Elizabeth Warren's Policy Ideas Dominated the First Democratic Debate

[SouthernProgressive]

Massachusetts senator and 2020 presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren began the month of June polling around 7 percent, placing her in-a-respectable-but-certainly-second tier of candidates along with California senator Kamala Harris and South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg. But over the past several weeks, she earned a blizzard of media coverage and made inroads with primary voters thanks to her steady rollout of detailed policies, from wiping out student debt and taxing the uber-rich back to funding universal childcare and abolishing the Electoral College. Warren entered Wednesday's inaugural Democratic debate at 12.8 percent in RealClearPolitics's polling average, good for third overall; New Jersey senator Cory Booker and former Texas representative Beto O'Rourke, at 3.3 and 2.3 percent, respectively, were the only other participants on stage who managed to exceed one percent.

Of the candidates hoping to use the debate to boost their polling numbers, former Department of Housing and Urban Development secretary Julián Castro was probably the most successful. His invocation of the black and Hispanic victims of police violence—a talking point he uses to promote his police reform platform—drew enthusiastic applause from the crowd. The former San Antonio mayor also drew a sharp distinction between his desire to repeal Section 1325 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which makes it a crime to illegally cross the border, and his fellow Texan O'Rourke's reluctance to vote to do so while in Congress. "I think that you should do your homework on this issue," Castro said, asserting that a separate federal law addresses O'Rourke's purported concerns about the implications of repeal for human trafficking. "If you did your homework on this issue, you would know that we should repeal this section."

For the most part, however, the stage belonged to Warren. She didn't monopolize the conversation in the traditional sense; according to FiveThirtyEight, the 1,637 words she spoke put her well behind the more loquacious Booker and O'Rourke, and on par with Castro (1,588 words), Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar (1,614 words), and NBC's Chuck Todd (1,633 words.) But her presence drove the debate at several critical junctures, as her policy positions forced competitors to measure their platforms directly against hers. In an early question to Booker, Savannah Guthrie asked why he criticized Warren's choice to call out by name companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook when she announced her plan to break up tech giants back in March. "I don't think I disagree," Booker replied, seemingly contradicting his earlier-expressed disagreement with Warren's approach. Eventually, he conceded: "I will single out companies like Halliburton or Amazon that pay nothing in taxes, and our need to change that."

GQ

[BlueWI]

1. Extremely sharp candidate.

Very happy to see her rising profile.

[happyaccident]

2. She is brave and I think scares corporations more than anybody

Her scariest idea? 40% of a corporation's board would be chosen by the workers to give fair representation on corporate decisions. That's real change that would weaken their stranglehold on our economy and labor laws. Now if we can do a 40% profit-sharing for workers...