Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin

They had both ruled out entering the race over the winter. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, had conducted polling and focus groups and concluded it was not worth challenging a rival as strong as Biden. Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts, had confronted a family illness — his wife was diagnosed with cancer — and new scrutiny of his business record. He, too, opted out of the race.

But over time, they both developed second thoughts. Critical of Biden’s campaign, Bloomberg asked his aides to bring updated polling information gauging his prospects. Patrick began expressing unease to friends about whether the existing crop of candidates could unite the Democratic Party after the primary, or heal a divided country after the general election.

And both men still harbored an undimmed ambition to be president.

Now, Bloomberg and Patrick are at the precipice of joining the tumultuous 2020 race, encouraged by a combination of anecdotal angst among voters and party officials, and in Bloomberg’s case by a trove of public-opinion research.

Both men have concluded in recent weeks that Biden, the former vice president, is not the imposing adversary they had expected him to be, interviews with aides and allies show. Both also believe there is room in the race for a more dynamic candidate who is closer to the political middle than Biden’s two most prominent challengers, Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Should Bloomberg and Patrick enter the race, they would test that proposition in different ways: Bloomberg with a powerfully funded campaign that would take on President Donald Trump directly and contest the biggest states on the primary map from the start; Patrick with an insurgent candidacy that would begin in next-door New Hampshire and run through South Carolina, where black voters are likely to decide the primary.

Advisers to Bloomberg conducted extensive polling at the national level and in the Super Tuesday states, including in the weeks leading up to his filing paperwork in Alabama last Friday. That data showed a number of shifts in the Democratic electorate since Bloomberg’s decision to forgo a run in March, people familiar with the polling said: It found Biden less formidable, and voters even more intently focused on questions of electability. A series of tests, gauging the impact of Bloomberg’s positive message and potential messages attacking him, yielded encouraging results.

Gary Hart, the former Colorado senator who made a last-minute bid for the Democratic nomination in 1988 after dropping out of the race, said the burden on both Bloomberg and Patrick would be to articulate a clear rationale for entering a race already overflowing with options.

“They ought to be out in public stating that rationale, and it has to be new and different,” Hart said. “It can’t be Beto O’Rourke warmed over, it can’t be Cory Booker. I mean, so many different approaches have been tried and haven’t quite gelled.”

While neither man has made a final decision, Bloomberg has already formally designated himself a candidate in two states with early filing deadlines. Patrick is expected to announce his intentions this week, and canceled a planned appearance Wednesday at a Colorado conference of socially conscious investors.

Both men conveyed their intentions to Biden last week, Patrick in a phone call to the former vice president, and Bloomberg through an emissary, his longtime aide Kevin Sheekey.

If there is room for someone to break through late, Hart predicted it would be because they convince Democratic voters they are uniquely capable of winning the general election.

“The overwhelming fact of this race is defeating the incumbent,” Hart said. “It’s, ‘Who can beat Trump?’”

Bloomberg and Patrick both see themselves as the answer to that question, and they may not be alone: Hillary Clinton told the BBC on Thursday that she would “never say never” to running and said she was under “enormous pressure from many, many people to think about it.”

But unlike Patrick and Bloomberg, Clinton is not taking active steps toward joining the race.

Polls show the Democratic race is fluid, but that voters are largely satisfied with their existing options. While there is no overpowering figure in the race, Biden still leads most national polls and voters in the early states have largely gravitated toward a short list of options including him, Warren of Massachusetts, Sanders of Vermont, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana.

Bloomberg, who has flirted with a White House run several times previously, usually as an independent, has already faced withering criticism from several candidates, including Warren and Sanders, who have derided him as yet another billionaire seeking to buy control of the political system. Patrick faces questions about whether he will be able to hire a strong campaign staff and raise the money needed to compete in a national election on such short notice.

The two have mapped out divergent strategies: Patrick is eyeing a relatively conventional path to the nomination through the early states, while Bloomberg envisions spending a huge sum of money contesting Super Tuesday in early March, leaving the current Democratic field to battle over early states like Iowa and New Hampshire.

Even Bloomberg’s close advisers acknowledge his intended strategy would be an experiment, with the potential to fizzle if another candidate comes out of the early states with runaway momentum.

Bloomberg took an incremental step toward mounting that kind of candidacy on Tuesday, flying to Little Rock, Arkansas, to file paperwork to contest the state’s March primary. He is contemplating a trip to North Carolina, another Super Tuesday state far from the Iowa-New Hampshire circuit, as soon as this week, people close to him said.

Michael John Gray, chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party, met briefly with Bloomberg in Little Rock and said he had the potential to generate “a lot of buzz” there because few presidential candidates have visited so far.

“You do that by showing up in places where people don’t show up,” Gray said.

In contrast, Patrick and his allies have been reaching out to Democrats in the early primary and caucus states. The former governor initially rejected making a White House bid last year, in part because his wife had received a cancer diagnosis, but she has been given a clean bill of health, according to Massachusetts Democrats.

Patrick, who has not responded to requests for comment, spent part of Tuesday on the phone with Democratic officials, explaining his thinking about how he could make a last-minute entry into the primary.

Yet longtime Democrats said that if Patrick has any hopes of getting the nomination, he’ll need to act quickly and have more than a little luck come his way.

“He’s got to move fast,” said former South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges, noting that Patrick is little known in a state he’d likely count on because of its large population of black primary voters. Indeed, Patrick has already missed the filing deadlines in Alabama and Arkansas.

