”

“I was the most effective Democrat in the U.S. Senate on 15 metrics. Bernie and Elizabeth were in the bottom half. It matters — it matters if you can actually get things done.”

Buttigieg, Biden, Bloomberg warn about a wipeout with Sanders as nominee.

Mr. Buttigieg and Mr. Biden attacked Mr. Sanders on the stage for what others have been saying in private for months: That Mr. Sanders would cost Democrats their House majority and imperil efforts to win the Senate in 2020.

Nominating Mr. Sanders, Mr. Buttigieg said, “adds up to four more years of Donald Trump, Kevin McCarthy as the speaker of the House. Not only is this a way to get Donald Trump re-elected, we have a House to worry about, a Senate to worry about.”

He added: “If you want to keep the House in Democratic hands, you might want to check with the people who actually turned the House blue — 40 Democrats who are not running on your platform. They are running away from your platform as fast as they possibly can.”

Mr. Biden piled on. More of those 40 Democrats have endorsed him than anyone else, he said.

And then Mr. Bloomberg said a Trump victory will lead to a generational catastrophe for Democrats.

“Bernie will lose to Donald Trump. And Donald Trump, and the House, and the Senate and some of the state houses will all go red and then between gerrymandering and appointing judges for the next 20 or 30 years, we’re going to live with this catastrophe,” he said.

Mr. Sanders shot back.

“If you want to beat Trump what you’re going to need is an unprecedented grass-roots movement,” Mr. Sanders said.

Biden, overlooked early, tries to assert himself: ‘I’m gonna talk.’

Mr. Biden did not speak a lot in the early moments. At one point everyone onstage was raising their hand except him. But after 30 minutes, he had had enough.

“I guess the only way to do this is jump in and speak twice as long as you should” Mr. Biden said. He took the chance to attack Mr. Steyer for past investments in private prisons.

As he time expired, he pressed on. “I’m not out of time. You spoke overtime and I’m going to talk!” Mr. Biden said.

Sanders pressed on the cost of his plans.

Mr. Sanders was pushed by moderators for exactly how he would pay for his array of plans, in particular his “Medicare for all” proposal.

“Can you do the math for the rest of us?” said Norah O’Donnell of CBS.

“How many hours do you have?” Mr. Sander said, somewhat dismissively.

He provided little specifics in his answer.

“It doesn’t take two hours to do the math,” said Mr. Buttigieg later.

When Ms. Klobuchar jumped in, she quoted Mr. Sanders’s comments on “60 Minutes” over the weekend, in which Mr. Sanders declined to list off all the particular costs.

She accused him of “broken promises that sound good on bumper stickers.”

Warren hits Bloomberg again over NDAs.

Ms. Warren came with a howitzer at Mr. Bloomberg, trashing his tenure as the CEO of Bloomberg, L.P., when women who worked for him signed nondisclosure agreements that bound them to silence about their experience at the company in exchange for cash payments.

“Let us have the women have an opportunity to speak,” Ms. Warren said. “The Bloomberg corporation and Mayor Bloomberg himself have been accused of discrimination. They are bound by nondisclosures so that they cannot speak. If he says there is nothing to hide here, then sign a blanket release and let those women speak.”

Mr. Bloomberg shot back that he never said, as Ms. Warren accused, that he demanded a pregnant woman abort her unborn child. And he said he was “probably wrong” to make jokes that women who worked for him found offensive.

“I don’t remember what they were,” he said of those jokes. “If it bothered them, I was wrong, and I apologize. I’m sorry for that.”

Mr. Bloomberg said he had, as Ms. Warren requested in last week’s debate, signed a blanket release to allow women who signed nondisclosure agreements to speak about their experiences.

“The trouble is with this senator is enough is never enough,” he said.

Warren slams Bloomberg for past Republican giving.

Ms. Warren prosecuted her argument that Mr. Bloomberg was the “riskiest” Democrat onstage, ticking off his past giving to Republican candidates for office — including the one she defeated.

“Who funded Lindsey Graham’s campaign for re-election last time? It was Mayor Bloomberg. And that’s not the only right-wing senator that Mayor Bloomberg has funded,” she said. “He scooped in to try to defend another Republican senator against a woman challenger. That was me. It didn’t work, but he tried hard.”

