 Well, the second Democratic Party primary debate is now officially over, all 20 candidates have debated across two nights, and let me just say that the first night was much more exciting than the second night. And going into these debates, my expectations were actually the opposite. I thought that the second night, which featured Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Tulsi Gabbard, would be more exciting because I just thought that there would be more fireworks, but contrary to what I had expected, the fireworks really occurred on the first night. But with that being said, there were still a lot at this debate. And, you know, the thing about this debate that kind of sets it apart from last night's debate was that I kind of felt like there was no clear winner. Like I do have a winner, but there was no clear winner. Like last night, I thought without question, it was Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. This night, you really can make the case that there were multiple winners, although I will say that there is a definitive loser. So I'm going to give you my general breakdown of the debate, talk about some highlights, some lowlights. But before we do that, as I usually do, I want to talk about some numbers. So when it comes to who talked the most, unsurprisingly, Joe Biden had the most talk time with 21 minutes. Harris comes in second with 17 minutes. Booker in third with 13 minutes. Gillibrand with 11 minutes. Inslee with 10 minutes 48 seconds. Gabbard with 10 minutes 47 seconds. Castro with 10 minutes 37 seconds. Michael Bennett with 10 minutes 25 seconds. Bill de Blasio with 9 minutes. Andrew Yang with 8 minutes 53 seconds. Now, when it comes to the most searched candidates before the debate, as you can see, Joe Biden was the most searched candidate. However, when the debate was over, once again, Tulsi Gabbard was the most searched candidate. And looking at the top 10 list, Kamala Harris came in second, Cory in third, Biden in fourth, Andrew Yang at five, Gillibrand at six, Inslee at seven, de Blasio at eight, Julian Castro at nine, Michael Bennett at 10. Now, when it comes to the candidates that earned the most Twitter followers throughout the debate, Yang came in first with 6,460. Gabbard came in second with nearly 5,000. Booker in third with almost 2,000. Harris with 1,800. Castro with 1,700. Inslee with 1,700. Gillibrand with 1,500. Biden with 1,100. Bennett with 775. And Bill de Blasio with 289. So, expectedly, the candidates who had the least amount of name recognition, they gained the most because as viewers learn about them for the very first time, they search, you know, they follow them. And, you know, this is what we expect to happen. So that's why these debates are absolutely crucial. And, you know, if you support a particular candidate, then you definitely want to donate to them to get them at that third September debate because they will need 130,000 individual donors to qualify. That means if you support Andrew Yang, Mary Ann Williamson, Tulsi Gabbard, they're going to need a boost in order to qualify in September. So just keep that in mind. But before we start to get into the nitty gritty, I want to talk about something that was a little bit odd. So if you tuned in to CNN before the debate, you may have seen DNC chairman Tom Perez singing a barnyard song. Old McConnell had a farm, EIEIO. That's the leader of the DNC. So, I mean, you could make the case, honestly, that Tom Perez was the biggest loser just based on that. Because what are you doing, Tom? But getting into the winners and the losers, starting out with the losers, I do think that there were two losers overall and there was a very clear loser. So first of all, I'm not going to start with the biggest loser. We'll start with one of the two losers, Michael Bennett. Michael Bennett was just a rehash of the centrists that we saw the night before. He's indistinguishable from someone like John Hickenlooper, John Delaney, and Steve Bullock. And really, he made no solid points. Whenever he spoke, whenever he was called on, the momentum just died. It was palpable. Nobody had any interest in what he had to say. And it just fell flat. I don't know what he's doing in the race. Again, I said this last night, there are so many centrists in this race. It makes no sense for you to run alongside this many centrists, like if you truly care about the centrist cause and if you're a radical centrist, then wouldn't it make more sense for you to drop out and endorse one of the bigger centrists, like Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, or Amy Klobuchar? I just think that most of these people are narcissistic and they don't realize that the American people aren't into them and they're not taking that hint. So Michael Bennett absolutely fell flat, was a non-antity for the most part. And of course, the biggest loser was Joe Biden. He came a little bit more prepared maybe, but I mean, for half the debate, he fumbled. He stumbled over his own words. It was awkward. And then there was this moment in his closing statement, which, just watch. If you agree with me, go to Joe 30330 and help me in this fight. What was that? I was watching that and I'm sitting there thinking like, is this a website? Is he trying to tell us to text something? Turns out his campaign tweeted out, this is a number that you're supposed to text and you're supposed to text join. So he completely and utterly fucked that up. And he basically copy and pasted his opening statement into his closing statement. Joe Biden was on the defense of the entire time and what was different was that he did kind of play offense a little bit. Like he actually went out after Kamala Harris, he went after Cory Booker, he fired some shots. Without being said though, I don't think it was enough. I mean, every single candidate almost was repeatedly