But Hodges had little difficulty imagining a favorable scenario for Patrick.

“If Biden doesn’t do well in the first two states, that would clearly create an opportunity for Patrick in South Carolina,” he said, referring to Iowa and New Hampshire.

Bloomberg’s emerging campaign is still finalizing elements of its strategy, but in addition to skipping the earliest-voting states it is likely to involve running television and digital ads on a national scale and targeting Trump as an adversary well before the general election.

His polling has found Democratic voters receptive to a message about his biography in business and government. Central to Bloomberg’s thinking is that he will be able to project his positive message on a vastly greater scale than his opponents’ attacks.

Howard Wolfson, an adviser to Bloomberg, said the former mayor would present an appealing figure to primary voters who are “increasingly looking for the strongest general election candidate to challenge the president.”

“Electability is key — and we believe that given his unique set of accomplishments in business, government and philanthropy, Mike is that candidate,” Wolfson said. “We have a great story to tell and the means to make sure everyone hears it.”

Still, even in his own polling Bloomberg is an underdog: One close ally said his positive message could lift him into third place under the right conditions, according to Bloomberg’s polling, but that getting into first place would be difficult. For that, Bloomberg would need to embrace some political gambles, like his Super Tuesday gambit.

For both Bloomberg and Patrick, there’s still the matter of hastily constructing a full-scale operation just a couple of months before voting begins. That task may be easier for Bloomberg, who already employs a set of full-time advisers and has the wealth to immediately find more.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg filed his paperwork then sat down for lunch with Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. at one of the city’s best-known barbecue joints. For some, the setting evoked the challenges faced by another Democrat who entered the primary late and based his campaign in the Arkansas capital — retired general Wesley Clark, who mounted a short-lived candidacy for the 2004 nomination.

“Having worked for Wes Clark I can tell you, it’s really hard to build this boat on the water,” said Jamal Simmons, a Democratic strategist.

This article originally appeared in

Why Bloomberg and Deval Patrick Changed Their Minds About 2020

It was late summer and the Democratic presidential primary was in flux. Joe Biden was sinking in national polls and Sen. Elizabeth Warren was on the rise. And two men, Michael R. Bloomberg and Deval Patrick, were again thinking quietly about running for president.

Biden, the leading candidate in the Democratic presidential race, entered the debate under pressure to articulate a more forceful rationale for his campaign and turn back attacks from his fellow Democrats, after failing to do so in his clash with Harris in the first debate in June.

In a handful of moments, Biden did just that, delivering pointed critiques of Harris and other challengers. But it was unclear by the end of the forum whether he was any closer to allaying liberals’ reservations about his candidacy, or inspiring a Democratic Party that is eager to defeat President Donald Trump but has shifted to the left in the years since Biden served as vice president under Barack Obama. Although he may have won sympathy from Democratic voters for absorbing so many blows, he did not deliver a commanding performance to reclaim firm control of the race.

And in a sign of the party’s drift, Biden was forced to not only defend his own record but also answer sharp questions about policies of Obama on issues such as immigration and trade.

Where ideology framed the conversation, the divisions resembled a mirror image of the dynamics that governed the first Democratic debate this week. On Tuesday, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, the populist liberals who have largely defined their party’s issue agenda, locked arms to deflect attacks from a gang of moderate underdogs, including Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana and former Rep. John Delaney of Maryland. In the second debate, it was Biden and his relatively centrist values under collective assault.

Taken together, though, the back-to-back debates only threw the party’s factions into stark relief while delivering little clarity about the direction of a race that features well-funded candidates from its populist and moderate wings as well as a handful of contenders attempting to straddle the divide.

In the opening moments of the debate, Biden took particular aim at Harris, accusing her of peddling “double talk” on health care and insisting that a range of liberal plans to displace the private health insurance system were too disruptive and too costly. He chided Harris for her proposal of a decadelong transition to a version of single-payer health care, urging voters to be skeptical “anytime somebody tells you you’re going to get something good in 10 years.”

“My response is: Obamacare is working,” said Biden, who has proposed the creation of an optional, government-backed health insurance plan.

Harris, on defense for the first time against Biden, insisted that her plan would do far more than his to ensure universal coverage: “Your plan, by contrast,” she retorted, “leaves out almost 10 million Americans.”

Yet by the end of the debate, Biden was besieged, attacked from all sides on a plethora of subjects including health care, immigration, trade, criminal justice, climate change, women’s rights and the war in Iraq. As he did at times in the first debate, he cut some of his answers short and stumbled over lines. And he flashed his impatience with rivals, like Booker and Harris, who he said were harrying him over events that occurred “a long, long time ago.”

Booker, among others, insisted that Biden’s half-century record was entirely fair game. Pointing to Biden’s history of shepherding harsh criminal-justice bills into law, Booker questioned whether the former vice president could lead the country forward on that and other contentious issues.

“This is one of those instances where the house was set on fire and you claimed responsibility for those laws,” Booker said. “And you can’t just now come out with a plan to put out that fire.”

While Biden found himself facing the most insistent attacks, Harris also came under fire and did not appear as steady as she did in the first debate, which breathed new life into her campaign. On Wednesday, it was Booker who often appeared to be the more formidable alternative to the front-runner.

If Tuesday’s debate defined the philosophical gulf within the Democratic Party, the Wednesday debate played out as a more complicated and personality-driven affair, featuring layers of political feuds and interlocking arguments over policy and electoral strategy.

