Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin

They had both ruled out entering the race over the winter. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, had conducted polling and focus groups and concluded it was not worth challenging a rival as strong as Biden. Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts, had confronted a family illness — his wife was diagnosed with cancer — and new scrutiny of his business record. He, too, opted out of the race.

But over time, they both developed second thoughts. Critical of Biden’s campaign, Bloomberg asked his aides to bring updated polling information gauging his prospects. Patrick began expressing unease to friends about whether the existing crop of candidates could unite the Democratic Party after the primary, or heal a divided country after the general election.

And both men still harbored an undimmed ambition to be president.

Now, Bloomberg and Patrick are at the precipice of joining the tumultuous 2020 race, encouraged by a combination of anecdotal angst among voters and party officials, and in Bloomberg’s case by a trove of public-opinion research.

Both men have concluded in recent weeks that Biden, the former vice president, is not the imposing adversary they had expected him to be, interviews with aides and allies show. Both also believe there is room in the race for a more dynamic candidate who is closer to the political middle than Biden’s two most prominent challengers, Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Should Bloomberg and Patrick enter the race, they would test that proposition in different ways: Bloomberg with a powerfully funded campaign that would take on President Donald Trump directly and contest the biggest states on the primary map from the start; Patrick with an insurgent candidacy that would begin in next-door New Hampshire and run through South Carolina, where black voters are likely to decide the primary.

Advisers to Bloomberg conducted extensive polling at the national level and in the Super Tuesday states, including in the weeks leading up to his filing paperwork in Alabama last Friday. That data showed a number of shifts in the Democratic electorate since Bloomberg’s decision to forgo a run in March, people familiar with the polling said: It found Biden less formidable, and voters even more intently focused on questions of electability. A series of tests, gauging the impact of Bloomberg’s positive message and potential messages attacking him, yielded encouraging results.

Gary Hart, the former Colorado senator who made a last-minute bid for the Democratic nomination in 1988 after dropping out of the race, said the burden on both Bloomberg and Patrick would be to articulate a clear rationale for entering a race already overflowing with options.

“They ought to be out in public stating that rationale, and it has to be new and different,” Hart said. “It can’t be Beto O’Rourke warmed over, it can’t be Cory Booker. I mean, so many different approaches have been tried and haven’t quite gelled.”

While neither man has made a final decision, Bloomberg has already formally designated himself a candidate in two states with early filing deadlines. Patrick is expected to announce his intentions this week, and canceled a planned appearance Wednesday at a Colorado conference of socially conscious investors.

Both men conveyed their intentions to Biden last week, Patrick in a phone call to the former vice president, and Bloomberg through an emissary, his longtime aide Kevin Sheekey.

If there is room for someone to break through late, Hart predicted it would be because they convince Democratic voters they are uniquely capable of winning the general election.

“The overwhelming fact of this race is defeating the incumbent,” Hart said. “It’s, ‘Who can beat Trump?’”

Bloomberg and Patrick both see themselves as the answer to that question, and they may not be alone: Hillary Clinton told the BBC on Thursday that she would “never say never” to running and said she was under “enormous pressure from many, many people to think about it.”

But unlike Patrick and Bloomberg, Clinton is not taking active steps toward joining the race.

Polls show the Democratic race is fluid, but that voters are largely satisfied with their existing options. While there is no overpowering figure in the race, Biden still leads most national polls and voters in the early states have largely gravitated toward a short list of options including him, Warren of Massachusetts, Sanders of Vermont, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana.

Bloomberg, who has flirted with a White House run several times previously, usually as an independent, has already faced withering criticism from several candidates, including Warren and Sanders, who have derided him as yet another billionaire seeking to buy control of the political system. Patrick faces questions about whether he will be able to hire a strong campaign staff and raise the money needed to compete in a national election on such short notice.

The two have mapped out divergent strategies: Patrick is eyeing a relatively conventional path to the nomination through the early states, while Bloomberg envisions spending a huge sum of money contesting Super Tuesday in early March, leaving the current Democratic field to battle over early states like Iowa and New Hampshire.

Even Bloomberg’s close advisers acknowledge his intended strategy would be an experiment, with the potential to fizzle if another candidate comes out of the early states with runaway momentum.

Bloomberg took an incremental step toward mounting that kind of candidacy on Tuesday, flying to Little Rock, Arkansas, to file paperwork to contest the state’s March primary. He is contemplating a trip to North Carolina, another Super Tuesday state far from the Iowa-New Hampshire circuit, as soon as this week, people close to him said.

Michael John Gray, chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party, met briefly with Bloomberg in Little Rock and said he had the potential to generate “a lot of buzz” there because few presidential candidates have visited so far.

“You do that by showing up in places where people don’t show up,” Gray said.

In contrast, Patrick and his allies have been reaching out to Democrats in the early primary and caucus states. The former governor initially rejected making a White House bid last year, in part because his wife had received a cancer diagnosis, but she has been given a clean bill of health, according to Massachusetts Democrats.

Patrick, who has not responded to requests for comment, spent part of Tuesday on the phone with Democratic officials, explaining his thinking about how he could make a last-minute entry into the primary.

Yet longtime Democrats said that if Patrick has any hopes of getting the nomination, he’ll need to act quickly and have more than a little luck come his way.

“He’s got to move fast,” said former South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges, noting that Patrick is little known in a state he’d likely count on because of its large population of black primary voters. Indeed, Patrick has already missed the filing deadlines in Alabama and Arkansas.

But Hodges had little difficulty imagining a favorable scenario for Patrick.