taking shots at Joe Biden. The only two candidates that seemed like they were avoiding taking shots at Joe Biden were actually three were Michael Bennett, Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard. But everyone else took turns dunking on Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, Cory Booker. So when you have that many people coming after you, it's going to hurt, it's going to do some damage. And even if I don't think that this was as devastating as his performance in the first debate in June, it still wasn't a good look, he was the biggest loser. And I don't think the attention will be turned away from him until he starts to go down in the polls. But he really demonstrated why he shouldn't be the nominee. I mean, everything he said made you want to fall asleep, it was unappealing, he reped policies like the TPP. And he said, no, I would renegotiate it so we're not getting the disaster that Obama was pushing. Although, as Walker Bragman pointed out on Twitter, Joe Biden said a lot of really positive things about the TPP, so I just don't believe him. And as Cory Booker put it, he invokes Obama whenever it's convenient. Although, sometimes it's not too convenient. So there was a moment when Joe Biden was speaking when he was interrupted by protesters, and if I'm correct, I think that they were shouting three million deportations. So if you're going to rep Obama's record, you have to basically accept the totality of it, right? You have to take the good and the bad. But when he was challenged by Bill de Blasio for Obama's poor record on immigration and deportations, he tried to run away from it and said, look, I wasn't the president. Okay, so you invoke Obama when it's convenient and you run away from Obama when it's also convenient. I mean, you've got to pick a lane and Joe Biden has nothing. It's just, I'm friends with Obama. Maybe I'm not when it comes to the bad things that Obama did. It's just not a good look. This was bad for him. This was bad for him. There was a moment when Cory Booker challenged him on criminal justice. He did not come out looking good at that. He tried to push back at Cory Booker and he got some good shots at Cory Booker, but overall, he was badly wounded even further. Okay, moving on. So as you all know, I have four categories. I have the loser category. I have the meh category. You know, candidates who didn't necessarily lose, but they just kind of maintained. I have the good category and then I have the winners. So moving on, I'm going to get to the meh category. And in this category, surprisingly, I am putting Kamala Harris here because Kamala Harris did not do as good as she did, you know, in the first debate. And I was expecting her to perform well. I was expecting her to come prepared because Tulsi Gabbard had kind of signaled that she would be going after Kamala Harris. Kamala did not take that threat seriously and you see what happened. Did not bode too well for her. Tulsi hit her really hard and that hurt her. Joe Biden and the centrists were taking shots at Kamala Harris with regard to healthcare. And here's the thing that really makes Kamala a failure. So there's all these criticisms that are that's being lobbed against Medicare for All by centrists, right? Well, we want to get rid of private insurance and that's a good thing, but they try to sell it as a bad thing. So Kamala, what does she do? She constructs this insurance friendly version of Medicare for All, which is really, you know, a glorified public option or Medicare Advantage for All. And she does this hoping that this will shield her from some of the criticism that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been taking. But what happened? Well, the centrists pretended as if she was the true standard bearer for Medicare for All when she in fact was not. And she had to defend the same criticisms that she thought she was insulating herself from. So that was a fail. And on top of it, it was a double failure knowing that she pissed off progressives and that opened the door for individuals like Kirsten Gillibrand to take shots at Kamala Harris by saying, look, these are for-profit companies. Tulsi Gabbard came in with a grade line that I think exposed Kamala the most during the healthcare debate and said, look, you're talking about Catherine Sibelius being excited about your plan? Well, your plan relies heavily on for-profit Medicare Advantage companies. Guess who's in that industry? Sibelius. So, and I don't know if it's Kathleen Sibelius or Catherine Sibelius. I don't know why I'm randomly blanking on that, but you get the point. Sibelius is an insider. So for you to tout her support of your bill, that's not helping you. That's hurting you. So Kamala was not great. And there was a portion towards the midsection of this debate where she just kind of faded into obscurity. We didn't hear a word from her. So this was not great. Not great from Kamala Harris. So she's definitely the standard bearer of the MAC category. Definitely not of Medicare for All. Also in the MAC category, I'm going to reluctantly put Kirsten Gillibrand here. And I kind of wavered back and forth. Is she in the good category? Is she in the MAC category? And I'm landing on MAC, simply because there were a couple of moments where she was called on where she just seemed like she wasn't prepared. But she did get in some good one-liners. She challenged Joe Biden, which helped bring her up. So if you disagree with me here and you think, Mike, you've got to move her out of the MAC category. I actually do think that there's an argument for that. But just because there were so many moments where she was called on and looked shocked, I think that really hurts you. Like you've got to be prepared. You can't doze off, you can't daydream. You've got to come prepared. And there were some moments where it didn't seem