At several early moments in the debate, some candidates onstage exhorted Democrats to keep their attention on Trump and the Republican Party, and especially on their hard-line immigration policies and efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. As Biden and Harris battled over the idea of “Medicare for All,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand trained her fire on Republicans whose “whole goal is to take away your health care.”

In the midst of another Biden-Harris duel, midway through the debate, Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado erupted in impatience with the two of them for once again “debating what people did 50 years ago with busing” — the subject of Harris’ searing confrontation with the former vice president in June.

“Our schools are as segregated today as they were 50 years ago,” Bennet said. “We need a conversation about what’s happening now.”

And in an extended, contentious discussion of immigration, several Democrats attempted to shift attention away from their own disagreements and toward the policies of the Trump administration.

“We can no longer allow a white nationalist to be in the White House,” said Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, adding, “We have to make America what it’s always been: a place of refuge.”

But Inslee, too, took aim at Biden, describing himself as the only person on stage to have voted against the Iraq War — Biden took the opposite position — and branding Biden’s climate platform as an insufficient answer to a planetary crisis.

The most protracted clashes of the evening concerned criminal justice and immigration, and put several candidates besides Biden on the defensive. Attempting to preempt liberal attacks on his immigration record, Biden went on offense against Castro — the most vocal advocate for liberal immigration policy in the Democratic field — noting that he could not recall the former San Antonio mayor criticizing the Obama administration’s border policies when he was serving in the Cabinet.

“If you cross the border illegally, you should be able to be sent back; it’s a crime,” said Biden, rejecting Castro’s plan to decriminalize illegal immigration.

Castro shot back that “it looks like one of us has learned the lessons of the past and one of us hasn’t,” and added that the only element missing in border policy is “politicians who have some guts.”

“I have guts enough to say his plan doesn’t make sense,” Biden retorted.

Still, the former vice president found himself fending off multiple attacks on the aggressive deportation policies of Obama, forcing him to choose between whether to defend a former president beloved by Democrats or align himself with the more liberal party of 2019. Pressed by Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City to say whether he had attempted to halt large-scale deportations when he was vice president, Biden evaded the question, saying he would not reveal his private conversations with Obama.

“You need to be able to answer the tough questions,” said de Blasio, in a jab that became something of a regular refrain throughout the evening.

But Biden’s position grew even more uncomfortable when Booker, standing just to his right, said: “You invoke President Obama more than anybody in this campaign. You can’t do it when it’s convenient and then dodge it when it’s not.”

Biden did come prepared for a clash over criminal justice and took aim at Booker’s tenure as mayor of Newark. “In 2007 you became mayor and you had a police department that was, you went out and hired Rudy Giuliani’s guy and engaged in stop and frisk,” he said.

Booker, however, had a counterattack planned. “You’re dipping into the Kool-Aid and you don’t even know the flavor,” he said, drawing laughter and applause.

Repeatedly highlighting the hard-line crime bill Biden wrote in the 1990s, Booker said: “There are people right now in prison for life for drug offenses because you stood up and used that tough on crime phony rhetoric that got a lot of people elected but destroyed communities like mine.”

Perhaps the only attack Biden deflected more or less easily was also among the most personal charges of the night, when Gillibrand cited an opinion article he wrote in 1981 criticizing a bill offering high-income families tax credits for day care. Gillibrand invoked a line from the piece to claim that he had argued that mothers working outside the house could lead to “deterioration of the family.”

But Gillibrand had signaled days earlier that she would raise the topic and Biden denied that was his view and quickly shifted the discussion to his own experience raising his two sons as “a single father” following his first wife’s death in a car accident. When she continued to demand an answer about his position, Biden smiled, recalling the praise Gillibrand had previously lavished on him.

“I don’t know what happened except you’re now running for president,” he said, to laughter from the crowd.

Biden also got a respite when Rep. Tulsi Gabbard took aim at Harris’ record as a prosecutor in California.

“She put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana,” Gabbard said of Harris. “She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so.”

Harris defended her record as state attorney general, arguing that her criminal justice overhaul became “a national model for the work that needs to be done.”

The friction over criminal justice, like other issues, seemed to make some candidates on stage uneasy. Andrew Yang, a former technology executive who has urged Democrats to treat the automation of working-class jobs as an urgent crisis, repeatedly nudged his fellow candidates away from their messiest confrontations.

“I speak for just about everyone watching when I say I would trust anyone on this stage much more than I would trust our current president on matters of criminal justice,” Yang said.

Far from resolving anything, the debate seemed to showcase just how messy and protracted the Democratic race could be. If Biden’s first debate held out the possibility of a rocket-like ascent by Harris, this one may have presaged a different trajectory for the race — one that has the former vice president persistently unable to quell resistance on the left, but with no singular rival emerging anytime soon as a focal point for that resistance.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/us/politics/democratic-presidential-debate-recap.html" id="1812146d-6208-3190-aa65-cf3ec92de87a">The New York Times</a>.

Biden Under Fire From All Sides as Rivals Attack His Record

DETROIT — Former Vice President Joe Biden delivered a steadfast defense of his moderate policies in the Democratic primary debate Wednesday, striking back at a familiar adversary, Sen. Kamala Harris, but facing intensifying attacks on his record from liberal rivals including Sen. Cory Booker and Julián Castro, the former housing secretary.