“If Biden doesn’t do well in the first two states, that would clearly create an opportunity for Patrick in South Carolina,” he said, referring to Iowa and New Hampshire.

Bloomberg’s emerging campaign is still finalizing elements of its strategy, but in addition to skipping the earliest-voting states it is likely to involve running television and digital ads on a national scale and targeting Trump as an adversary well before the general election.

His polling has found Democratic voters receptive to a message about his biography in business and government. Central to Bloomberg’s thinking is that he will be able to project his positive message on a vastly greater scale than his opponents’ attacks.

Howard Wolfson, an adviser to Bloomberg, said the former mayor would present an appealing figure to primary voters who are “increasingly looking for the strongest general election candidate to challenge the president.”

“Electability is key — and we believe that given his unique set of accomplishments in business, government and philanthropy, Mike is that candidate,” Wolfson said. “We have a great story to tell and the means to make sure everyone hears it.”

Still, even in his own polling Bloomberg is an underdog: One close ally said his positive message could lift him into third place under the right conditions, according to Bloomberg’s polling, but that getting into first place would be difficult. For that, Bloomberg would need to embrace some political gambles, like his Super Tuesday gambit.

For both Bloomberg and Patrick, there’s still the matter of hastily constructing a full-scale operation just a couple of months before voting begins. That task may be easier for Bloomberg, who already employs a set of full-time advisers and has the wealth to immediately find more.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg filed his paperwork then sat down for lunch with Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. at one of the city’s best-known barbecue joints. For some, the setting evoked the challenges faced by another Democrat who entered the primary late and based his campaign in the Arkansas capital — retired general Wesley Clark, who mounted a short-lived candidacy for the 2004 nomination.

“Having worked for Wes Clark I can tell you, it’s really hard to build this boat on the water,” said Jamal Simmons, a Democratic strategist.

This article originally appeared in

Why Bloomberg and Deval Patrick Changed Their Minds About 2020

It was late summer and the Democratic presidential primary was in flux. Joe Biden was sinking in national polls and Sen. Elizabeth Warren was on the rise. And two men, Michael R. Bloomberg and Deval Patrick, were again thinking quietly about running for president.

The debate confirmed that the primary race had entered a new phase, defined by Warren’s apparent strength and the increasing willingness of other Democrats to challenge her. She has risen toward the top of the polls while confronting limited resistance from her opponents, and in past debates she attracted a fraction of the hostility that Democrats trained on Biden.

That changed in a dramatic fashion Tuesday, when a group of her rivals voiced sharp skepticism of Warren’s agenda or accused her of taking impractical stances on issues like health care and taxation. Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, insistently charged Warren with evading a “yes-or-no” question on how she would pay for a “Medicare for All” health care system, while Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota cast parts of Warren’s platform as a “pipe dream.” Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas branded Warren’s worldview as overly “punitive.”

Warren sought at every turn to dispense with her critics by casting them as lacking ambition or political grit. When she addressed criticism of her proposal to tax vast private fortunes, for instance, Warren suggested her opponents believed it was “more important to protect billionaires than it is to invest in an entire generation” but did not single out her rivals.

The debate unfolded in a drastically altered political landscape, with Trump facing impeachment and Biden in the center of a firestorm over his son’s financial overseas financial dealings. The candidates were prompted to cover a wide range of issues, including a number that had featured little or not at all in past debates, such as the Turkish invasion of Syria, and the details of gun control policy and the taxation of great wealth.

They also included impeachment. The moderators began with a series of questions about impeachment to each of the 12 candidates — the largest field ever for a primary debate — affording them an opportunity to denounce Trump. And Biden was quickly asked about his son Hunter Biden’s overseas financial work, delivering a narrow, repetitive answer in which he said neither he nor his son had done anything wrong.

Foreign policy played a greater role Tuesday evening than in any other debate, pushed to the political foreground by the renewed outbreak of war and humanitarian catastrophe in Syria. The Democrats chiefly trained their attention on Trump’s role in instigating the crisis there: For instance, Julián Castro, the former housing secretary, condemned Trump for “caging kids on the border and letting ISIS prisoners run free” in Syria.

With Biden a diminished force, Buttigieg and Klobuchar appeared determined to present themselves as strong alternatives for voters in the middle. Both emphasized their Midwestern credentials, and Buttigieg invoked his experience as a military veteran in several wide-ranging answers on foreign policy.

Their new aggressiveness represented a shorter-term calculation about halting Warren’s increasing strength in Iowa. With Warren gaining there, Klobuchar and Buttigieg plainly decided to target her in an effort to appeal to the state’s moderate voters, who so far have lined up with Biden.

With a powerfully funded campaign and an expanding field operation in Iowa, Buttigieg may be uniquely well positioned to assert himself there.

In an intense argument that reflected their changing fortunes in the race, Biden briefly went on the offensive against Warren toward the end of the debate, describing her health care plans as “vague” and demanding in a raised voice that she give him some credit for her signature accomplishment, the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after the 2008 financial crisis. Warren expressed gratitude for the help she had received — not from Biden but from former President Barack Obama.

But Warren was on the defensive for much of the evening and most of all on the issue of single-payer health care, when she again declined to specify precisely how she would fund a sweeping system of government-backed insurance. Unlike Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Warren has not acknowledged in plain terms that a Medicare for All plan would quite likely have to substitute broad-based taxes for private insurance premiums and other costs.

“I will not sign a bill into law that does not lower costs for middle-class families,” Warren said, declining to elaborate.

