Politics

Democratic debate 2015 live stream: time, TV schedule, and how to watch online

Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O’Malley will face off onstage.

by Andrew Prokop

Updated Dec 20, 2015, 1:08 AM UTC

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Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.

Tonight’s third Democratic debate is expected to kick off on ABC at 8:30 pm Eastern time. But don’t worry, if you don’t have a TV, you’ll still be able to tune in — an online live stream will be free and available to all at ABC’s website.

This debate, like two others on the Democrats’ sparse schedule, is relegated to the weekend, when fewer people are likely to tune in. This was likely an attempt by the Democratic National Committee to smooth Hillary Clinton’s path to the nomination.

But things could get pretty heated nonetheless, because on Friday, the sleepy Democratic contest suddenly exploded in controversy. First, Bernie Sanders’s campaign was accused of improperly accessing the Clinton campaign’s proprietary voter data. Then, the Democratic National Committee suspended Sanders’s access to its important voter database. Then the Sanders campaign filed a lawsuit against the DNC, but the day ended with an agreement by the DNC to restore Sanders’s access to the data. You can read our explainer for more on this contretemps, but you should definitely expect it to be discussed on stage.

With terrorism in the news after the Paris and San Bernardino attacks, Sanders has also said that he’ll attempt to contrast his foreign policy’s views with Clinton’s during tonight’s debate. It’s an important topic, because this is an area where the contenders seriously differ. Hillary Clinton’s record suggests that she’s genuinely more hawkish than most other Democrats — that is, more willing to support aggressive intervention abroad. Sanders, though, voted against the war in Iraq in 2002 (unlike Clinton) and has generally been more skeptical of the use of force (though he has endorsed it in certain cases).

The third candidate onstage besides Clinton and Sanders will be Martin O’Malley. He has less of a record on foreign policy, since his background is in Maryland politics. Back in the second debate, he seemed thrilled to talk about refugee policy (arguing that the US should accept 65,000 Syrian refugees with proper screening). He also struck a hawkish tone, saying that “America is best when we are actually standing up to evil in this world.” And when Clinton said the fight against ISIS couldn’t be “an American fight,” O’Malley insisted that it was.