Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and Tom Steyer all took center stage at the CNN/Des Moines Register debate on Tuesday night and most candidates did not hold back.
This debate in Iowa is a critical one, as it's the last chance for candidates to go head-to-head before February's Iowa caucuses. Inevitably, things got heated.
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While the candidates were able to unify on some issues like their disdain for President Donald Trump and his foreign policy regarding Iran, some very clear schisms within the party became evident on Tuesday.
So much so that New York Post debate analyst and the founder of Bluejacket Strategies, a public affairs firm in New York, Peter Kauffmann, declared, "Preseason is over. The Democratic race got real tonight, and these candidates started to realize that only one of them is leaving Iowa with a W."
Warren vs. Sanders
The debate got personal between the two progressive candidates. After the Warren campaign leaked a report saying that Sanders didn't believe a woman could be elected president, the septuagenarian senator flatly denied he made the comment.
"As a matter of fact, I didn't say it," Sanders said. "How could anybody in a million years not believe that a woman could become the president of the United States?"
Warren though, calmly issued a swift and effective rebuttal against Sanders and the other male candidates, saying, "Look at the men on this stage. Collectively, they have lost ten elections. The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they've been in are the women. Amy and me," referring to Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar.
The tension between the two appeared to continue even after the debate as Sanders approached Warren to shake her hand, only to have Warren clasp her hands together in what looked like an intense conversation between the two.
To make matters even more uncomfortable, fellow candidate Tom Steyer looked on and was largely ignored by the two senators.
"I don't know what they were saying," Steyer told MSNBC. "Whatever they were going on between each other, I was trying to get out of the way as fast as possible."
Elizabeth Warren with some words for Bernie Sanders #DemocraticDebate pic.twitter.com/2varfDM9AG
— Jordan Dajani (@JordanDajani) January 15, 2020
Sanders vs. Biden
Meanwhile, Sanders and Biden squared off regarding the 2002 Iraq War. Sanders attacked Biden for voting for what he called the "worst blunder in modern history."
Biden replied saying that voting for the war was a mistake and one he tried to fix as vice president.
"It was a mistake and I acknowledged that, but the man who argued against the war, Barack Obama, picked me to be vice president … and turned to me and asked me to end the war," Biden said, neglecting to mention that his efforts to withdraw troops from Iraq weren't entirely successful.
With only two weeks to go until that fateful caucuses, candidates know they have to strike a delicate balance between criticizing their opponents and being civil.
"We're down to the end here. That means there's pressure on everybody to try to show off, to be smart, to point out their opponents' weaknesses," Stuart Rothenberg, a political analyst and senior editor of Inside Elections with Nathan Gonzales, told TIME. "But you don't want to go too nasty right at the end here. You don't want to look mean spirited. That's not Midwestern nice."