Klobuchar, in her most assertive debate performance yet, chided Warren for not explaining to voters “where we’re going to send the invoice” for single-payer care.

“At least Bernie’s being honest here,” Klobuchar said.

Warren was squeezed, at times, from the left as well: While Sanders never broke their informal nonaggression pact, he agreed with several of the moderates that it was “appropriate” to enumerate the financial trade-offs involved in single-payer health care, including taxes on Americans that would be “substantially less than what they were paying for premiums and out-of-pocket expenses.”

And while Sanders, who had a heart attack this month, was forced to address new concerns about his health, his campaign aides confirmed during the debate that he had secured an endorsement from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York that could inject new energy into his candidacy.

But there were also the germs of a broader debate about the role of the United States in the Middle East: In an intense exchange between the two military veterans onstage, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii said that it was not only Trump who had “the blood of the Kurds on his hands,” but also politicians in both parties and news media organizations that had cheered for “regime change war.”

Her remarks drew forceful pushback from Buttigieg, who said Gabbard was “dead wrong,” arguing that “the slaughter going on in Syria is not a consequence of American presence — it is a consequence of a withdrawal and a betrayal by this president of American allies and American values.”

While Biden and Warren did not clash directly over foreign policy, they diverged in a stark fashion over the situation in Syria. Biden said he would want to keep U.S. troops there and convey to the Turkish government that it would pay a “heavy price” for its invasion. Warren said she opposed Trump’s handling of the situation but believed the United States should “get out of the Middle East.”

Throughout the evening, Biden played a far less central role than he did in past debates, stepping to the foreground for exchanges over foreign policy but otherwise taking a more passive approach. His most important moment of the night may have come early on, when he was pressed by a moderator to explain why his son had not crossed any ethical lines by doing business in Ukraine while his father was overseeing diplomacy there for the Obama administration.

Biden said several times that he and his son had done “nothing wrong,” and alluded repeatedly to an interview Hunter Biden gave to ABC News, in which he said it had been an error in judgment to sit on the board of a Ukrainian gas company while the elder Biden was vice president. Trump has accused the Bidens of corruption, often in false or exaggerated terms, and his efforts to enlist the government of Ukraine in tarring Biden instigated an impeachment inquiry.

“This is about Trump’s corruption,” Biden said. “That’s what we should be focusing on.”

None of Biden’s Democratic rivals chose to press the subject, reflecting both the political sensitivity of issues touching on Biden’s family and also a calculation, by his most immediate rivals, that Biden is likely to continue sinking in the race without a further onslaught from fellow Democrats. While a number of candidates are hoping to peel away moderate voters from Biden, they tried to do so Tuesday by challenging the left rather than by blasting the leading candidate of the center.

Defending his political stature, Biden at one point described himself as “the only one on this stage who has gotten anything really big done,” and cited his work on the Violence Against Women Act and the Obama administration’s health care law.

That argument drew a fierce response from Sanders, who said Biden had also achieved far less laudable feats, like the passage of the NAFTA trade deal and a law tightening the federal bankruptcy code. “You got the disastrous war in Iraq done,” Sanders said.

And Warren, too, took issue with Biden’s claim, pointing to her role as the architect of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — an agency, she said, that represented “structural change in our economy.” In a moment of crackling tension, Biden raised his voice and urged Warren to give him credit, too, for the birth of the agency.

“I went onto the floor and got you votes,” he said.

Warren retorted by saying she was “deeply grateful for President Obama, who fought so hard to make sure that agency was passed into law,” as well as for others in the administration who did the same.

Just as striking as the offensives by Klobuchar and Buttigieg were the more passive showings by Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris — both of whom were counting on a strong outing.

Booker repeatedly said the focus of the debate should be on Trump. He denounced the moderators’ questions about Biden’s son. “The only person sitting at home enjoying that was Donald Trump,” Booker said.

And he even defended the fitness of the septuagenarian candidates onstage — Biden, Sanders and Warren — by noting that Trump would be the least healthy candidate running in 2020. Harris also mostly trained her fire on the president, at one point using her new catch line: “Dude gotta go.”

The only moment when Harris showed any appetite for tangling with the other candidates was when she demanded to know why Warren would not join her in urging Twitter to remove the president’s account.

Harris seemed more focus on trying to build support with women, as she spoke most forcefully about the importance of defending abortion rights. “It is her body, it is her right, it is her decision,” she said.

After presenting her message at the previous three debates with only intermittent challenges from her rivals, Warren was met with cutting criticism of her signature populist flourishes.

“I want to give a reality check to Elizabeth,” said Klobuchar, before alluding to another candidate onstage, hedge fund executive Tom Steyer. “No one on this stage wants to protect billionaires. Not even the billionaire wants to protect billionaires. We just have different approaches.”

Buttigieg was just as pointed, repeatedly casting Warren as a “Washington politician,” but he and Klobuchar were not alone. Even lagging candidates such as O’Rourke and Andrew Yang, a former tech entrepreneur, took on Warren, all but confirming her front-runner status.

And while she was eager to articulate her progressive vision here, Warren seemed just as cognizant that she must broaden her coalition beyond her core base of upscale liberal whites. She repeatedly cited her support for adding funding to historically black colleges and cited her brothers, who still live in her native and Oklahoma and two of whom are Republicans.

Sanders was not as ubiquitous a presence as he had been at past debates, but he drew applause by preempting a question about his health. “I’m healthy, I’m feeling great,” he said before vowing “a vigorous campaign.”

That, Sanders said, “is how I think I can reassure the American people.”

