| I did wrap-ups here and here, but after two nights of Democratic presidential debates, I have some broader impressions about where this week fits into the 2020 campaign: - I saw a number of analysts flag the liberal positions that some candidates took as general-election vulnerabilities. Perhaps! But it's not exactly a secret that candidates tend to play to their parties during the nomination fight and then moderate their positions when they face the larger electorate. So I'd guess that such concerns are overblown. And in a world where Republicans will call even very modest Democratic proposals "socialism," it's not clear that supporting somewhat more liberal policies will change anyone's perceptions.
- That said, I've always thought Senator Bernie Sanders is an exception. It's normal to back away from a campaign promise, claim to be misunderstood or generally modify specific policy positions for the general election. Sanders just isn't in a position to do that, and I doubt he has any interest in it. Perhaps that's to his credit, but it makes him a very vulnerable potential nominee nonetheless. Political-science research is uncertain as to whether ideological extremism harms presidential candidates, but the truth is, there hasn't been a comparable major-party nominee in the last century.
- Representative Eric Swalwell exemplified the perils of attack politics during the second debate when he explicitly went after former Vice President Joe Biden (and by extension Sanders) over his age. The problem is that every one of these candidates, Biden included, is relatively popular with Democratic voters. That's the nature of nomination politics: Democrats tend to like Democrats. So I suspect that even people who agreed with the critique may have thought Swalwell crass to raise it. It's easy to imagine such criticisms harming the attacker just as much as the target.
- The next few days will be an interesting test for the media. Will recency bias – the tendency to perceive new information as more valuable – entirely erase the first debate from news coverage? I hope not, but we'll see if weekend chatter about the nomination contest ignores the candidates who were thought to have done well on the first night.
- Speaking of the first night, I suppose this remains subjective, but I'll stick by my argument that the two debate lineups were fairly evenly balanced. I went in thinking that each night had five or six plausible nominees, and didn't really see anything to change that impression. And I'm not at all sure the most likely nominee was on the stage on Thursday.
One other observation. Some have been arguing that the best comparable candidate to Marianne Williamson, the self-help author now seeking the nomination, was the neurosurgeon Ben Carson in 2016. That seems right to me: both non-politicians, both accomplished in their fields, neither particularly interested in public policy. I'll just say that when Carson gave a debate performance similar to what Williamson did on Thursday, it was wildly popular within his party and he even briefly became the polling leader.
1. Carla Freeman at the Monkey Cage on Chinese President Xi Jinping in North Korea.
2. Rick Hasen on the Supreme Court's census decision.
3. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Noah Feldman on the same case.
4. Alyssa Rosenberg on the Kamala Harris/Joe Biden debate exchange.
5. And Bloomberg's Saleha Mohsin on President Donald Trump's new plan to cut capital-gains taxes.
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