like she was that engaged. And I can see if you want to make the case as to why she's in the good category, I get that. Now let's get to the good category because there's a lot of candidates here. And when it comes to my good category and my winners category, all of this is very debatable. I think there's a clear winner here or winners here. But nobody was as big of a winner as Bernie Sanders was last time. I think overall he was the big winner out of these two debates last time. I thought that Kamala was the biggest winner this time. I think it's Bernie Sanders definitely. But in this debate, it was really difficult for me to grasp who won this debate because there were a lot of people that had pretty good moments. They had their standout moments. They had their moments where there was a good one-liner that yielded applause. So you really could make the case that any of these candidates that I'm gonna bring up was the winner, maybe the winner. But this is just my take. This is incredibly subjective. And I honestly, I think I probably need more time to sleep on it, think about this. But here's where I'm at right now. And I'm sure that my opinion on this will evolve. In the good category, Julian Castro, Andrew Yang, Bill de Blasio and Jay Inslee. Now, the only person who I am pretty committed to keeping in the good category is Julian Castro. Overall, he didn't have as good of a night as he did last time, but he still got in there, took some shots, he was part of the conversation, he didn't tune out. And I think he performed well. There was a great moment where he looked Biden in the eyes and he said, look, one of us learned the lessons of history. That was a phenomenal moment. And he's always just brilliant when it comes to the issue of immigration. He's a leader here. So, you know, he did good. But when it comes to Andrew Yang, Bill de Blasio and Jay Inslee, you can very plausibly make the case that they're also in the winner category. Now, here's why I put Yang in the good category instead of placing him in the winner category. He started out strong. He ended strong. And what he did, which I think was brilliant, was he tied universal basic income to a plethora of other issues that are seemingly unrelated. He did a great job at repping his number one policy proposal. What he did here was kind of what I was expecting from him at the very first debate. My only problem though, and why I kind of wavered on whether or not I would characterize him as a winner is because it got to the point where he started to sound like a one-trick pony where he wouldn't move away from UBI. And you have to be able to disaggregate that policy, the economics from issues related to social justice, foreign policy, and he tied everything to UBI. And even though I think that that's gonna play really well with his group of supporters, by and large, the average person might be a little bit turned off by that. I think towards the third half of the debate or the third quarter in the second half, I kind of was getting turned off because it was like, okay, is he going to talk about UBI when it comes to this unrelated foreign policy issue? Like you've gotta be able to talk intelligently about other issues in order to let the American people know that you're serious. Like there are candidates who have one main issue that they have, that they talk about, that they rep, but they also are able to talk about other issues. So I think that Yang, he's kind of still finding his voice. You know, he's gotta do better, but at the same time, his performance this time was leagues better than his first performance. I think he did a really good job. He brought the energy, he was prepared. Overall, you know, if you say, Mike, you're wrong, I think that Andrew Yang is a winner. I do believe that you can make that case. Maybe I'm being a little bit too nitpicky and saying he over relied on UBI, but I do think that he needs to kind of diversify his platform. When you're talking about healthcare, you know, I don't need to hear about UBI. When you're talking about foreign policy, I don't need to hear about UBI. When you're talking about the rust belt and economic issues, please engage with us about UBI. There are some, you know, criticisms that I have with his UBI program. With that being said, I think that he, you know, he is kind of the person who is the standard bearer for this one issue. So I get that he's going to rely on it and rely on it heavily. He just needs to tune it down a little bit. That's my criticism. Okay, Bill de Blasio, another person who I've wavered back and forth. You can put him in the winner category, although this time he took some damage. He was called out rightfully so for his handling of the Eric Garner situation. And there was a chant early on during the debate and I couldn't really make out what they were saying, but it seems like people are saying that they were chanting for him to fire the police officer involved with the death of Eric Garner and he mishandled this. He botched it and it's embarrassing. He was called out for it. And that was good that he was called out for it. That being said, if you put that aside, there were some great moments where he called out Joe Biden, held Joe Biden's feet to the fire. He started by taking shots at Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and he really is a progressive attack dog. I don't think that anyone in the progressive community thinks that he's actually the real deal. Like we all know that he's full of shit. We all know that he's saying one thing and will unquestionably do another, but we do need that progressive voice on the screen as Ben Dixon pointed out on Twitter. You know, he's shifting the overton window at these debates and that is really, really important. When it comes to Jay Inslee, he had a really solid performance and you can also make the case