The issues that will decide the Democratic primaries

The second round of debates for the Democratic primary concluded in Detroit in the early hours of this morning, with crucial battle lines drawn between policies, priorities and personalities.

“Go easy on me, kid,” said Joe Biden to Kamala Harris as the two welcomed each other on stage. The folksy greeting belied the action to come, an evening that saw increased attacks on Biden’s record, testing the centrist front-runner.

The former vice president was more prepared for the assault than he was in the previous debate, although he did stumble at the end, seeming to confuse a website with a text number: “If you agree with me go to Joe 30330”, he said.

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A theme established on Tuesday was continued last night, with candidates broadly separated into two camps: centrists and those further left, or to use American terminology, moderates and progressives.

Tuesday night’s debate saw an inversion of the traditional script, where, as the Atlantic describes, “front-runners, drawn from the party establishment… defend a fairly centrist agenda against insurgents from the ideological extremes.” Instead, here, the front-runners were the ones further out on the ideological spectrum, while lesser-known candidates, dwindling in the polls, tried - largely unsuccessfully - to discredit their policies from the centre.

Wednesday, however, featured Joe Biden, the only front-runner in the race to espouse a recognisably centrist agenda, and as such reverted, to some degree, to a more conventional pattern.

Pete Buttegieg, the Mayor of South Bend, Idiana, cut through intra-party ideological concerns: “If it's true that if we embrace a far-left agenda, they're going to say we're a bunch of crazy socialists. If we embrace a conservative agenda, you know what they're going to do? They're going to say we're a bunch of crazy socialists," he said. "So let's just stand up for the right policy, go out there and defend it.”

Now all the candidates have debated, what are the main policy differences dividing the Democratic party as it swings to the left?

Healthcare

Electorally, healthcare “is a potent issue for Democrats,” The Guardian says. “The party flipped 40 congressional seats in the midterm elections running against Republican efforts to take health insurance away by repealing the Affordable Care Act”.

The dividing line on the issue of healthcare comes down to whether, and to what extent, the candidate supports “Medicare for All” - a system that guarantees free medical care for everyone. Currently, the system covers those over the age of 65, but candidates like Bernie Sanders, who argue that universal healthcare is a human right, want to expand it.

At the other end of the spectrum, last night Joe Biden again stated his policy on healthcare - in essence a development of Obama’s Affordable Care Act - arguing that Medicare for all was simply too large and expensive an undertaking: “no matter how you cut it, it costs three trillion dollars when it is in fact deployed,” he said. He continued it would require middle-class taxes to go up, and employer-based insurance to be eliminated, asking “What happens in the meantime?”

Immigration

Like healthcare, the issue of immigration splits progressives and moderates. It is centered around the issue of family separation. Elizabeth Warren, for example, along with other progressives, wants to make illegal border crossings an issue for the civil courts, thereby denying future administrations the legal basis to separate families at the border.

As the New York Times reports, last night presidential hopeful Julian Castro “defended the idea of decriminalising crossing the border illegally, an argument he made at the June debate that helped boost his candidacy. As Mr. Biden began speaking on immigration, protesters in the crowd started shouting about deportations during the Obama administration. Mr. Biden criticised Mr. Castro for not airing his complaints when they served in that administration together. ‘I never heard him talk about any of this when he was secretary,’ Mr. Biden said.”

“It looks like one of us has learned from the lessons of the past and one of us hasn't,” Castro fired back.

Race

Following an influential article by Ta-Nehisi Coates in a 2014 edition of the Atlantic, progressives in the US largely support some degree of reparations paid to the descendents of slaves. On Tuesday night CNN moderator Don Lemon asked Marianne Williamson, another of the Democratic contenders “Many of your opponents support a commission to study the issue of reparations for slavery, but you are calling for up to $500 billion in financial assistance. What makes you qualified to determine how much is owed in reparations?”

Williamson responded, saying, “It’s not $500 billion in ‘financial assistance’ — it’s $200 to $500 billion payment of a debt that is owed.”

In another example of the attacks on Joe Biden’s record, in the previous debate he was left flat-footed after an assault by Kamala Harris in which she accused him of failing to support the busing policy - which saw African American children bused from deprived areas to wealthy white schools - earlier in his career.

Last night, Biden was prepared with an attack of his own: “When Senator Harris was the attorney general for eight years in the state of California, there were two of the most segregated school districts in the country, in Los Angeles and in San Francisco,” he said. “I didn’t see a single solitary time she brought a case against them to desegregate.”

Race remains an important issue for Democrats because mobilising black voters is integral to winning the national election. Senator Cory Booker said during last night’s debate: “Everybody from Republicans to Russians were targeting the suppression of African-American voters… I will be a person who tries to fight against voter suppression and tries to activate and engage voters and coalitions that will win Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin,” he said to applause.

Who can beat Trump?

“Two and a half years after Election Night 2016, and with a year and a half until Election Night 2020, Democrats are still clearly, desperately, viscerally afraid none of them will win,” writes Edward-Isaac Dovere in the Atlantic.

One of the breakout candidates from Tuesday’s debate was Marianne Williamson, who was explicit on the issue: "If you think any of this wonkiness is going to deal with this dark psychic force of the collectivised hatred that this president is bringing up in this country, then I'm afraid that the Democrats are going to see some very dark days.”

Speaking to CNN after the debate, she described the president as a “phenomenon. An insider political game will not defeat him,” she said.

As Mayor Buttigieg summarised: “We need the kind of vision that’s going to win.”