Who’s on stage tonight?
Biden in the hot seat
Every candidate but one on stage Thursday has recently participated in a nationally televised town hall forum, taking tough questions with the cameras rolling. The exception is Mr. Biden.
The first debate will be one of the first times since he entered the race that Mr. Biden, the former vice president, will be pressed for answers about both his record and his vision for the future. He’ll answer in front of a national audience of millions.
Yes, Mr. Biden has run for president twice before, and has been on the debate stage in recent memory — when he ran on his own in 2008, and in the vice-presidential debate that year and in 2012. But years have passed since then, and given that he would be the oldest president ever elected, one of the first tests he will face is whether he looks rusty on stage.
Mr. Biden’s early strength in the polls is expected to make him a magnet for scrutiny, as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont seeks a foil for his argument that there is “no middle ground” when it comes to progressive priorities and others seek to chip away at Mr. Biden’s early lead.
So far, Mr. Biden has preferred to focus on President Trump. But the moderators and rivals could goad him into a defense of his lengthy record.
[Who’s running for president in 2020? Here’s our candidate tracker.]
Sanders and Biden seek to reconnect with Americans. For everyone else, it’s an introduction.
Of the 10 candidates on stage Thursday, only two have previously run for president: Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders. For everyone else, the limited time they will have to speak will be a critical moment to introduce themselves and their visions for America to millions of viewers. For some perspective, consider that Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., who has emerged as a factor in the race in recent months, is still mostly polling in the single digits and remains little known to all but the most engaged voters.
For a party whose electorate is focused, if not obsessed, with defeating Mr. Trump in 2020, the campaigns are keenly aware that any relatively unknown candidate who comes out swinging at fellow Democrats may not be well received. And yet a candidate who does not make a splash early in the race may not be around later. The Democratic National Committee’s requirement that everyone in the third debate have at least 130,000 donors could dramatically cull the field by September.
[18 questions. 21 Democratic candidates. Here’s what they said.]
Two of the X factors on Thursday will be at the far left of the stage, having never held elective office: Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson. Their rivals do not seem to know what to expect from either of them.
Can Harris “prosecute the case”?
Senator Kamala Harris, the former San Francisco district attorney, has focused her campaign on her ability to, as she likes to put it, “prosecute the case” against Mr. Trump.
It’s a line and a tactic that seeks to tap into some of Ms. Harris’s most memorable moments in the last two years: times when she has pressed Trump administration officials in Senate committee hearings. She has wielded her limited questions to maximum effect, most recently with Attorney General William Barr. But those settings are predictable. From the dais, Ms. Harris can run through a prepared list of questions and, ultimately, the witness is powerless to do much but answer them.
Debates are different, and the first one presents a big opportunity for Ms. Harris, whom many Democratic voters seem predisposed to want to like. Among her goals is to present herself as a credible opponent for Mr. Trump, someone ready, as she says, to go through his “rap sheet.” But a challenge facing Ms. Harris — and other Democrats at this early stage — is how to evince such toughness without doing bruising battle with fellow Democrats on stage.
How much will the candidates clash?
The candidates who debated on Wednesday night swiped at each other’s policy views occasionally, but there were only a few moments of fireworks. There were also no extended references to Mr. Biden or Mr. Sanders, even though many of the other candidates are seeking to cut into their bases of support.
Mr. Biden’s team in particular is bracing for a more aggressive approach from the candidates onstage on Thursday. Will they deliver that? And if there are sharp words, will they be directed only at Mr. Biden or Mr. Sanders, or will more rivalries crop up?
On Wednesday, for example, Tim Ryan and Tulsi Gabbard engaged in a pointed argument over the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan, and Julián Castro and Beto O’Rourke had an intense exchange over immigration. Ms. Warren — the poll-leader on Wednesday’s stage — stayed above the fray.
Can Buttigieg land the generational contrast argument?
Mr. Buttigieg, 37, has spent much of his campaign embracing his status as a millennial and arguing that the country should be represented by the next generation of leadership.
On Thursday, he will have the opportunity to draw the sharpest generational contrast yet as he stands next to Mr. Biden and near Mr. Sanders, two septuagenarians more than twice his age.
Will he rely on optics alone, or will Mr. Buttigieg explicitly criticize the perceived misdeeds of his older opponents’ generations?
Mr. Buttigieg, a veteran, has already been critical of Mr. Biden’s vote to authorize the war in Iraq. But prosecuting a more aggressive generational argument could also carry risks. It could create an opening for other candidates to emphasize their experience at a time when Mr. Buttigieg faces tensions at home over a police shooting in South Bend, the biggest crisis his young campaign has faced to date.
[See what issues our readers said they would most like to hear about in the first round of Democratic debates.]
Will Miami’s challenges shape the message?
Every day, Miami struggles with the challenges of climate change. The city is forced to confront the real-world implications of rising sea levels for its streets and even its water supply.
Democrats descend on Miami at a time when polls show that the issue of climate change is increasingly important to Democratic voters. A number of the most prominent presidential contenders have released plans for combating climate change.
Will the Miami setting make climate change a more dominant issue in the debate?
Meanwhile, the Homestead facility for unaccompanied migrant children is about 30 miles from Miami, and several of the contenders have visited or plan to. The debate will unfold as a shocking photograph circulates of a migrant father and his young daughter, who died while attempting to reach the United States and seek asylum.
Look for immigration to be top of mind for some of the candidates.