September 2019 Democratic presidential debate

Top-tier Democratic candidates finally got into it over trade at the Democratic debate.

The friction between the top progressive Democratic presidential candidates — Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren versus free-trade-friendly Vice President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — had been building for some time, and it finally came out in the open on Thursday night.

At the Democratic presidential debate on Thursday, the 2020 presidential candidates argued over the nitty-gritty details of policy proposals on everything from health care to gun policy to immigration and criminal justice reform.

But when it came to what to do about the war in Afghanistan, the candidates were devoid of ideas about what to do beyond “get out, and get out fast.”

Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke made his support for an assault weapons buyback very clear during Thursday night’s Democratic debate. “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” he said at the time.

It was one of the most memorable moments of the night, and it’s since spurred a tweet from a state lawmaker that O’Rourke called a “death threat.” Following the debate, Briscoe Cain, a Republican in the Texas Legislature, posted a response to O’Rourke’s gun comments, which Twitter has since taken down. “My AR is ready for you Robert Francis,” he wrote.

The 2020 Democratic candidates all hate President Donald Trump’s trade war with China. They also seem to have no real idea what they would do instead.

At least, they didn’t have any great answers onstage during Thursday’s 2020 debate in Houston. When it came to questions on US-China relations, trade negotiations, and tariffs, candidates were quick to condemn Trump’s strategy. But when it came to delivering their plans on how to handle China, the candidates sounded a bit like, well, Trump.

Repeated on-stage jabs at former Vice President Joe Biden from former US housing secretary Julián Castro at Thursday night’s Democratic debate, paired with a bizarre and vaguely offensive Biden monologue about record players in response to a question about on race, made the question of Biden’s mental fitness for office impossible to ignore.

It’s an awkward topic that can easily verge into outright ageism. But Biden sounds sloppier and less put together than the other two frontrunners from his age bracket, Sens. Bernie Sanders (78) and Elizabeth Warren (70). He’s always been gaffe-prone, to be sure, but something about it feels worse now to a lot of Democratic voters.

Four beneficiaries of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the program giving legal protections for young unauthorized immigrants, interrupted Joe Biden’s closing remarks during the Democratic debate Thursday night with chants of “We are DACA recipients! Our lives are at risk!”

Wearing T-shirts that read, “Defend DACA,” “Abolish ICE,” and “Citizenship for All,” the protesters from the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium, or NAKASEC, had been invited to the debate. They were hoping that the candidates would discuss solutions for DACA recipients, who may lose their legal status if the US Supreme Court decides the program is unlawful in a case before the justices this fall. The protesters jumped on stage and chanted for about a minute before ultimately being escorted away.

Thursday’s Democratic debate included an early discussion of racism that seemed poised to be substantive but didn’t fully pan out.

It began when ABC News correspondent Linsey Davis asked former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke how he would address racism and a racial divide that young black voters have said they are particularly concerned about this year.

Abortion rights are shaping up to be a key issue for Democratic voters going into 2020.

But you wouldn’t know it from the third Democratic debate on Thursday night.

Beto O’Rourke may not be one of the top-polling candidates in the 2020 presidential primary, but at the third Democratic debate on Thursday, he did have one of the best and most moving answers on what has become one of the central issues of his White House bid: gun control.

The former Texas Congress member and US Senate candidate has turned his focus to gun violence in recent weeks in the wake of a mass shooting at a Walmart in his hometown of El Paso, Texas, in August. At Thursday’s debate, multiple candidates commended his focus on the issue — and O’Rourke delivered one of his strongest responses of the evening on it as well when asked whether he would institute a national gun buyback program in America.

“You are a vegan since 2014, and that’s obviously a personal choice,” moderator Jorge Ramos said to Sen. Cory Booker during the Democratic debate. “Should people follow your diet?”

It was a question that seemed to come out of nowhere. Booker looked surprised by it, which makes sense — when’s the last time you remember veganism getting airtime in a presidential debate? But he quickly recovered and gave his answer: No.

In their first time onstage together, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren largely dominated speaking time during Thursday’s debate.

According to an analysis by The Washington Post, Biden spoke the most at the Democrats’ third showdown, coming in at 17.4 minutes, followed closely by Warren, who spoke for 16.5 minutes.

According to every poll I’ve read, if the Democratic presidential primary had been held on Monday, former Vice President Joe Biden would’ve won. And after watching Thursday night’s Democratic primary debate, it seems to me that the same thing would be true if the primary was held the next day.

Through hours of sometimes exciting and sometimes tedious arguing, no candidate laid a real hand on the frontrunner. And what’s particularly striking is that barely anybody tried.

Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang promised to spice up Thursday’s primary debate by doing “something no presidential candidate has ever done before in history” live on television.

He kept that promise by announcing in his opening statement that he would give away $1,000 a month — $120,000 a year — to 10 randomly selected families as part of a pilot program for his universal basic income proposal.

On Thursday night, the third Democratic debate will be the first to put all the major Democratic candidates on one stage together. But among the 10 candidates, only three have been consistently registering frontrunner status in the polls: Former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

And that’s been pretty consistent for several months now.

The deadline to meet the Democratic National Committee’s requirements for the third Democratic presidential debate came and went at the end of the day on Wednesday — and it turned out Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) was not among the 10 candidates who made the cut. But while there’s a very straightforward explanation for Gabbard’s exclusion, she’s instead suggesting she was the victim of some sort of DNC conspiracy.

In cable news interviews on Wednesday and Thursday, Gabbard claimed the DNC’s process for determining who made the debate stage lacked “transparency” — the implication being that she may have been singled out.