But it was unclear by the end of the forum whether Biden was any closer to allaying liberals’ reservations about his candidacy, or inspiring a Democratic Party that is eager to defeat President Donald Trump but has shifted to the left in the years since the former vice president served under Barack Obama. Though he may have won sympathy from Democratic voters for absorbing so many blows, he did not deliver a commanding performance to reclaim firm command of the race.

And in a sign of the party’s drift, Biden was repeatedly forced to defend not only his own record but also questioned sharply about policies of Obama on issues such as immigration and trade.

Booker, among others, insisted that Biden’s half-century record was entirely fair game. Pointing to Biden’s history of shepherding harsh criminal-justice laws into law, Booker questioned whether the former vice president could lead the country forward on that and other contentious issues.

While Biden found himself facing the most insistent attacks, Harris also came under fire and did not appear as steady as she did in the first debate, which breathed new life into her campaign.

But if Tuesday’s debate defined the philosophical gulf within the Democratic Party, the Wednesday debate played out as a more complicated and personality-driven affair, featuring layers of political feuds and interlocking arguments over policy and electoral strategy.

Biden did, though, come prepared for a clash over criminal justice and took aim at Booker’s tenure as mayor of Newark. “In 2007 you became mayor and you had a police department that was, you went out and hired Rudy Giuliani’s guy and engaged in stop and frisk,” he said.

But Gillibrand had signaled days earlier that she would raise the topic and Biden denied that was his view and quickly shifted the discussion to his own experience raising his two sons as “a single father” following his first wife’s death in a car accident.When she continued to demand an answer about his position, Biden smiled, recalling the praise Gillibrand had previously lavished on him.

Harris defended her record as state attorney general, arguing that her criminal justice overhaul became “a national model for the work that needs to be done.” And she appeared to take aim at Gabbard, who is barely registering in the polls and has left little mark in the House, saying that as a prosecutor she chose to do more than “just give fancy speeches.”

Far from resolving anything, the debate seemed to showcase just how messy and protracted the Democratic race could be. If Biden’s first debate held out the possibility of a rocket-like ascent by Harris, this one may have presaged a different trajectory for the race — one that has the former vice president persistently unable to quell resistance on the left, but with no singular rival emerging as a focal point for that resistance.

Biden-Harris Rivalry Flares Anew as Democrats Spar on Health Care, Criminal Justice

Standing side by side in Detroit, the two candidates whose clash over race and school integration defined the first round of debates in June engaged each other at once on the question of how to cover Americans’ medical costs. This time Biden took the offensive, noting that Harris had rolled out “several plans so far,” the most recent of which would take 10 years to kick in and cost trillions to disrupt the existing system of private insurance.

Voters, Biden said, should be skeptical “anytime somebody tells you you’re going to get something good in 10 years.”

Harris fired back quickly. “You’re just simply inaccurate in what you’re describing,” she said, countering that Biden’s proposal to create an elective government-backed health insurance option would leave many Americans uncovered.

“Your plan, by contrast, leaves out almost 10 million Americans,” she said, adding, “The cost of doing nothing is far too expensive.”

But Biden persisted. Echoing some of the criticism that centrist Democrats leveled against Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in Tuesday night’s debate, the former vice president warned that Harris’ plan would be costly, disruptive and slow to take effect.

Defending his own proposal, Biden called it a prudent update to the system devised under the Obama administration.

“My response is: Obamacare is working,” he said.

It was the second night of lengthy and contentious exchanges among the candidates over the future of health care in the country. Like the 10 contenders who debated Tuesday, the candidates split over whether the country should retain some form of the Affordable Care Act or completely transform the system into some form of “Medicare for All.”

The exchanges over health care on both nights exposed a fundamental schism in the party, between more traditional reformers who are seeking to improve on the policies of the Obama administration and aggressive liberals who hope to overhaul the U.S. economy and government in a comprehensive way.

At several early moments in the debate, other candidates onstage exhorted Democrats to keep their attention on President Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s efforts to strike down the Affordable Care Act. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York told viewers that for Republicans, “their whole goal is to take away your health care,” while Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey lamented that “the person enjoying this debate most right now is Donald Trump.” He implored Democratic rivals to stop “saying one is unrealistic and the other doesn’t care enough.”

Yet there were signs early on that even the lower-profile candidates onstage were looking to shake up the race through confrontation. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City, for instance, used his opening statement to blast both the leading candidates onstage, Biden and Harris, depicting them as guardians of the status quo and vowing that he would “tax the hell out of the wealthy.”

“Joe Biden told wealthy donors that nothing, fundamentally, would change if he were president; Kamala Harris said she’s not trying to restructure society,” de Blasio said, countering: “Well, I am.”

But even de Blasio, who is currently an asterisk in the polls, could not escape controversy: His opening remarks were interrupted by protesters bellowing, “Fire Pantaleo” — a reference to the New York City police officer whose rough physical treatment of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, led to his death in 2014, and whose status on the force remains unresolved.

If Tuesday’s debate defined the ideological gulf within the Democratic Party, in unmistakable and often contentious terms, the Wednesday debate appeared likely to play out as a more complicated and personality-driven affair, featuring layers of political feuds and interlocking arguments over policy and electoral strategy.

The first debate put two liberals, Warren of Massachusetts and Sanders, center stage, where they were forced to defend their ideas from a centrist onslaught. The second debate was expected to be shaped, more than anything else, by the comparatively moderate front-runner, Biden.