that he's a winner. You know, I kind of seem like I'm a fan setter here, but this was tough. He did a great job at politely challenging Joe Biden when it comes to the issue of climate change and showing why, you know, Joe Biden's middle of the road policy, it's not going to suffice. You know, he has to keep up with the science. We've got a decade to act. That's it. You know, no milk toast middle of the road policies will suffice. Booker also kind of stole a little bit of the spotlight away from Inslee when he said that, you know, you shouldn't, and I'm paraphrasing, he said, you don't deserve credit by saying you're going to rejoin the Paris climate accord because that's kindergarten. You know, that's the easiest thing that you could do as president. That's not bold at all. So, you know, Jay Inslee was great. I think that a reason why I'm feeling a little bit more inclined to place him in the good category as opposed to the winner category is because when he had his good moments, there wasn't, you know, the fireworks. Like when people like Tulsi went after Kamala, when Booker went after Biden, you saw the fireworks. You saw how the crowd reacted when Kamala went after Biden, you know, the energy was palpable. And I just didn't get that from Inslee. And part of it is I think that that's just his personality. He just seems like a genuinely nice and relatively quiet person. So maybe that's not in his nature. With that being said, though, for the debates, you've got to try to go out of your comfort zone and turn up the heat. And, you know, he did that. He did better. I think he improved, you know, in comparison with his performance last time. And it's why I put him in the good category. But if you say, Mike, he should be in the winner category, I think that's certainly, it's arguable, right? You can make that case. It's highly subjective. I'm not incredibly confident with my rankings this time with the exception of me placing Joe Biden and Michael Bennett in the loser category and Kamala Harris in the meh category. You know, Biden and Harris, I think that they lost the most in this debate, although Biden had more to lose than Kamala, to be fair. Okay, getting to the winners. This was tricky. This was tricky for me. And I have two winners, obviously since there's two candidates left. They are Corey Booker and Tulsi Gabbard. Now the overall standout winner I think is Tulsi Gabbard. Now going into this debate, I was rooting for Tulsi Gabbard. She was basically the only candidate that I was rooting for. So I'm trying to disaggregate my personal support for Tulsi from her performance because I don't know if I'm just biased, right? And this is subjective. And I was rooting for her and the person who I was rooting for just so happened to win. But with that being said, trying to put aside my bias and step outside of my own personal opinions and policy agreements with Tulsi, I do believe that she had the most big, exciting moments. She went after Kamala Harris and these were great moments. Although I will say this, even though I think that Tulsi was the winner, there were some really high highs and then there were some moments where I think she fell a little bit flat. For example, when it came to foreign policy and Biden was in the discussion and we were talking about his vote for the Iraq War, for whatever reason, Tulsi Gabbard didn't take that opportunity to attack him and I was waiting. I was waiting for her to pounce, right? But it seemed like she was holding her fire and I wanted her to unleash because she is the foreign policy candidate. She served in the war that Joe Biden sent her to fight. So I was waiting for that and we didn't get it. That being said, Tulsi Gabbard still, in those moments where she went after Kamala, that absolutely hurt Kamala. It left Kamala fumbling and Kamala did not know how to respond to any of Tulsi's criticisms and I'll be doing a separate video about that because I think that those moments were so powerful. Tulsi's moments where she went after Kamala and just laid out her entire criminal justice record, that was just absolutely brutal. And what's awkward is whenever we start talking about Kamala's criminal justice background and her record as a prosecutor, she doesn't really know what to say. We got a little glimpse of this at the first CNN town hall that she did when someone in the audience asked her about her criminal justice record and it was really awkward. She just kind of laughed it off. So right here, you have one of your opponents on the debate stage laying it out and it just wasn't great, but what Kamala loses, Tulsi gains. And I think that because that was such a powerful moment, I believe Tulsi was the overall standout, although there were several missed opportunities that I think she needed to utilize, right? On immigration, I think she probably could have done better when it came to the issue of free college. If she would have taken that opportunity to endorse student loan debt cancellation, the crowd would have went wild. So there's still, I think, more to be desired. However, I don't want to be too down on Tulsi because when you compare this to her last debate performance, she improved dramatically. And what I said at the last debate performance was that for the first half, she kind of just wasn't that big of an entity, but towards the end when she bodied Tim Ryan, that single-handedly gave her the boost that she needed. So she improved, but I think that, I hope that she washes this back and she capitalizes next time on the areas that were presented to her where she could have also taken some really strong and powerful shots at Joe Biden. Okay, getting to Cory Booker. The reason why I believe he's a winner and why maybe you can even make the case that he is the winner is because he had a lot of great moments, but the reason why, in my view, he wasn't stronger than Tulsi was because there were so many moments and things that he said that came off as overly rehearsed, he was too fake. You know, during the healthcare debate, he tried to chime in with this, I'm above the fray, you know, line and saying, look, all this debating centrists versus progressives when it comes to healthcare, Donald Trump is watching this and loving this. That's just corny, dude, you're in a debate. So I don't get that, I don't think it is persuasive. However, when it comes to him taking on Joe Biden, when it comes to criminal justice, that was brutal. Cory Booker beat him down and that was good. The Kool-Aid line, so good, so good. Now again, I think that Biden did take a couple of shots at Cory Booker's own record. There's a lot to be desired when it comes to Cory Booker's record. You know, his promotion of charter schools when he was the mayor of Newark, New Jersey. But Cory Booker let it roll off his back and he knew what he had to do. And I kind of predicted that if he was going to go after Joe Biden for anything, it was his record on criminal justice and damn, that was strong and that single-handedly may have been enough, I think, to kind of propel Cory Booker because he's stagnating, he's not doing too great, he's being outshined by other people in the race. But I think that this kind of was the moment. I predicted that, you know, if he was going to try any type of strategy, tactically speaking, he would try to replicate the success that Kamala had by calling out Joe Biden in an area where he feels he is personally stronger and he did that and it paid off for him. So basically that's my winners, that's my losers. I don't wanna get into too many topics so I'm going to basically just talk about healthcare because the healthcare portion this time was awful. It was just awful. And I kind of alluded to this but, you know, it made it seem like Kamala Harris was the one who was really in favor of Medicare for All but the people who came out on top in that exchange were Kirsten Gillibrand, Bill de Blasio, Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard. You know, Joe Biden, I think that he was right to pin Kamala Harris as a flip-flopper with regard to Medicare for All but she also kind of got some good shots in at him saying, look, your plan will leave 10 million people uninsured. So they were taking shots at each other and there was this assumption that, you know, who's right, is it Joe Biden or Kamala Harris? They're both wrong. And when Julian Castro chimed in, you know, he backtracked from Medicare for All seemingly. Kamala Harris is now talking about Americans want access to healthcare. No, we want healthcare. Eliminate the word access, we want healthcare. And you know, Kamala Harris was struggling to defend her watered-down version of Medicare for All but it was great to see Bill de Blasio call out everyone who was fear-mongering about Medicare for All. I think that Yang did a pretty good job here even if I don't necessarily trust him when it comes to Medicare for All since he's kind of gone back and forth between Medicare for All and a public option. So, you know, comparing tonight's healthcare debate to last night's healthcare debate, I mean, the difference is night and day. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren did a much better job at, you know, representing the position of Medicare for All than Kamala Harris did. And it was frustrating that she was the one who was supposedly defending Medicare for All because she's not defending Medicare for All. She has now officially moved away from Medicare for All because she is proposing a Medicare for All plan that isn't actually Medicare for All. It keeps private health insurance companies which defeats the entire purpose because if you opt for single payer, the goal is to get that for-profit motive out of our healthcare system. And Kamala is explicitly now saying, no, I want to keep the profit motive in. So, you know, when you compare Bernie and Elizabeth Warren taking on John Delaney to, you know, Kamala taking on Biden, it was just, it was awful. It was a shit show. But, you know, overall that's my takeaway. Joe Biden is a gigantic loser. Kamala Harris definitely, I think, is coming away damaged. Do I think that this is going to have an effect on her in the polls? I don't know. Did Tulsi do enough damage to affect her polling numbers? It's really difficult to say. But if people who are watching are, you know, engaged politically and they do a Google search and look into all of the things that Tulsi said about Kamala's record, this could really damage Kamala Harris. So we'll see what happens. I do think that Joe Biden should take another hit. But, you know, it could just be a temporary hit. He may regain, recover a little bit. Like we kind of saw last time, although it wasn't, you know, a full recovery, according to most polls, some polls did say that he made a full recovery. But, you know, this is difficult. It's hard to assess. It's hard to see into the future. But when it's all said and done, I think that when you compare both nights, the clear standout here was Bernie Sanders and just stepping back, it seems like the centrists did not do too well. The progressives dominated, right? Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren dominated the first debate. And I think that Tulsi Gabbard won the second debate. Now, this is all fairly subjective, especially with regard to night number two. But, you know, when you look at Joe Biden, John Delaney, John Hickenlooper, Michael Bennett, centrists aren't doing too well in this race, which is great. You know, it shows that we are as progressives shifting the Overton window to the left. And that's great news for us. So this was incredibly entertaining and exciting. This debate was good. Definitely nowhere near as exciting as night one.