NBC News Democratic debate: news and updates

In Sunday night’s Democratic debate, Bernie Sanders came out ahead for the first time, getting the most airtime. Unlike in previous debates, Sanders spoke more than his two opponents, getting almost three minutes more than Hillary Clinton and 16 minutes more than Martin O’Malley.

But when we splice the numbers, we can see that Sanders didn’t just speak the most — he spoke most consistently during the whole debate, with the most frequent interventions. By contrast, O’Malley seemed to struggle to get some airtime between Sanders and Clinton, especially when they sparred on health care and financial regulation.

Democratic presidential candidates spent more time debating criminal justice issues during the Sunday night NBC debate than during all the Republican debates combined.

In the latest debate, Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O’Malley quickly brought up mass incarceration, police shootings, the war on drugs, gun violence, and racial disparities in the criminal justice system. During all of the Republican debates, candidates rarely raised these issues; if they came up at all, it was usually during a narrow one-off question and answer.

Sunday night’s Democratic debate was, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz insisted, timed to “maximize the opportunity for voters to see our candidates.“ Given that it was held on the Sunday before a federal holiday, that seems … dubious. But whoever wasn’t deterred by the debate’s inauspicious timing saw an event that was both substantive and sort of lackadaisical. Almost all the discussion focused on policy, but Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton began awkwardly attempting to slip in attacks on each other, though neither really seemed that comfortable doing it. The most animated of the bunch was Martin O’Malley, who seemed energized by his quest to successfully say something, anything, without being talked over.

It’ll take a few days for poll results to trickle in, which will provide the closest thing to an objective answer of who actually won the debate. But in the meantime, here are the candidates who ended the night better off than they started it — and the ones who slipped.

About an hour and a half into Sunday night’s Democratic presidential debate, when the questions finally turned to foreign policy, specifically to ISIS, what had previously been a freewheeling and high-spirited debate suddenly became much more awkward.

“As everybody here knows, this is an incredibly complicated and difficult issue,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said, going on to declare that he wouldn’t send American ground troops to Syria — but offering little about what he would do. He argued, awkwardly, that “Muslim troops should be on the ground” to fight ISIS. And he praised, oddly, the hereditary king of Jordan.

Bernie Sanders dominated the fourth Democratic debate on Sunday night — and the speaking time shows it.

For the first time, he spoke more than frontrunner Hillary Clinton, with 30 minutes of speaking time to Clinton’s 27 minutes:

Late in NBC’s Democratic debate, Bernie Sanders said something that struck a lot of foreign policy observers as very strange:

King Abdullah’s Jordan, while a US ally against ISIS, has played a limited role in the military campaign in Iraq and Syria. It’s responsible for only a fraction of the airstrikes against the group, and (contrary to what you might think from Sanders’s comment) has no significant role on the ground.

Hillary Clinton has made a lot of bad arguments about Bernie Sanders’s support for single-payer. But her best argument was her simplest: With mere weeks to go before the Iowa caucuses, Sanders still hadn’t released any details about his plan. And absent a real plan, no one could really say what he was proposing or whether it was a good idea. As Clinton said in an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, “The devil’s in the details when it comes to health care.”

On Sunday night, mere hours before the fourth Democratic debate, Sanders tried to head off Clinton’s attacks by releasing his plan. Only what he released isn’t a plan. It is, to be generous, a gesture toward a future plan.

Imagine you’re a Democratic voter who’d been cryogenically frozen right before the 2016 presidential campaign got started — right at the end of 2014, say — and got unfrozen just in time to watch Sunday night’s Democratic debate on NBC.

The first question you heard the three candidates answer was what they’d do in their first 100 days. Only one of the candidates mentioned climate change as a top priority. That same candidate was also the only candidate who said he’d get the ball rolling on immigration reform in the first days of his presidency.

At Sunday’s Democratic debate, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) made a point about the harrowing opioid painkiller and heroin epidemic that isn’t raised enough: “There is a responsibility on the part of the pharmaceutical industry and the drug companies who are producing all of these drugs and not looking at the consequence of it.”

The opioid epidemic began when doctors prescribed a tremendous amount of opioid painkillers to help treat pain — a serious problem, given that chronic pain alone afflicts about 100 million Americans. One reason doctors were so willing to prescribe these painkillers, despite the clear risks of addiction and overdose, is heavy campaigning from the pharmaceutical industry.

At Sunday’s Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton asked a powerful question about racial disparities in America’s prisons: “One out of three African-American men may well end up going to prison. That’s the statistic. I want people here to think what we would be doing if it was one out of three white men. And very often the black men are arrested, convicted, and incarcerated for offenses that do not lead to the same results for white men. So we have a very serious problem that we can no longer ignore.”

The statistic is outdated, based on a 2003 report on incarceration, as Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post explained. The actual rate of incarceration is likely much lower than Clinton suggested.

At each Democratic presidential debate, Bernie Sanders was forced to answer for one issue he’s not so liberal on: guns.

Now, Sanders isn’t — as some people have described him — a “gun nut,” but he does have a mixed voting record on gun policy. As a former representative and now senator of the very liberal Vermont, Sanders has swung to the left on many issues, particularly the economy and health care. But guns are one issue his rural state, with its relatively high levels of gun ownership, is moderate on — since so many residents use firearms for hunting and sport.

This debate — the fourth of just six overall that Democrats are planning — will once again feature all three of the remaining Democratic candidates: Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O’Malley.

If you think it’s odd for this debate to be scheduled on the Sunday night of a three-day weekend, you’re not alone. Amazingly enough, half of the Democratic debates were scheduled to take place on the weekend — when many fewer people are expected to watch.

Like the last debate, this one will feature all three of the remaining Democratic candidates: Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O’Malley. It will be the fourth of just six debates that Democrats are planning. And, like the last two debates, it will take place on the weekend (a three-day weekend, in this case) — when fewer people are expected to watch.

Tempted as you might be to skip it, though, this will be the final Democratic debate before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries kick off the actual voting in early February. So tune in now, before it’s too late — especially because the Democratic race has just started to get interesting.