Conflict between Biden and Harris had the potential to define the evening, after their first clash in the June debate in Miami jolted both their candidacies and threatened to harm Biden’s. In that event, Harris delivered a searing rebuke of Biden’s political and legislative judgment, assailing the former vice president for having worked with segregationist senators in the 1970s to oppose school busing — a policy, she noted, that aided her own path through the public schools in Berkeley, California.

Biden was left grasping for a rebuttal and afterward indicated that he was personally stung by the attack; the contrast between Harris assured critique, and his unsteady response dented Biden’s support in polls, where Democratic voters have tended to back him chiefly because they see him as a strong competitor for the general election against Trump.

Yet Biden appears to have recovered much of his strength in polls over the intervening month. And while Harris’ support has risen, it is not clear whether she has managed to convert her debate-stage electricity into sustained gains: In many polls, she still trails not only Biden but also Warren and Sanders.

Biden signaled his early broadsides against Harris in the days before the debate, indicating that he was prepared to go after Harris aggressively on matters of policy and most of all on the proposal for a modified Medicare for All health care system that she unveiled Monday. Aimed in part at preempting criticism from Biden, her plan includes a longer phase-in period and a larger role for private insurance than the single-payer plan Sanders has championed. But it drew instant criticism from the left and the relative center for watering down Sanders’ ideas for a comprehensive overhaul without achieving the pragmatism of Biden’s vision.

Harris, meanwhile, declined to telegraph her own offensive strategy in advance of the debate — the same discreet approach she took ahead of the Miami event that galvanized her campaign.

Biden’s paramount task in the debate may have been to allay Democrats’ angst about his strength as a general election candidate. Polls show most voters consistently name him as the Democrat best equipped to defeat Trump, but his unsteady first debate plainly raised doubts. And Biden has not put to rest serious concerns across the party about his ability to inspire much of the Democratic base, especially younger and more liberal voters — people who may be more drawn to Harris, or to Warren or Sanders.

If the challengers onstage Wednesday, like Harris, are to threaten Biden’s overall advantage in the race, they will likely have to explain to voters why they are better prepared than he is to take on Trump in states like Michigan.

But Biden and Harris were not alone onstage Wednesday, and the diverse array of competitors joining them was expected to present challenges for both, particularly for the former vice president. Perhaps most vexing was the presence of three liberals who are seeking a breakthrough moment and who have not hesitated to draw sharp distinctions in the campaign: Booker, and Gillibrand and Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor and federal housing secretary.

In his first debate in June, Castro startled the Democratic field with his uncharacteristically combative approach, harrying former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas with persistent attacks on his immigration proposals. There was ample material in the records of both Biden and Harris to invite the same approach.

And Gillibrand — who like Castro is struggling to qualify for the third round of debates in September — appeared to have provided a preview of an intended attack on Biden last weekend, alluding on the campaign trail to a candidate who had questioned the value of women working outside the home. Advisers to the former vice president took it as a reference to his opposition in the early 1980s to an expanded child tax credit; even before the debate got underway they circulated a memo to supporters predicting she and others onstage would attempt “to knock out Biden.”

But the most unpredictable figure may be Booker. Though not a brawler by nature, he has been increasingly eager to highlight differences between his record and Biden’s on criminal justice, recently calling him “the proud architect of a failed system.” Booker has been building a substantial field operation on the ground in the early primary states and methodically collecting endorsements from local power brokers there, but he has so far lacked a moment of ignition on the national level.

By his presence, though, Booker had the potential to transform the dynamics that ruled the first Biden-Harris debate in June: When Harris confronted Biden the first time, she did so as the only candidate of color onstage. Now, Biden will be sandwiched between Harris and Booker, two candidates who have been sharply critical of his record and who represent a glaring contrast in age and identity. Both African American senators believe they must crack Biden’s strong support with black voters in order to win the nomination.

Two potential wild cards were Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, an anti-war candidate who has repeatedly defended Biden from Harris’ criticism, and Andrew Yang, a former tech executive running as a political outsider. Yang prepared for the debate in part by making light of his competitors’ public chest-thumping and vowing theatrically on Twitter to take down a candidate of similar obscurity.

“I would like to signal to the press that I will be attacking Michael Bennet at next week’s debate,” he wrote. “Sorry @MichaelBennet but you know what you did.”

Biden-Harris Rivalry Flares From the Start in Testy Exchange Over Health Care

DETROIT — Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris of California renewed their political rivalry almost instantly on the debate stage Wednesday night, as Biden accused Harris of peddling “double talk” on the central campaign issue of health care and Harris defended her newly unveiled plan as a pragmatic version of single-payer care.

On an evening that could have produced explosions in their own political rivalry, Sanders and Warren instead formed something of an ideological tag team to defend their shared agenda, above all on health care. Though each is seen as the other’s chief obstacle in the Democratic race, Sanders and Warren did not at any point clash directly.

Instead, they battled an array of comparatively obscure candidates who used the debate as an opportunity — and for some of them, likely a last chance — to express alarm about their party’s embrace of immense liberal policy goals, like the creation of a “Medicare for All”-style health care system, Sanders’ No. 1 issue, and a broad liberalization of the immigration system.

There was former Rep. John Delaney of Maryland, who accused Sanders and Warren of making “fairy tale” promises; Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, who lamented liberal “wish-list economics”; and former Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, imploring the left not to overreach and “FedEx the election to Donald Trump.”