Warren Draws Fire From All Sides, Reflecting a Shift in Fortunes in Race

WESTERVILLE, OHIO — Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts faced a sustained barrage of criticism from her Democratic rivals at a presidential debate in Ohio on Tuesday, tangling with a group of underdog moderates who assailed her liberal economic proposals, while former Vice President Joe Biden appeared to fade from the fray after parrying President Donald Trump’s attacks on his family.

Biden and his campaign aides have said since the start of the race that they would not welcome an outside spending effort on his behalf, and every other major Democratic candidate has sworn off super PACs for the duration of the primary. A spokesman for Biden on Thursday reiterated that he opposed super PACs and would reject any such group that attempted to support him.

Yet several former staffers of Biden and political donors backing his candidacy have held conversations in recent weeks about moving ahead with a super PAC, and said Trump’s furious, and often unsubstantiated, allegations about the former vice president had convinced them it was imperative they act.

“For me, this week puts everything into stark relief,” said Larry Rasky, a former aide to Biden who is now a political fundraiser and public relations executive. “And I was already thinking the campaign was being a little naïve about the resources we’d need to fight this.”

In Rasky’s office in Washington last week, a small group of Biden allies briefly discussed the possibility of a pro-Biden super PAC. Philip Munger, a prominent Democratic donor, and Mark Riddle, a political strategist, were among those who participated.

Conversations about a super PAC were well underway earlier this month, even before news broke of Trump’s attempt to enlist the leader of Ukraine to investigate Biden. Riddle was involved in filing paperwork for a pro-Biden super PAC, named For the People, earlier this year. The Biden campaign disavowed it last spring, and there is no evidence that the group has raised any money since then.

Riddle suggested that could change.

“The vice president is getting hit from all directions,” Riddle said, alluding to some negative advertising by a Republican group, Great America PAC. “A lot of us believe there should be a fair fight. He can hold his own with his campaign in these early states or whatnot, but there’s only so much incoming somebody can take without a response.”

T.J. Ducklo, a spokesman for Biden, said Biden would reject any super PACs that joined the race on his side. Invoking the Supreme Court decision that made such groups legal, Ducklo said Biden “has long advocated to reverse Citizens United and stand up against the corrupt money in our politics.”

And while some of Biden’s supporters see the anti-Biden efforts by Trump’s allies as a reason to solicit their own outside money, Ducklo said the campaign took an opposing view.

“The attacks aimed at this campaign from dark money groups helping Donald Trump spread his outlandish lies and slander have only served as a reminder of the urgent need for campaign finance reform,” Ducklo said. “Which is exactly why since the beginning of this campaign, Biden for President has not and will not welcome the help of super PACs. That goes for those that purport to help him, despite his explicit condemnation of their existence.”

In addition to its public statements, Biden’s campaign has warned off some Democrats from participating in a super PAC. One prominent Democrat, David Wilhelm, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said he had been approached about being involved in the pro-Biden super PAC but had declined to do so after the campaign urged him against it.

Riddle said a final decision about whether to deploy a super PAC for Biden would be made in “the coming weeks.”

Biden clearly needs to jolt his campaign, which has lost ground in the early nominating states to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has been largely unscathed by her rivals. And the vice president’s longtime friends increasingly believe that Warren’s growing strength — along with Trump’s offensive — is reason enough to risk the backlash they would get from their opponents and campaign finance reform advocates for creating a group reliant on large contributions. But Riddle said there had been no final decision on whether to proceed with a super PAC, in part because of this risk. Biden’s two leading competitors for his party’s nomination, Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, have made getting big money out of politics a major theme of their campaigns. And Biden has already drawn criticism for his comparative reliance on wealthy donors to fund his candidacy.

“I’m mindful that any effort to do this is going to be disowned by the campaign because of the way Warren has replayed her hand,” said Rasky, alluding to the senator’s decision not to solicit large campaign checks as a presidential candidate, despite having done so in her Senate campaign.

Riddle said that any pro-Biden advertising would be focused on responding to attacks from Trump and Republicans, rather than targeting other Democrats.

Despite Munger’s presence at the meeting last week, Riddle said Munger was not involved in devising the pro-Biden group and had not contributed any money so far. Munger is the son of Charles Munger, a billionaire who is the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s investment firm.

There have been a few fitful attempts to use super PACs on behalf of specific Democratic presidential candidates, but none of them has had a major impact on the race. A super PAC promoting Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington ran a wave of television ads in Iowa, but Inslee did not rise in the polls. And Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey sternly disavowed an effort by one Democratic donor, Steve Phillips, to lead a super PAC promoting his campaign.

Tiffany Muller, president of End Citizens United, a progressive group that supports stricter campaign finance laws, said Biden was right to reject any group that might attempt to raise and spend money in unlimited increments. She credited him with being “an outspoken opponent of single-candidate super PACs.”

“The Democratic nominee should be chosen by voters, not millionaires and corporate special interests,” Muller said.

Still, Biden’s political position now appears precarious enough that some of his supporters believe it may be worth taking the considerable risk of activating a group that could raise and spend large sums of money to support him.

While Biden remains at the top of the Democratic field, his poll numbers have slowly weakened over the course of the race, leaving him at risk of slipping behind Warren or Sanders in three of the four early primary and caucus states. A poll released this week by Quinnipiac University found Warren slightly ahead of Biden in the preferences of Democratic voters nationwide, though her lead was less than the margin of error.

