Thread by @PalmerReport

Palmer Report is live blogging the #DemDebate in this thread.

The moderators are already pretending Iowa and New Hampshire are indicative of who's going to be the nominee. The media just doesn't want to let go of its ratings-friendly narrative about those two non-diverse, non-representative states.

This is an important point. Bernie has been in politics 40 years yet he's never been vetted. If Bernie were the nominee, Trump and the GOP would bust out Bernie's entire weird history, and quickly destroy him. Bernie is the only one on this stage who can't beat Trump.

Bernie is not a socialist. He's a guy who calls himself a "socialist" because he doesn't know what the word means.

Tom Steyer is polling surprisingly high in South Carolina. No one seems to know why, including him.

Didn't Andrew Yang get like negative-three votes in Iowa?

The Democrats have four real candidates on stage: Biden, Warren, Buttigieg, Klobuchar.

They also have a billionaire who wandered onto the stage by accident, and an angry guy who's too clueless to know he isn't really a socialist, and a game show host offering everyone $1000.

Is anyone even watching this debate? We've had too many of them already.

Bernie: here's a list of all the pipe dreams I know I could never make happen.

Joe Biden seems more comfortable and confident tonight than in any previous debate. It's almost like the pressure is off him now that his inevitable Iowa loss has come and gone.

The trouble is this: if you're the kind of democratic candidate whose appeal is broad enough to win the nomination, then you're the kind of candidate who will do poorly in Iowa and/or New Hampshire. So we spend February pretending the frontrunners aren't the frontrunners.

Amy Klobuchar has a large vocabulary and she's not afraid to use it.

Donald Trump only knows small words and he's not sure how to spell them.