She went on.

“I don’t care how much money Mayor Bloomberg has, the core of the Democratic Party will never trust him. He has not earned their trust. I will,” she said.

Mr. Bloomberg replied: “I have been training for this job since I stepped on the pile that was still smoldering on 9/11. I know what to do. I’ve shown I know how to run a country. I’ve run the city, which is almost the same size — bigger than most countries in the world. I am not the — I’m the one choice that makes some sense.”

Biden take on Sanders over gun control and Obama.

With Mr. Sanders rising in the polls and having won two of the first three states, Mr. Biden took his best shot to knock Mr. Sanders down during his first remarks of the debate.

Mr. Sanders, Mr. Biden said, voted against gun control legislation that Mr. Biden passed in the 1990s, and then came with the real hammer for black voters in South Carolina and beyond: Mr. Sanders was disloyal to President Barack Obama.

“He talked Barack Obama, he wanted a primary,” Mr. Biden said. “He said we should primary Barack Obama, someone should. And, in fact, the president was weak and our administration was in fact not up to it.”

Needless to say that is not how most black Americans view Mr. Obama.

Mr. Biden, asked about his standing with black voters, said he’s done the work to appeal to black voters for decades — an implicit criticism of Mr. Sanders and others on the stage.

“I’ve earned the vote,” he said. “Not just here, but across the country. I’ve been coming here for years and years, creating jobs here.”

Biden: “I will win South Carolina.”

Mr. Biden refused to consider the possibility of losing South Carolina, a state which he has previously called his “firewall” in the 2020 primary, and would not answer if he would depart the state if he lost.

“I will win South Carolina,” Mr. Biden said.

He declined to say if he would quit the race if he lost. He has finished fourth, fifth and second in the first three contests.

Sanders jokes about being a target.

In the opening 10 minutes, Mr. Sanders came under attack from Mr. Buttigieg, Mr. Steyer, Mr. Biden, Mr. Bloomberg and Ms. Warren.

“I’m hearing my name mentioned a little bit tonight,” he joked of his newfound front-runner status. “I wonder why.”

Warren takes sharp aim — at Sanders.

Ms. Warren, who has spent recent weeks avoiding direct confrontation with Mr. Sanders, decided to end that tactic in the opening moments of the debate.

“The way I see this is that Bernie is winning right now because the Democratic Party is a progressive party, and progressive ideas are popular ideas, even if there are a lot of people on this stage who don’t want to say so,” she began.

Then she pivoted.

“Bernie and I agree on a lot of things,” she said. “But I think I would make a better president than Bernie.”

She said she had a record of accomplishments.

On the consumer credit agency, she said, “I dug in. I did the work and then Bernie’s team trashed me for it.”

On health care, she added, “Bernie’s plan doesn’t explain how we’re going to get there.”

She concluded, “Progressives have got one shot and they need to spend it with a leader to get things done.”

Bloomberg to Sanders: “That’s why Russia is helping you get elected.”

The debate began with a question to Mr. Sanders about the economy, and he went straight to his stump speech talking points.

“The economy is doing really great for people like Mr. Bloomberg and other billionaires,” Mr. Sanders said. “For the ordinary American, things are not so good. Last year, real wage increases for the average worker were less than 1 percent.”

Mr. Bloomberg shot back: “I think Donald Trump thinks it would be better if he’s president. I do not think so. Vladimir Putin thinks that Donald Trump should be president of the United States, and that’s why Russia is helping you get elected.”

Mr. Buttigieg then jumped in, trying to present himself as a unifying figure while rivals took big swings at each other.

“I mean, look, if you think the last four years has been chaotic, divisive, toxic, exhausting, imagine spending the better part of 2020 with Bernie Sanders versus Donald Trump,” he said. “Think about what that will be like for this country.”

The candidates are taking the stage.

The seven Democratic contenders walked out to their podiums single-file, all waves and smiles as they faced the audience. Mr. Bloomberg grinned more than he did last week, and blew a kiss to someone in the audience. The candidates moved so fast that they didn’t shake hands or engage much with each other.