The next round of fundraising reports, due after the end of the month, will also reveal whether Biden is still in a strong financial position relative to his nearest competitors. In the last quarter, Biden raised the second-most money of any candidate, trailing only Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. But he finished June with less money in the bank than Buttigieg, Warren, Sanders and Sen. Kamala Harris of California.

Anxious Biden Allies May Unleash Super PAC

Allies of Joe Biden, concerned about his slipping poll numbers in the Democratic presidential primary and an onslaught of attacks from President Donald Trump, are weighing whether to mobilize a super PAC supporting Biden and have held conversations with wealthy donors to gauge their interest in contributing money.

Biden, the leading candidate in the Democratic presidential race, entered the debate under pressure to articulate a more forceful rationale for his campaign and turn back attacks from his fellow Democrats, after failing to do so in his clash with Harris in the first debate in June.

In a handful of moments, Biden did just that, delivering pointed critiques of Harris and other challengers. But it was unclear by the end of the forum whether he was any closer to allaying liberals’ reservations about his candidacy, or inspiring a Democratic Party that is eager to defeat President Donald Trump but has shifted to the left in the years since Biden served as vice president under Barack Obama. Although he may have won sympathy from Democratic voters for absorbing so many blows, he did not deliver a commanding performance to reclaim firm control of the race.

And in a sign of the party’s drift, Biden was forced to not only defend his own record but also answer sharp questions about policies of Obama on issues such as immigration and trade.

Where ideology framed the conversation, the divisions resembled a mirror image of the dynamics that governed the first Democratic debate this week. On Tuesday, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, the populist liberals who have largely defined their party’s issue agenda, locked arms to deflect attacks from a gang of moderate underdogs, including Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana and former Rep. John Delaney of Maryland. In the second debate, it was Biden and his relatively centrist values under collective assault.

Taken together, though, the back-to-back debates only threw the party’s factions into stark relief while delivering little clarity about the direction of a race that features well-funded candidates from its populist and moderate wings as well as a handful of contenders attempting to straddle the divide.

In the opening moments of the debate, Biden took particular aim at Harris, accusing her of peddling “double talk” on health care and insisting that a range of liberal plans to displace the private health insurance system were too disruptive and too costly. He chided Harris for her proposal of a decadelong transition to a version of single-payer health care, urging voters to be skeptical “anytime somebody tells you you’re going to get something good in 10 years.”

“My response is: Obamacare is working,” said Biden, who has proposed the creation of an optional, government-backed health insurance plan.

Harris, on defense for the first time against Biden, insisted that her plan would do far more than his to ensure universal coverage: “Your plan, by contrast,” she retorted, “leaves out almost 10 million Americans.”

Yet by the end of the debate, Biden was besieged, attacked from all sides on a plethora of subjects including health care, immigration, trade, criminal justice, climate change, women’s rights and the war in Iraq. As he did at times in the first debate, he cut some of his answers short and stumbled over lines. And he flashed his impatience with rivals, like Booker and Harris, who he said were harrying him over events that occurred “a long, long time ago.”

Booker, among others, insisted that Biden’s half-century record was entirely fair game. Pointing to Biden’s history of shepherding harsh criminal-justice bills into law, Booker questioned whether the former vice president could lead the country forward on that and other contentious issues.

“This is one of those instances where the house was set on fire and you claimed responsibility for those laws,” Booker said. “And you can’t just now come out with a plan to put out that fire.”

While Biden found himself facing the most insistent attacks, Harris also came under fire and did not appear as steady as she did in the first debate, which breathed new life into her campaign. On Wednesday, it was Booker who often appeared to be the more formidable alternative to the front-runner.

If Tuesday’s debate defined the philosophical gulf within the Democratic Party, the Wednesday debate played out as a more complicated and personality-driven affair, featuring layers of political feuds and interlocking arguments over policy and electoral strategy.

At several early moments in the debate, some candidates onstage exhorted Democrats to keep their attention on Trump and the Republican Party, and especially on their hard-line immigration policies and efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. As Biden and Harris battled over the idea of “Medicare for All,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand trained her fire on Republicans whose “whole goal is to take away your health care.”

In the midst of another Biden-Harris duel, midway through the debate, Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado erupted in impatience with the two of them for once again “debating what people did 50 years ago with busing” — the subject of Harris’ searing confrontation with the former vice president in June.

“Our schools are as segregated today as they were 50 years ago,” Bennet said. “We need a conversation about what’s happening now.”

And in an extended, contentious discussion of immigration, several Democrats attempted to shift attention away from their own disagreements and toward the policies of the Trump administration.

“We can no longer allow a white nationalist to be in the White House,” said Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, adding, “We have to make America what it’s always been: a place of refuge.”

But Inslee, too, took aim at Biden, describing himself as the only person on stage to have voted against the Iraq War — Biden took the opposite position — and branding Biden’s climate platform as an insufficient answer to a planetary crisis.

The most protracted clashes of the evening concerned criminal justice and immigration, and put several candidates besides Biden on the defensive. Attempting to preempt liberal attacks on his immigration record, Biden went on offense against Castro — the most vocal advocate for liberal immigration policy in the Democratic field — noting that he could not recall the former San Antonio mayor criticizing the Obama administration’s border policies when he was serving in the Cabinet.

“If you cross the border illegally, you should be able to be sent back; it’s a crime,” said Biden, rejecting Castro’s plan to decriminalize illegal immigration.

Castro shot back that “it looks like one of us has learned the lessons of the past and one of us hasn’t,” and added that the only element missing in border policy is “politicians who have some guts.”

