Democratic debate on ABC: News and updates

As in previous debates, Hillary Clinton came out ahead last night, getting the most airtime and number of mentions during the last debate of 2015. She spoke more that her two opponents, getting almost eight minutes more than Sen. Bernie Sanders and 14 minutes more than former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.

Clinton also got the most attention during the debate, getting more mentions than her two opponents. Sanders addressed Clinton 15 times and O’Malley mentioned her seven times, while she only mentioned them 12 and four times respectively.

At Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate, Hillary Clinton mentioned a little-known drug when asked about America’s opioid painkiller and heroin epidemic: naloxone.

The drug — also known by its brand name, Narcan — is at the center of America’s new public health approach toward drugs, a shift from the old war on drugs. As the country deals with an opioid painkiller and heroin epidemic that’s pushed drug overdose deaths above car crash and gun violence deaths, policymakers are increasingly looking for more effective ways to cut down on drug use and prevent deadly overdoses. And naloxone speaks to that shift.

It’s a question Hillary Clinton has been dealing with since 1992, when journalists sometimes questioned her role in making substantive policy while she was first lady. At the time she responded, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas.”

The Clinton campaign responded with a tweet clipping video from the 1990s, when Clinton made a speech talking about human rights in China.

During Saturday’s Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton had two nominal opponents: Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley. But her main focus seemed to be elsewhere — on the general election.

Rather than try to placate progressives — as she did this summer and fall during Sanders’s surge, when she moved to the left on trade and the Keystone XL pipeline — Clinton frequently seemed to be making a case aimed at swing voters, as several commentators observed.

Fundamentally, though, the debate lacked a certain amount of focus because too many of the key players weren’t really all that interested in the primary contest that serves as the nominal subject of the debate. The moderators were largely more interested in delivering a hard-hitting interview of Clinton than in facilitating an argument between the candidates and Clinton herself seemed to be mostly looking ahead to the general election. It’s nobody’s fault, exactly, that the Democratic race just isn’t very close but the fact of the matter is that it isn’t very close and that makes for a much worse television program than the wide open Republican field.

Still, debates continue to be among the most important campaign events out there and Saturday’s slog produced wins and losses for a range of figures.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens premiered on Friday (it was, incidentally, really good). To try to milk the hype, Hillary Clinton closed off Saturday night’s democratic debate by saying “may the force be with you.” People kind of loved it:

Interestingly, J..J. Abrams (the film’s director) and his wife gave one million dollars to the Clinton super PAC Priorities USA in June, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Ballhaus.

Hillary Clinton — like Barack Obama before her — wants voters to know that however much she may favor defending and expanding useful federal programs, she won’t be asking the 97 percent or so of American households that earn less than $250,000 a year. She’s so eager to make this known, she’s even made it a point of pride in her primary campaign against Bernie Sanders.

The bar on middle-class tax hikes is the perfect policy stance for a 21st-century Democrat, blending timidity in the face of the public’s skepticism about tax hikes with boldness in the face of the liberal base’s rage about income inequality. And directionally it’s the right idea. A huge share of the income gains over the past generation have gone to a tiny minority of high-income households, so those are the ones who are going to have to pay the bulk of the tab for useful new investments.

The strangest moment of the Democratic presidential debate Saturday night happened after a commercial break, when the debate resumed — without front-runner Hillary Clinton:

It’s not clear where Clinton was (bathroom?), but her absence wasn’t enough to get the moderators to stall for the additional minute or so it took for her to walk in.

About midway through the Democratic debate, the previously staid affair erupted. Bernie Sanders lit into Hillary Clinton on an issue where there are real differences between the two candidates — launching wars to topple foreign dictators.

The flashpoint was Bashar al-Assad. Sanders argued that the United States should abandon any commitment to toppling Assad’s government, and focus on destroying ISIS instead. “I worry,” Sanders said, “that Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change:”

Why has Donald Trump surged to first place in GOP primary polls? Some liberals are quick to simply blame “racism” on the right — but during Saturday’s Democratic debate, Bernie Sanders gave a more subtle answer.

Essentially, Sanders thinks Trump has risen because Americans are “anxious” about an economy that isn’t working for them, and have grown distrustful of political elites in both parties. That economic failure, Sanders said, has given Trump the opportunity to build his popularity by naming scapegoats, like Mexicans and Muslims. Watch or read his comments below:

Unsurprisingly, one of the first questions ABC moderators asked at the Democratic debate was about the controversy that’s consumed the campaign for the last 48 hours: the allegations that Bernie Sanders campaign staffers improperly accessed data from the Clinton campaign on a voter database, and the DNC’s decision to lock the Sanders campaign out of the database entirely in response.

In what probably wasn’t the hardest-hitting follow-up question a moderator has ever asked in 2015, ABC’s Martha Raddatz asked Sanders directly, “Does secretary Clinton deserve an apology tonight?”

At Saturday night’s Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton ripped into Donald Trump’s recent comments about banning Muslim immigration, saying that the Republican frontrunner was “becoming ISIS’s best recruiter.” Her evidence was that Trump had been featured in ISIS videos — a claim her campaign recanted by Sunday morning:

On Sunday morning Clinton’s communications director tried to clean up Hillary’s claim, conceding: “She didn’t have a particular video in mind.” She added that Trump is being used in social media efforts by extremists, generally.

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.

The third Democratic debate will begin tonight at 8 pm. And to make it a bit more fun, we have created two bingo cards so you can turn it all into a game.

Here’s the first card: