CNN Democratic debate in Flint: news and updates

There have been seven Democratic presidential debates so far, and none of them have featured any questions about abortion.

The candidates have mentioned reproductive rights on their own a few times, but not because a moderator raised the issue.

Bernie Sanders won the Maine caucus by a big margin on Sunday night, giving him three victories out of the four contests held this weekend.

That seems impressive, but the number of delegates awarded make it sound a little less so. Though Sanders also took Nebraska and Kansas on Saturday, he and Hillary Clinton are likely to get roughly the same number of delegates from the four contests because of her overwhelming win in Louisiana.

Sunday’s Democratic debate was notable not for who was onstage, but for who was in the audience. The debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders took place in Flint, Michigan — a city whose water supply has been contaminated with shocking amounts of lead, where local officials dismissed and covered up the water problems, and where residents were lied to and ignored.

Tonight, residents of Flint told Clinton and Sanders about their struggles with the water crisis, as well as preexisting issues from underemployment to public education, and demanded to know what they would do. That isn’t something that typically happens on national television, and it was for that reason remarkable.

Responding to a question about God and religion at the CNN Democratic debate on Sunday, Hillary Clinton gave a thoughtful answer on how prayer factors into her daily life.

A woman named Denise, whose church services Clinton has apparently visited, asked Clinton to whom, and for whom, she prays.

Bernie Sanders made a joke about about Republicans at Sunday’s Democratic debate that the audience cheered, but maybe they shouldn’t have.

The zinger tied Sanders’s support for mental health funding to the Republican field: “We are, if [I’m] elected president, going to invest a lot of money into mental health,” Sanders said. “And when you watch these Republican debates, you know why we need to invest in mental health.”

Bernie Sanders would be the first Jewish president in American history, but he doesn’t talk about it much on the campaign trail.

On Sunday, Anderson Cooper asked him whether he was intentionally downplaying his heritage. Sanders gave a great response — one that this Jewish writer, in particular, found incredibly moving:

At CNN’s Democratic debate on Sunday, moderator Don Lemon asked Bernie Sanders what his racial blind spots are. But Sanders’s response was perhaps a bit more revealing than he intended.

In his response, Sanders suggested that white people “don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto and to be poor” — a response that also seemed to characterize all minority Americans as impoverished.

Just four words made up one of the most jarring moments of CNN’s Democratic debate on Sunday: “Excuse me, I’m talking.”

That’s what Bernie Sanders said to Hillary Clinton when she interrupted him during an exchange on trade.

The next Democratic presidential debate is tonight at 8 pm Eastern. It will take place in Flint, Michigan, and be aired on CNN. An online live stream will be available at CNN.com.

This will be the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders since Super Tuesday. And it comes with Clinton looking once again like the solid frontrunner in the race — she currently has a lead of about 200 pledged delegates over Sanders, according to Vox’s delegate tracker, and reportedly has an even greater lead in “superdelegates,” party insiders who can vote for whomever they want.