“I have guts enough to say his plan doesn’t make sense,” Biden retorted.

Still, the former vice president found himself fending off multiple attacks on the aggressive deportation policies of Obama, forcing him to choose between whether to defend a former president beloved by Democrats or align himself with the more liberal party of 2019. Pressed by Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City to say whether he had attempted to halt large-scale deportations when he was vice president, Biden evaded the question, saying he would not reveal his private conversations with Obama.

“You need to be able to answer the tough questions,” said de Blasio, in a jab that became something of a regular refrain throughout the evening.

But Biden’s position grew even more uncomfortable when Booker, standing just to his right, said: “You invoke President Obama more than anybody in this campaign. You can’t do it when it’s convenient and then dodge it when it’s not.”

Biden did come prepared for a clash over criminal justice and took aim at Booker’s tenure as mayor of Newark. “In 2007 you became mayor and you had a police department that was, you went out and hired Rudy Giuliani’s guy and engaged in stop and frisk,” he said.

Booker, however, had a counterattack planned. “You’re dipping into the Kool-Aid and you don’t even know the flavor,” he said, drawing laughter and applause.

Repeatedly highlighting the hard-line crime bill Biden wrote in the 1990s, Booker said: “There are people right now in prison for life for drug offenses because you stood up and used that tough on crime phony rhetoric that got a lot of people elected but destroyed communities like mine.”

Perhaps the only attack Biden deflected more or less easily was also among the most personal charges of the night, when Gillibrand cited an opinion article he wrote in 1981 criticizing a bill offering high-income families tax credits for day care. Gillibrand invoked a line from the piece to claim that he had argued that mothers working outside the house could lead to “deterioration of the family.”

But Gillibrand had signaled days earlier that she would raise the topic and Biden denied that was his view and quickly shifted the discussion to his own experience raising his two sons as “a single father” following his first wife’s death in a car accident. When she continued to demand an answer about his position, Biden smiled, recalling the praise Gillibrand had previously lavished on him.

“I don’t know what happened except you’re now running for president,” he said, to laughter from the crowd.

Biden also got a respite when Rep. Tulsi Gabbard took aim at Harris’ record as a prosecutor in California.

“She put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana,” Gabbard said of Harris. “She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so.”

Harris defended her record as state attorney general, arguing that her criminal justice overhaul became “a national model for the work that needs to be done.”

The friction over criminal justice, like other issues, seemed to make some candidates on stage uneasy. Andrew Yang, a former technology executive who has urged Democrats to treat the automation of working-class jobs as an urgent crisis, repeatedly nudged his fellow candidates away from their messiest confrontations.

“I speak for just about everyone watching when I say I would trust anyone on this stage much more than I would trust our current president on matters of criminal justice,” Yang said.

Far from resolving anything, the debate seemed to showcase just how messy and protracted the Democratic race could be. If Biden’s first debate held out the possibility of a rocket-like ascent by Harris, this one may have presaged a different trajectory for the race — one that has the former vice president persistently unable to quell resistance on the left, but with no singular rival emerging anytime soon as a focal point for that resistance.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/us/politics/democratic-presidential-debate-recap.html" id="1812146d-6208-3190-aa65-cf3ec92de87a">The New York Times</a>.

Biden Under Fire From All Sides as Rivals Attack His Record

DETROIT — Former Vice President Joe Biden delivered a steadfast defense of his moderate policies in the Democratic primary debate Wednesday, striking back at a familiar adversary, Sen. Kamala Harris, but facing intensifying attacks on his record from liberal rivals including Sen. Cory Booker and Julián Castro, the former housing secretary.

But it was unclear by the end of the forum whether Biden was any closer to allaying liberals’ reservations about his candidacy, or inspiring a Democratic Party that is eager to defeat President Donald Trump but has shifted to the left in the years since the former vice president served under Barack Obama. Though he may have won sympathy from Democratic voters for absorbing so many blows, he did not deliver a commanding performance to reclaim firm command of the race.

And in a sign of the party’s drift, Biden was repeatedly forced to defend not only his own record but also questioned sharply about policies of Obama on issues such as immigration and trade.

Booker, among others, insisted that Biden’s half-century record was entirely fair game. Pointing to Biden’s history of shepherding harsh criminal-justice laws into law, Booker questioned whether the former vice president could lead the country forward on that and other contentious issues.

While Biden found himself facing the most insistent attacks, Harris also came under fire and did not appear as steady as she did in the first debate, which breathed new life into her campaign.

But if Tuesday’s debate defined the philosophical gulf within the Democratic Party, the Wednesday debate played out as a more complicated and personality-driven affair, featuring layers of political feuds and interlocking arguments over policy and electoral strategy.

Biden did, though, come prepared for a clash over criminal justice and took aim at Booker’s tenure as mayor of Newark. “In 2007 you became mayor and you had a police department that was, you went out and hired Rudy Giuliani’s guy and engaged in stop and frisk,” he said.

But Gillibrand had signaled days earlier that she would raise the topic and Biden denied that was his view and quickly shifted the discussion to his own experience raising his two sons as “a single father” following his first wife’s death in a car accident.When she continued to demand an answer about his position, Biden smiled, recalling the praise Gillibrand had previously lavished on him.

Harris defended her record as state attorney general, arguing that her criminal justice overhaul became “a national model for the work that needs to be done.” And she appeared to take aim at Gabbard, who is barely registering in the polls and has left little mark in the House, saying that as a prosecutor she chose to do more than “just give fancy speeches.”

