My takeaways, watched both nights.
The first debate, "undercard debate", was a bit of a joke. Warren naturally got most the attention. Booker, Sparticus, came off poorly with the forced Spanish. Beto was pandering as well and didn't answer anything. He's so apologetic at this point good chance his campaign is tanked. Tulsi got almost no time. Rest of the field had poor performance.
Second debate was bad, but in a different way. Everyone in that field is going full progressive with support of massive gun control, medicare for all, and unchecked illegal immigration/ amnesty. Biden is showing his age. The new age chick was funny, I had heard of her before, and it was funny listening to a new age hippy providing comic relief from the rest of the field. Bernie took a strong jab at the end of the debate at everyone on the stage, but should have gone further and said the whole process was rigged (in 16) and prevented him from getting the nomination. Was refreshing to stronger calls for no more wars though. Pete Buttigeg, who is this Clintonesque, Obamaesque, charismatic Oxford-educated intellectual type, and young, like JFK, seems to be being set up for the nomination. I wonder who is behind him? We may never again see a heterosexual white male nominated by the democratic party for president given how deep the DNC is going with identity politics. Andrew Yang made a poor showing in terms of speaking time--less than 3 minutes the least of anyone-- but I suspect the power elites don't want his messages being spread for free: not interested in UBI, taxing tech, running on a policy platform to beat trump (as opposed to identity politics). It emerged today that NBC purposely was not turning on his mic.
This cycle turning out to be just as much as a joke as the last one. Rigged, indeed for some of the democrats:
"Andrew Yang says microphone was 'not on' at times during Democratic debate" // The Hill
Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang claimed his microphone was "not on" a few times when he attempted to jump in during Thursday night's Democratic debate in Miami.
"There were also a few times, FYI, where I just started talking, being like, 'Hey, I want to add something there,' and my mic was not on," Yang said while speaking to supporters after the event. "And it's this sort of thing where, it's not like if you started talking, it takes over the [conversation]. It's like I was talking, but nothing was happening. And it was like, 'Oh f---.' So that happened a bit too."
The allegation from the tech entrepreneur comes as an analysis by The Hill shows Yang had the least amount of speaking time of all the 20 candidates who participated in the two nights of debates that took place Wednesday and Thursday.
NBC later pushed back on Yang's claims, telling The Hill "At no point during the debate was any candidate's microphone turned off or muted.”
As Tiger said^^, the debates aren't really debates. This stems from the fact that the moderators refuse to strictly control the debates, and give everyone equal speaking time. It cannot be a debate if equal time limits are not enforced. If you have further doubts, just look who gets put in the center both nights, and who doesn't. It would be much fairer to assign stage positions based on random assignments.
The format is flawed, but probably intentional. It looks like everyone is getting a fair shot, but they've already determined the outcome. It would be much more honest to just narrow the field down to Harris, Biden, Buttigeg and maybe Warren and exclude everyone else. Bernie is not going to get the DNC nomination anyway. They already rigged it once against him.
