Vice President Joe Biden spoke the most, but Elizabeth Warren wasn’t far behind. Andrew Yang talked the least at this debate. Here’s how the final times break down:
As the final question of the night, each candidate was asked to detail their biggest professional setback.
Here’s how they answered:
Sen. Amy Klobuchar said that Trump’s trade war is costing American jobs. “One forecast recently says that it has already cost us 300,000 jobs,” she said.
Facts First: This is true according to one major economic analysis. A September report from Moody’s Analytics estimates that Trump’s trade war with China has cost “almost 300,000 jobs” since it started about a year ago.
It’s tricky to calculate exactly how many jobs have been lost because of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese-made goods. One reason the trade war could be hurting American jobs is because Trump’s tariff strategy has created a lot of uncertainty for businesses. They don’t know how long the tariffs will be in place or whether the rate of the tariff will go up as part of a negotiating strategy – making it hard to make investments and hire new workers.
But the Moody’s report isn’t the only one that suggests the duties are having an effect on US workers. A report from staffing firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said that trade difficulties were cited as the reason for more than 10,000 job cuts in August alone.
Former Vice President Joe Biden claimed that gun control measures put forward by the Obama administration had a majority of support from NRA members.
“Those proposals I put forward for the President had over 50% of gun – members of the NRA supporting them,” he said.
Facts First: According to one poll, a majority of NRA members did support some gun control measures proposed by the Obama administration, but not all.
In a 2013 poll conducted by Johns Hopkins University, 74% of people who identified as NRA members supported universal background checks, which the Obama administration proposed following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook.
A majority – 62% – of this cohort “supported prohibiting gun ownership for 10 years after a person has been convicted of violating a domestic-violence restraining order,” according to the poll. And 70 percent supported increasing penalties for individuals who sell a gun to someone who is not allowed to own a gun.
As part of its proposals following Sandy Hook, the Obama administration proposed a ban on so-called assault weapons and high capacity magazines (those that hold more than ten bullets). Only 15% of NRA members supported the ban of so-called assault weapons and 19% supported the banning of sales of high capacity magazines, according to the JHU poll.
Protesters interrupted former Vice President Joe Biden as he started to answer a question about professional setbacks.
Biden was speaking when the protesters started yelling in the auditorium at Texas Southern University. It’s unclear what they were saying.
His time to speak was restored after the screaming stopped.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, when asked about what Americans need to do about the nation’s legacy of slavery, began by talking about poor schools.
He said teachers have “every problem coming to them” and social workers can help parents at home. Parents often want to help their kids, but don’t know how, he said.
Here are the suggestions he gave:
He added that a poor child will hear 4 million fewer words by the time they get to school than a child from a wealthier background.
If you want a look at the kind of government Bernie Sanders envisions, steer clear of Venezuela, the Vermont senator said on Thursday,
“In terms of democratic socialism, to equate what goes on in Venezuela with what I believe is extremely unfair,” Sanders said in response to co-moderator Jorge Ramos. “I agree with (what) goes on in Canada and Scandinavia, guaranteeing health care to all people as a human right. I believe that the United States should not be the only major country on earth not to provide paid family and medical leave.”
In his answer, Sanders drew on the nut of a speech he gave in Washington earlier this year explaining his take on the ideology. It is centered on a milder form of socialism that does not mandate the nationalization of major industries, but instead broadens and beefs up the social safety net and offers workers more of a say in how major corporations are run.
“You got three people in America owning more wealth than the bottom half of this country. You got a handful of billionaires controlling what goes on in Wall Street, the insurance companies and in the media. Maybe, just maybe, what we should be doing is creating an economy that works for all of us, not 1%,” Sanders said in Houston. “That’s my understanding of democratic socialism.:
Asked by Ramos if he would, after demurring in the past, call Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro a “dictator,” Sanders again passed up the chance.
But he was hardly kind in his description.
“Well, first of all, let me be clear. Anybody that does what Maduro does is a vicious tyrant,” Sanders said, before reiterating his position on Venezuela, saying: “What we need now is international and regional cooperation for free elections in Venezuela so that the people of that country can make, can create their own future.”
Former Housing and Urban Development secretary Julián Castro was less circumspect.
“I’ll call Maduro a dictator,” he said as Sanders finished, “because he is a dictator.”
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren laid out her position on funding for public schools.
She went on to say, “Let’s be clear in all the ways we talk about this, money for public schools should stay in public schools, not go anywhere else.”
Warren vowed to appoint a public school teacher to the position of education secretary.
In a discussion of immigration policy, former Vice President Joe Biden said: “We didn’t lock people up in cages, we didn’t separate families.”
Facts first: Both of Biden’s claims are false. While the Obama administration didn’t systematically separate families, it did happen under certain circumstances.
Separations did sometimes occur under Obama, but they were non-routine and much less frequent, according to immigration experts and former Obama officials.
They occurred in exceptional cases. Examples include those where the parent was being criminally prosecuted for carrying drugs across the border or other serious crimes aside from illegal crossing, those where human trafficking was suspected and those where the authorities could not confirm the connection between the child and the adult.
The separations didn’t happen as a result of a blanket policy, however, as was the case during the Trump administration’s controversial “zero tolerance” policy last year.
Similarly, fenced enclosures at processing facilities along the border, the structures that have been labeled as cages, existed under the Obama administration. Some individuals — including children — were held in those cells during processing.
Sen. Cory Booker, a vegan, was just asked if more Americans should stop eating meat as a means to curb the climate crisis.
The line drew laughs from the audience.
Booker said “factory farming is destroying and hurting our environment” and claimed that kind of farming is pushing family farmers out of business. He has called for an end to big food mergers — but not an end to meat consumption.
It’s just after 10 p.m. ET, and the debate has been going for two hours. Joe Biden is still leading in talk time with just over 13 minutes. Here’s where everyone else falls.
California Sen. Kamala Harris compared President Donald Trump to the Wizard of Oz on Thursday, arguing that the Republican leader is hiding behind bluster on the issue of trade.
“We need to partner with China on the issue of North Korea,” Harris said. “We need a partner on the issue of North Korea.”
She added: “But the bottom line is this, Donald Trump in office on trade policy … He reminds me of that guy in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ when you pull back the curtain, it’s a really small dude.”
The comment drew laughs from the audience and a smile from moderator George Stephanopoulos.
Trump has talked tough on trade for years, but his record on the issue has been mixed and a massive trade deal with China has eluded the President.
Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg criticized President Trump’s trade policy on China, saying, “The President clearly has no strategy.”
“Is it just me or was that supposed to happen in like April?” Buttigieg said. “It’s one more example of a commitment not made.”
He said Trump’s inability to stick with his commitments lead to “serious consequences.”
Buttigieg pointed to the G7 summit, and when Trump skipped a climate change discussion.
Sen. Bernie Sanders repeated a claim he’s often made on the amount of money the US spends on health care.
Facts First: Sanders is right about Canada. While there’s no universal definition of “major country,” so there’s some subjectivity here, it’s not true that the US spends twice as much per capita on health care as every other country in the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, a group of 36 wealthy countries around the world.
At $10,586 per capita in 2018, the US did spend more than twice as much as Canada ($4,974) and more than twice as much as the OECD average ($3,992) in 2018 – but Switzerland ($7,317), Norway ($6,187) and Germany ($5,986) all were substantially above half the US level; Sweden ($5,447), Austria ($5,395) and Denmark ($5,299) were also above half, though more slightly.
Sanders has been repeating this same exaggeration since at least 2009, when fact-checkers at PolitiFact first noted that it wasn’t true.
An hour and a half into this debate, former Vice President Joe Biden has spoken the most, with an even 10 minutes of talking time.
Sen. Cory Booker has had the second most time speaking, clocking in at just shy of 8 minutes.
Meanwhile, businessman Andrew Yang has said the least: He’s spoken for just 3 minutes and 59 seconds.
Here’s a full break down of who’s talked the most so far:
Former Vice President Joe Biden dodged a question tonight on his position on the millions of deportations under former President Barack Obama.
ABC’s Jorge Ramos asked Biden if he did anything to prevent the deportations and then asked why Latinos should trust him.
Biden didn’t answer the questions. Instead he offered a different response.
He said that comparing Obama to President Trump “is outrageous.”
Biden then laid out his immigration plan.
Ramos asked again if Biden made a mistake with the deportations.
“The President did that best thing that was able to be done at the time,” Biden said.
“How about you,” Ramos asked again.
Biden responded, “I am the vice president of the United States.”
What you need to know: Obama’s immigration policies has drawn criticism from some immigration advocates and lawmakers, and it had been expected that Biden would be called to answer to them.
South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg said Thursday that anyone who supports President Donald Trump’s immigration policy is “supporting racism.”
“Do you think people who support President Trump and his immigration policies are racist,” asked moderator Jorge Ramos.
“Anyone who supports this is supporting racism,” Buttigieg said. “The only people who actually buy into this president’s hateful rhetoric around immigrants are people who don’t know any.”
Buttigieg went on to note that Republicans in Indiana have rallied around immigrants in their communities who were facing deportation.
“We have an opportunity to actually get something done but we cannot allow this to continue to be the same debate with the same argument and the same clever lines often among the same people since the last reform happened in the 1980s,” Buttigieg said.
This is not the first time Buttigieg has said supporting Trump is, at the very least, condoning racism.
Asked by CNN in August whether he believes it is racist to cast a vote for Trump, Buttigieg said, “Well, at best it means looking the other way on racism.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar went after Sen. Bernie Sanders’ defense of his Medicare for All bill, attempting to turn his signature line of, “I wrote the damn bill’ into a one-liner of her own.
Facts First: This is true according to one estimate by a prominent health care research center.
On page 8 of the legislation Klobuchar references, S.1129 - Medicare for All Act of 2019, there is a provision that stipulates it would be unlawful under the plan for “a private health insurer to sell health insurance coverage that duplicates the benefits provided under this Act.” The bill also bans employer-provided coverage on the same page.
However, different organizations have different estimates for how many Americans have private insurance, and who therefore would be at risk of losing it under a Medicare for All plan. Klobuchar cites a number backed by a 2014 survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a national nonpartisan nonprofit. That survey indicated that 149 million non-elderly people had employer-sponsored coverage.
Her estimate may actually be low. The US Census Bureau estimated that in 2017, more than 181 million people had employment-based health insurance.
Sen. Kamala Harris defended her record as a top law enforcement official in California on Thursday, admitting that while she accomplished a number of goals in her earlier career, she was “absolutely not” able to get enough done.
Harris was presented with changes in her views on marijuana and investigating police shootings and asked, “When you had the power, why didn’t you try to affect change then?”
“I’m glad you asked me this question and there have been many distortions of my record,” said Harris, who previously worked as the former California Attorney General and San Francisco District Attorney.
Harris said she became a prosecutor because she always “wanted to protect people and keep them safe” and the need to combat racial bias in the criminal justice system.
Harris added she took the opportunity to reform the system “from the inside.”
No Democrat on the stage tonight has gone as far as former Rep. Beto O’Rourke in the fight to remove firearms from American streets.
Asked about his plan to require gun owners to sell back their assault weapons to the government, the Texan didn’t blink.
Explaining why he supported the mandatory buyback – while others have said it should be voluntary or don’t support the idea at all – O’Rourke offered a graphic explanation.
He also discussed the most recent high-profile mass shooting here in Texas.