Far from resolving anything, the debate seemed to showcase just how messy and protracted the Democratic race could be. If Biden’s first debate held out the possibility of a rocket-like ascent by Harris, this one may have presaged a different trajectory for the race — one that has the former vice president persistently unable to quell resistance on the left, but with no singular rival emerging as a focal point for that resistance.

Biden-Harris Rivalry Flares Anew as Democrats Spar on Health Care, Criminal Justice

Standing side by side in Detroit, the two candidates whose clash over race and school integration defined the first round of debates in June engaged each other at once on the question of how to cover Americans’ medical costs. This time Biden took the offensive, noting that Harris had rolled out “several plans so far,” the most recent of which would take 10 years to kick in and cost trillions to disrupt the existing system of private insurance.

Voters, Biden said, should be skeptical “anytime somebody tells you you’re going to get something good in 10 years.”

Harris fired back quickly. “You’re just simply inaccurate in what you’re describing,” she said, countering that Biden’s proposal to create an elective government-backed health insurance option would leave many Americans uncovered.

“Your plan, by contrast, leaves out almost 10 million Americans,” she said, adding, “The cost of doing nothing is far too expensive.”

But Biden persisted. Echoing some of the criticism that centrist Democrats leveled against Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in Tuesday night’s debate, the former vice president warned that Harris’ plan would be costly, disruptive and slow to take effect.

Defending his own proposal, Biden called it a prudent update to the system devised under the Obama administration.

“My response is: Obamacare is working,” he said.

It was the second night of lengthy and contentious exchanges among the candidates over the future of health care in the country. Like the 10 contenders who debated Tuesday, the candidates split over whether the country should retain some form of the Affordable Care Act or completely transform the system into some form of “Medicare for All.”

The exchanges over health care on both nights exposed a fundamental schism in the party, between more traditional reformers who are seeking to improve on the policies of the Obama administration and aggressive liberals who hope to overhaul the U.S. economy and government in a comprehensive way.

At several early moments in the debate, other candidates onstage exhorted Democrats to keep their attention on President Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s efforts to strike down the Affordable Care Act. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York told viewers that for Republicans, “their whole goal is to take away your health care,” while Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey lamented that “the person enjoying this debate most right now is Donald Trump.” He implored Democratic rivals to stop “saying one is unrealistic and the other doesn’t care enough.”

Yet there were signs early on that even the lower-profile candidates onstage were looking to shake up the race through confrontation. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City, for instance, used his opening statement to blast both the leading candidates onstage, Biden and Harris, depicting them as guardians of the status quo and vowing that he would “tax the hell out of the wealthy.”

“Joe Biden told wealthy donors that nothing, fundamentally, would change if he were president; Kamala Harris said she’s not trying to restructure society,” de Blasio said, countering: “Well, I am.”

But even de Blasio, who is currently an asterisk in the polls, could not escape controversy: His opening remarks were interrupted by protesters bellowing, “Fire Pantaleo” — a reference to the New York City police officer whose rough physical treatment of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, led to his death in 2014, and whose status on the force remains unresolved.

If Tuesday’s debate defined the ideological gulf within the Democratic Party, in unmistakable and often contentious terms, the Wednesday debate appeared likely to play out as a more complicated and personality-driven affair, featuring layers of political feuds and interlocking arguments over policy and electoral strategy.

The first debate put two liberals, Warren of Massachusetts and Sanders, center stage, where they were forced to defend their ideas from a centrist onslaught. The second debate was expected to be shaped, more than anything else, by the comparatively moderate front-runner, Biden.

Conflict between Biden and Harris had the potential to define the evening, after their first clash in the June debate in Miami jolted both their candidacies and threatened to harm Biden’s. In that event, Harris delivered a searing rebuke of Biden’s political and legislative judgment, assailing the former vice president for having worked with segregationist senators in the 1970s to oppose school busing — a policy, she noted, that aided her own path through the public schools in Berkeley, California.

Biden was left grasping for a rebuttal and afterward indicated that he was personally stung by the attack; the contrast between Harris assured critique, and his unsteady response dented Biden’s support in polls, where Democratic voters have tended to back him chiefly because they see him as a strong competitor for the general election against Trump.

Yet Biden appears to have recovered much of his strength in polls over the intervening month. And while Harris’ support has risen, it is not clear whether she has managed to convert her debate-stage electricity into sustained gains: In many polls, she still trails not only Biden but also Warren and Sanders.

Biden signaled his early broadsides against Harris in the days before the debate, indicating that he was prepared to go after Harris aggressively on matters of policy and most of all on the proposal for a modified Medicare for All health care system that she unveiled Monday. Aimed in part at preempting criticism from Biden, her plan includes a longer phase-in period and a larger role for private insurance than the single-payer plan Sanders has championed. But it drew instant criticism from the left and the relative center for watering down Sanders’ ideas for a comprehensive overhaul without achieving the pragmatism of Biden’s vision.

Harris, meanwhile, declined to telegraph her own offensive strategy in advance of the debate — the same discreet approach she took ahead of the Miami event that galvanized her campaign.

Biden’s paramount task in the debate may have been to allay Democrats’ angst about his strength as a general election candidate. Polls show most voters consistently name him as the Democrat best equipped to defeat Trump, but his unsteady first debate plainly raised doubts. And Biden has not put to rest serious concerns across the party about his ability to inspire much of the Democratic base, especially younger and more liberal voters — people who may be more drawn to Harris, or to Warren or Sanders.

If the challengers onstage Wednesday, like Harris, are to threaten Biden’s overall advantage in the race, they will likely have to explain to voters why they are better prepared than he is to take on Trump in states like Michigan.