Arguing in somewhat subtler terms was Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who declined multiple chances to lash her liberal rivals by name but questioned the viability of their progressive stances on health care and education.

“I have bold ideas,” Klobuchar said, “but they are grounded in reality.”

With Sanders and Warren refusing to yield an inch, the debate laid bare the stark choice before Democratic primary voters: whether to embrace an agenda of transformational economic change in an effort to motivate young and nonwhite voters, or to proceed more cautiously against a vulnerable president by embracing more incremental appeals that could win over moderates.

Both Warren and Sanders insisted that their more daring approach would lead Democrats to victory, and depicted their more moderate critics as bereft of ambition and political courage.

Democrats, Sanders said, had to wage a campaign “of energy and excitement, and of vision,” or risk losing to Trump a second time.

“We need to bring millions of young people into the political process in a way that we have never seen by among other things, making public colleges and universities tuition free and canceling student debt,” Sanders said.

Warren, likewise, warned the party not to nominate “a candidate we don’t believe in, just because we’re too scared to do anything else,” and in an exchange with Delaney expressed exasperation with what she portrayed as his electoral doomsaying.

“I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for the president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for,” Warren said to applause. “I don’t get it.”

The most protracted exchanges of the night, and by far the most substantive ones, concerned Sanders’ signature proposal to replace private health insurance with a single payer system of the kind employed in Canada and a number of European countries. Delaney and the other moderates attacked the proposal from the first minutes of the debate, calling it a politically toxic idea that would void the health care plans of union members and of employees of private businesses.

“We don’t have to go around and be the party of subtraction, and telling half the country, who has private health insurance, that their health insurance is illegal,” Delaney said.

Sanders defended his plan ferociously, with periodic help from Warren. He cast Delaney and other Democratic doubters as champions of an indefensible system, and argued that opponents of single payer tended to brand the system with traits — like costliness and unpredictability — that the American health care system already possesses.

“The answer,” Sanders said, “is to get rid of the profiteering of the drug companies and the insurance companies, move to ‘Medicare for All.’ ”

Responding to pointed criticism from Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio about the effect of the single-payer proposal on union members, Sanders grew testy for a moment: “I wrote the damn bill,” he said.

After being overshadowed in the first debates last month, Sanders found himself in the spotlight for much of the evening.

Both he and Warren depicted skeptics of single-payer health care as being in league with the GOP: Sanders accused a CNN moderator, Jake Tapper, of using a “Republican talking point” when raising questions about his plan, and noted that “the health care industry will be advertising tonight on this program.” In a similar complaint, Warren urged Democrats to “stop using Republican talking points” on the issue.

There were other signs of impatience on the debate stage. Moderates offered cautionary warnings about how Republicans might brand Democrats in the general election as outside the political mainstream. But Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, drew applause with the prediction that Republicans would brand the eventual Democratic nominee as a wild-eyed extremist no matter what policies that person endorsed.

“Let’s just stand up for the right policy,” said Buttigieg, who has endorsed a liberal health care policy more modest than “Medicare for All.”

The contenders roundly condemned Trump’s recent rash of attacks on a group of minority lawmakers, but it was not just his most recent provocations that thrust him into the center of the debate: He also served as a reminder of the stakes in this election and shaped the argument over what course Democrats should take in 2020.

Several of the long shot candidates asked voters to see their arguments against raw populism in the context of electoral strategy. Bullock mentioned repeatedly that he carried a state, as governor, that voted for Trump by a huge margin. And Klobuchar reminded viewers of her electoral success in the crucial Midwest: “I can win in states like Wisconsin and Michigan and Iowa,” she stressed in her closing statement.

Others asked Democrats to trust them to deal Republicans a crushing Electoral College defeat by other means.

“There’s a new battleground state: Texas,” said former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas, reminding Democrats of the go-everywhere, meet-everyone approach that defined his near-miss Senate campaign last year.

He returned to the enticing prospect in his closing statement: “Those 38 Electoral College votes in Texas are now in play,” O’Rourke said, “and I can win them.”

Even Sanders, who sometimes expresses disdain for political process, emphasized that he is currently leading Trump in many public polls, including in the battleground states like Michigan.

The harshest counterattack on the moderates, however, may not have come from Sanders or Warren.

“I wonder why you’re Democrats,” said Marianne Williamson, the author and spiritualist. “You think there’s something wrong about using the instruments of government to help people.”

If the debate Tuesday was a relatively high-minded affair, hinging on deep disagreements over policy and electoral strategy, a far more personally charged clash may be looming Wednesday. Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris of California will meet for the first time since their crackling confrontation in the initial round of debates in Miami last month. Unlike Sanders of Vermont and Warren of Massachusetts, they are unlikely to keep their personal rivalry muted.

But on Tuesday the ideological rifts were persistent. The same center-versus-left divide evident on health care was also on display as the candidates clashed over trade and immigration, and whether some of the proposals offered by the liberal candidates would represent a boon to Trump.

“We got a hundred thousand people showing up at the border right now,” said Bullock. “If we decriminalize entry, if we give health care to everyone, we’ll have multiples of that.”

Turning to Warren, he accused her of “playing into Donald Trump’s hands” for wanting to make illegal immigration a civil penalty and seeking to provide federal benefits to unauthorized migrants.

Warren fired back that “seeking refuge, seeking asylum” is “not a crime.”

A similar crossfire unfolded on trade, as Hickenlooper and Delaney accused Warren of pursuing a trade agenda closer to Trump’s than to that of the last Democratic president, Barack Obama. Warren’s agenda, Delaney said, “would isolate America’s economy around the world.”

