Disappearing midterm election debates: Democrats dodging their opponents this year in their party’s primary debates
In the Democratic primary debates, it was not Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders who dominated the headlines, but the debates were full of new candidates — including the first woman to win a major party’s nomination.
But in the Republican debates, Trump dominated the headlines, with the focus falling on Republican nominee Marco Rubio.
With a new debate schedule in place, we’ll see how the midterm elections and next year’s presidential election impact the television debate landscape.
Democratic debates
We’ve seen many debates this year in the primaries. But the Democratic debates in a series of three: two on CNN and one on MSNBC. All three debates were held in the last week of May and the first week of June.
In the CNN debates, former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders sparred over health care. In the second round of debates, Sanders was the clear winner, although no clear answer was provided. Biden had some strong responses to Sanders claims and claimed that Republicans had not worked toward making the health system better. Biden was also asked about the “Medicare for All” bill, which has been introduced in the Senate and is expected to be debated and voted on at the end of this year. The issue of Medicare for All has not been a central debate in this election yet, but could be a pivotal debate in the fall.
But a question that drew the most interest was the presidential debate. Here was an opportunity for Democratic candidates to try to separate themselves from Sanders and try to make their case about who should lead the Democratic Party. And that’s exactly what they did, with no clear frontrunner emerging.
CNN’s debates were:
Bernie Sanders vs. Joe Biden
Bernie Sanders:
First, Sanders took on Biden on Medicare for All, saying that the Democratic Party needed to be true to its values and its history.
“The fact that we have a president who does not want to talk about the role that the