But Biden and Harris were not alone onstage Wednesday, and the diverse array of competitors joining them was expected to present challenges for both, particularly for the former vice president. Perhaps most vexing was the presence of three liberals who are seeking a breakthrough moment and who have not hesitated to draw sharp distinctions in the campaign: Booker, and Gillibrand and Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor and federal housing secretary.

In his first debate in June, Castro startled the Democratic field with his uncharacteristically combative approach, harrying former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas with persistent attacks on his immigration proposals. There was ample material in the records of both Biden and Harris to invite the same approach.

And Gillibrand — who like Castro is struggling to qualify for the third round of debates in September — appeared to have provided a preview of an intended attack on Biden last weekend, alluding on the campaign trail to a candidate who had questioned the value of women working outside the home. Advisers to the former vice president took it as a reference to his opposition in the early 1980s to an expanded child tax credit; even before the debate got underway they circulated a memo to supporters predicting she and others onstage would attempt “to knock out Biden.”

But the most unpredictable figure may be Booker. Though not a brawler by nature, he has been increasingly eager to highlight differences between his record and Biden’s on criminal justice, recently calling him “the proud architect of a failed system.” Booker has been building a substantial field operation on the ground in the early primary states and methodically collecting endorsements from local power brokers there, but he has so far lacked a moment of ignition on the national level.

By his presence, though, Booker had the potential to transform the dynamics that ruled the first Biden-Harris debate in June: When Harris confronted Biden the first time, she did so as the only candidate of color onstage. Now, Biden will be sandwiched between Harris and Booker, two candidates who have been sharply critical of his record and who represent a glaring contrast in age and identity. Both African American senators believe they must crack Biden’s strong support with black voters in order to win the nomination.

Two potential wild cards were Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, an anti-war candidate who has repeatedly defended Biden from Harris’ criticism, and Andrew Yang, a former tech executive running as a political outsider. Yang prepared for the debate in part by making light of his competitors’ public chest-thumping and vowing theatrically on Twitter to take down a candidate of similar obscurity.

“I would like to signal to the press that I will be attacking Michael Bennet at next week’s debate,” he wrote. “Sorry @MichaelBennet but you know what you did.”

Biden-Harris Rivalry Flares From the Start in Testy Exchange Over Health Care

DETROIT — Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris of California renewed their political rivalry almost instantly on the debate stage Wednesday night, as Biden accused Harris of peddling “double talk” on the central campaign issue of health care and Harris defended her newly unveiled plan as a pragmatic version of single-payer care.

On an evening that could have produced explosions in their own political rivalry, Sanders and Warren instead formed something of an ideological tag team to defend their shared agenda, above all on health care. Though each is seen as the other’s chief obstacle in the Democratic race, Sanders and Warren did not at any point clash directly.

Instead, they battled an array of comparatively obscure candidates who used the debate as an opportunity — and for some of them, likely a last chance — to express alarm about their party’s embrace of immense liberal policy goals, like the creation of a “Medicare for All”-style health care system, Sanders’ No. 1 issue, and a broad liberalization of the immigration system.

There was former Rep. John Delaney of Maryland, who accused Sanders and Warren of making “fairy tale” promises; Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, who lamented liberal “wish-list economics”; and former Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, imploring the left not to overreach and “FedEx the election to Donald Trump.”

Arguing in somewhat subtler terms was Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who declined multiple chances to lash her liberal rivals by name but questioned the viability of their progressive stances on health care and education.

“I have bold ideas,” Klobuchar said, “but they are grounded in reality.”

With Sanders and Warren refusing to yield an inch, the debate laid bare the stark choice before Democratic primary voters: whether to embrace an agenda of transformational economic change in an effort to motivate young and nonwhite voters, or to proceed more cautiously against a vulnerable president by embracing more incremental appeals that could win over moderates.

Both Warren and Sanders insisted that their more daring approach would lead Democrats to victory, and depicted their more moderate critics as bereft of ambition and political courage.

Democrats, Sanders said, had to wage a campaign “of energy and excitement, and of vision,” or risk losing to Trump a second time.

“We need to bring millions of young people into the political process in a way that we have never seen by among other things, making public colleges and universities tuition free and canceling student debt,” Sanders said.

Warren, likewise, warned the party not to nominate “a candidate we don’t believe in, just because we’re too scared to do anything else,” and in an exchange with Delaney expressed exasperation with what she portrayed as his electoral doomsaying.

“I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for the president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for,” Warren said to applause. “I don’t get it.”

The most protracted exchanges of the night, and by far the most substantive ones, concerned Sanders’ signature proposal to replace private health insurance with a single payer system of the kind employed in Canada and a number of European countries. Delaney and the other moderates attacked the proposal from the first minutes of the debate, calling it a politically toxic idea that would void the health care plans of union members and of employees of private businesses.

“We don’t have to go around and be the party of subtraction, and telling half the country, who has private health insurance, that their health insurance is illegal,” Delaney said.

Sanders defended his plan ferociously, with periodic help from Warren. He cast Delaney and other Democratic doubters as champions of an indefensible system, and argued that opponents of single payer tended to brand the system with traits — like costliness and unpredictability — that the American health care system already possesses.

DETROIT — The leading liberals in the Democratic presidential primary, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, strenuously fought back Tuesday against accusations of making fanciful promises and imperiling the party’s prospects for defeating President Donald Trump, as a group of moderate underdogs sought to slow their momentum in the second round of debates.

Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin

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