“What the congressman is describing as extreme is having deals that are negotiated by American workers for American workers,” Warren retorted. “American workers want those jobs. And we can build the trade deals that do it.”

The evening seemed to expose the rifts in the party that might ultimately define the Democratic debate once the party’s primary field narrows, and Biden comes face to face in future debates with Sanders and Warren. Most of the men criticizing the two populists Tuesday are at risk of failing to qualify for future debates, leaving them to act as a kind of preliminary stand-in crew for the centrist side of the ideological battle that may ultimately settle the primary.

Ryan, another such marginal candidate, at one point delivered something of a cri de coeur for the party’s dwindling constituency of blue-collar men. Democrats risked eliminating that slim part of their base, Ryan said, if they did not “talk about the working class issues.”

“We’ve talked about taking private health insurance away from union members in the industrial Midwest, we’ve talked about decriminalizing the border, and we’ve talked about giving free health care to undocumented workers when so many Americans are struggling to pay for their health care,” Ryan said. “I quite frankly don’t think that that is an agenda that we can move forward on and win.”

Yet Sanders and Warren, who had the most speaking time of the candidates, did not back off. Indeed, perhaps the most notable conflict in Detroit was the one that did not happen, as the two populists locked arms rather than trading blows.

Warren ignored a question about her boasts that she’s a proud capitalist — a barely-veiled contrast with Sanders, a democratic socialist — and used the prompt instead to talk of her battles with Wall Street. Sanders even praised his colleague at one point, echoing her tough talk on corporate America.

“Elizabeth,” he said, “is absolutely right.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/us/politics/democratic-presidential-debate-recap.html" id="6442cf52-37e2-32e4-a5bc-3d845b2b7e9f">The New York Times</a>.

Leading Liberals Fend Off Attacks on Big Promises

DETROIT — The leading liberals in the Democratic presidential primary, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, strenuously fought back Tuesday against accusations of making fanciful promises and imperiling the party’s prospects for defeating President Donald Trump, as a group of moderate underdogs sought to slow their momentum in the second round of debates.

The most protracted exchanges of the night concerned Sanders’ signature proposal to replace private health insurance with a single payer system.

DETROIT — The leading liberals in the Democratic presidential primary, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, strenuously fought back on Tuesday against accusations of making fanciful promises and imperiling the party’s prospects for defeating President Donald Trump, as a group of moderate underdogs sought to slow their momentum in the second round of debates.

From the first moments on the debate stage, there were charges of “wish-list economics” and critiques of “massive government expansions,” as the candidates engaged in an unusually substantive discussion of health care policy. Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, appearing in a debate for the first time, took implicit aim at Sanders by insisting that distressed farmers and teachers could not “wait for a revolution.” And former Rep. John Delaney of Maryland conjured electoral catastrophes of the past to argue that the activist left could not be trusted to lead the party.

The course recommended by Sanders and Warren, Delaney said, was defined by “bad policies like ‘Medicare for All,’ free everything and impossible promises that will turn off independent voters and get Trump reelected.”

Sanders and Warren responded with defiance, rejecting the moderate candidates as offering policies that were plainly unequal to the political moment. Without taking aim at her more centrist rivals by name, Warren used her opening statement to dismiss their ethos of incremental change.

“We’re not going to solve the urgent problems that we face with small ideas and spinelessness,” Warren said.

Sanders and Warren have largely defined the party’s conversation about policy up to this point, and there were signs of impatience on the debate stage with the admonitions of moderates about how Republicans might brand Democrats in the general election as outside the political mainstream.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, drew applause with the prediction that Republicans would brand the eventual Democratic nominee as a wild-eyed extremist no matter what policies that person endorsed.

“Let’s just stand up for the right policy,” said Buttigieg, who has endorsed a liberal health care policy more modest than the one favored by Warren and Sanders.

DETROIT — The leading liberal populists in the Democratic presidential primary, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, strenuously fought back against accusations of impracticality and warnings of electoral ruin Tuesday night, as a group of moderate underdogs sought to dent their momentum in the second round of presidential primary debates.

Leading Liberals Fend Off Attacks On Big Proposals

Sanders, who has largely staked his candidacy on his support for single-payer health care, defended the policy ferociously, at one point accusing a CNN moderator, Jake Tapper, of using a “Republican talking point” when raising questions about his plan and then noted that “the health care industry will be advertising tonight on this program.” Prompted to address Delaney’s criticism of Medicare for All, Sanders fired back laconically: “You’re wrong.”

Assailing the instability of the current health care system, Sanders argued, “The answer is to get rid of the profiteering of the drug companies and the insurance companies.”

The same center-versus-left divide evident on health care was also on display as the candidates clashed over immigration and whether some of the proposals offered by the liberal candidates would represent a boon to President Donald Trump’s reelection.

Turning to Warren, he accused her of “playing into Donald Trump’s hands” for wanting to make illegal migration a civil penalty and seeking to provide federal benefits to undocumented migrants.

Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio also criticized his progressive rivals for what he described as overly permissive immigration proposals. “If you want to come into the country you should at least ring the doorbell,” said Ryan.

The Tuesday debate did not feature any of the candidates of color — they will all be onstage Wednesday — but it marked the first opportunity for half the field to speak about President Donald Trump’s recent rash of derogatory attacks against a group of minority lawmakers, an offensive that has appalled Democrats and much of the country. Several of the candidates harshly criticized the president in their one-minute opening statements, with Warren saying that any one of the Democratic contenders on the stage Tuesday or Wednesday would be a vast improvement over Trump.

Within the primary, the Detroit forum represented strikingly different opportunities for the two tiers of candidates: The three leading figures Tuesday — Warren, Sanders and Buttigieg — had a chance to maneuver carefully, while others were facing pressure to pursue more impatient risk-taking that might elevate their candidacies.

Seven of the debaters, five of them relatively moderate white men, have been struggling to attract interest in the race, and Tuesday’s forum may be their last chance to break through until the third debate in September, when the requirements for participation will be far higher.

For several Democrats, including former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas, Bullock and former Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, the debate had the potential to become a decisive moment. All three men have fielded entreaties from Democratic leaders to leave the presidential race and run instead for the Senate in 2020, and in Hickenlooper’s case some of his closest associates have urged him to do just that.

Under pressure to grab media attention, Hickenlooper sought to pick a fight with one of his far better-known rivals on the eve of the debate: Warren, he warned on Twitter, had “big ideas that have an even bigger cost.”

“We proved in Colorado that you don’t need big, expensive government programs to achieve progressive goals,” he tweeted.

One of the avenues the more centrist candidates could have for highlighting their differences appeared to have been preemptively blocked by the debate organizers, though: CNN said it would not ask yes-or-no questions or ask for a show of hands, the sort of queries that in the first debate illustrated the leftward shift of the party.

The most important political rivalry in the debate — between Warren and Sanders — was not guaranteed to produce a dramatic clash. In general, the two have been more inclined to defend their shared ideas against centrists like Hickenlooper than to attack each other over their real but comparatively modest policy differences.

Though the two liberal populists are competing for some of the same primary voters, they both indicated in the run-up to the debate that they were not eager for direct combat. In addition to sharing a personal friendship, Warren and Sanders could also face significant backlash from each other’s supporters from an aggressive confrontation.

Further, Sanders and his aides are more eager to confront former Vice President Joe Biden, who they view as the most formidable moderate in the race and who also is currently winning support from many of the working-class voters they covet.

For her part, Warren has sought to both flatter Sanders and protect her left flank by offering a full-throated embrace of Sanders’ Medicare for All legislation. “I’m with Bernie,” she has repeatedly said. Of the leading candidates, Warren is the only one besides Sanders to lend her full support to the plan.

Still, there are differences between the two in substance, attitude and political strategy. Warren has risen rapidly in the polls by both pulling away support from Sanders among younger and more liberal voters, and winning over many women — especially educated white women — who tended to support Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primaries. She has generated a wider array of policy proposals than Sanders, usually taking greater pains to explain how they would be paid for and at times limiting the generosity of the public benefits she has proposed, as in the case of student loan forgiveness.

Sanders has seen his support erode since the 2016 election but remains highly popular among very liberal Democrats and maintains a following among working-class whites that Warren has not yet matched. He has staked his campaign, above all, on his support for single-payer health care, and he has taken a more combative approach than Warren to candidates whom he sees as overly accommodating of the wealthy’s interests — Biden chief among them.

Signaling that Warren was not his focus, Sanders spent the weekend before the debate targeting Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris of California for health care policies he denounced as inadequate and deferential to corporate power. But Biden and Harris will not appear on the debate stage until Wednesday, when the seething rivalry between them that began in the first round of debates may again be on vivid display.

Buttigieg, a distant third in prominence among the debaters, has needed a jolt of energy for his campaign: While he has raised an enormous sum of money, more than any other candidate in the last fundraising quarter, his polling numbers have steadily slipped into the mid-single digits over the last month. A liberal reformer rather than an economic populist, Buttigieg has ample areas of disagreement with Warren and Sanders on issues such as health care and higher education.

Similarly situated in the debate, if not in the polls, was Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, an avowed moderate who has been touting her appeal across the Upper Midwest states that are likely to decide the general election. Klobuchar has profound disagreements on policy with the leading candidates in the Tuesday debate, calling for measured improvements to the health care and education systems rather than sweeping legislation and rebuffing a number of liberal litmus tests on subjects like immigration.

In theory, a debate stage in swing-state Michigan would be an ideal setting for laying out those differences. Up to this point, however, Klobuchar has stopped well short of calling out Sanders or Warren by name about their differences. In their first debate encounter last month, Klobuchar passed up several opportunities to draw clear distinctions, and she has similarly declined to do so in appearances since the Miami forum.

From the first moments onstage, there were charges of “wish-list economics” and critiques of “massive government expansions.” Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, appearing in a debate for the first time, took implicit aim at Sanders by insisting that distressed farmers and teachers could not “wait for a revolution.” And former Rep. John Delaney of Maryland conjured electoral catastrophes of the past to argue that the activist left could not be trusted to lead the party.

Within the primary, the Detroit forum represented strikingly different opportunities for the two tiers of candidates: The three leading figures Tuesday — Warren of Massachusetts, Sanders of Vermont and Buttigieg — had a chance to maneuver carefully, while others were facing pressure to pursue more impatient risk-taking that might elevate their candidacies.

DETROIT — The leading liberal populists in the Democratic presidential primary, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, strenuously fought off accusations of impracticality and warnings of electoral ruin Tuesday night, as a group of moderate underdogs sought to dent their momentum in the second round of presidential primary debates.

Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin

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