The second Democratic presidential debate kicks off in a few minutes at Drake University’s Sheslow Auditorium. Why Democratic National Committee leaders scheduled this event on a Saturday night is beyond me; but then, their whole approach to debates this year has been idiotic. I wonder how many politically-engaged Iowans who would normally tune in for a debate will watch the Iowa Hawkeyes football game against Minnesota tonight.

I’m not a fan of curtain-raisers such as lists of “things to watch for” or mistakes candidates might make. I will update this post later with thoughts on each contender’s performance.

Any comments about tonight’s debate or the Democratic presidential race generally are welcome in this thread. I enclose below the latest commercials Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have been running in Iowa. The new 30-second Sanders spot mostly uses images and phrases pulled from his strong introductory commercial. Clinton’s ad-maker this year is putting out much better material than I remember from her 2007 Iowa caucus campaign. To my knowledge, Martin O’Malley has not aired any television commercials in Iowa yet, but the Generation Forward super-PAC has run at least one spot promoting his candidacy, which Bleeding Heartland posted here.

UPDATE: My first take on the debate is after the jump.

How unfortunate that the DNC buried this debate on a Saturday night, when an Iowa Hawkeyes football game was on another channel. I wish all voters could have seen the substantive, fact-based discussion. The panelists mostly asked good questions, with the exception of the Des Moines Register’s Kathie Obradovich returning to the tired subject of Clinton’s e-mails.

O’Malley was the most-improved candidate. Compared to the first debate, he sounded less scripted and spoke more forcefully. Lots of people googled his name, especially during the first hour. O’Malley’s top moment on Twitter came when he employed a crowd-pleasing line from his stump speech, deriding Donald Trump as an “immigrant-bashing carnival barker.” His problem is that Clinton and Sanders were mostly solid. I don’t see O’Malley making headway against the front-runners unless one or both make big mistakes.

Clinton had a particularly strong opening segment, when the questions focused on terrorism and national security. David Axelrod got it wrong by asserting that Clinton’s “solid answers” were not necessarily “winning” answers. The former senior figure in Barack Obama’s campaign apparently does not realize that for a candidate trying to become the first woman commander in chief, solid answers are winning answers. Axelrod may not understand that no woman with Obama’s 2008 resume would ever be considered qualified for the presidency.

Clinton weathered a shaky patch in the middle, when her close ties to Wall Street came under scrutiny. Sanders and O’Malley pressed the point hard. Clinton drew applause by noting that she is proud to have so many small donors, of whom 60 percent are women. (That was her top moment on Twitter this evening.) But she ventured onto dangerous territory by commenting that when terrorists attacked on 9/11, they picked a target on Wall Street. She defended her banking reform proposals, citing Paul Krugman of the New York Times for cover, but the truth is she has raised a ton of money from people with Wall Street ties. Sanders commented, “Why over her career has Wall Street been the major contributor to Hillary Clinton? Maybe they are dumb, but I don’t think so.” A commercial break materialized at a helpful time for Clinton, and she seemed to regain her footing for the last half-hour or so. Her best line came near the end, when she remarked that if she lived in Iowa, she wouldn’t want Governor Terry Branstad administering her health care.

Another analyst who got it wrong was Chris Cillizza of “The Fix,” who inexplicably prefers debates with eight candidates on stage to those with three candidates. Cillizza wrote tonight that Clinton was a “loser” in the debate: “The problem was that Clinton made a few verbal and/or policy mistakes that will likely haunt her in the days to come.”

Maybe the media will obsess over Clinton’s missteps, but the first post-debate poll showed a crushing victory for the front-runner. (Public Policy Polling surveyed 501 “Democratic primary voters […] who had been pre-screened on Thursday and Friday as planning to watch the debate and willing to give their opinions about it afterward.”) You may take these results with a grain of salt, since Correct the Record, a “hybrid PAC” that was created to support Clinton, commissioned the poll.

-67% of voters think Clinton won the debate, to 20% for Bernie Sanders and 7% for Martin O’Malley. On a related note 63% of viewers said the debate gave them a more positive opinion of Clinton, compared to 41% who said it gave them a more positive opinion of Sanders, and 37% who said it gave them a more positive opinion of O’Malley.

-Clinton is by a wide margin the candidate debate watchers trust the most on national security issues. 75% say they have the most faith in Clinton on that front, compared to only 17% for Sanders, and 5% for O’Malley. […]

-What’s particularly striking is how universal the sentiment that Clinton won the debate tonight is among all the different groups within the Democratic Party. 86% of African Americans, 73% of women, 70% of moderates, 69% of seniors, 67% of Hispanics, 65% of liberals, 61% of white voters, 58% of men, and 50% of younger voters all think that Clinton was the winner of tonight’s debate.

I thought Sanders delivered a lot of strong answers and explained his policy stands well. His top Twitter moment may have been the debate’s biggest laugh line. Asked how high he would raise taxes on the wealthy, Sanders said he wasn’t as big a socialist as Dwight Eisenhower, noting that he wouldn’t raise the top income tax rate to 90 percent (where it was during the 1950s). Many of his answers made viewers want to learn more, judging by google searches during the debate. He may not have won over many Democrats inclined to support Clinton, but he solidified his status as the main alternative to the front-runner.

SECOND UPDATE: I should have mentioned one of O’Malley’s strongest moments: recounting a conversation with a woman in Burlington, Iowa, who asked him not to refer to our troops as “boots on the ground”: “My son is not a pair of boots on the ground.”

CBS News conducted a poll of Democrats and independents who watched the debate and found,

By a 23 point margin, these debate watchers say Hillary Clinton won the debate. Fifty-one percent say Clinton won, compared to 28 percent who favor Bernie Sanders. Just 7 percent pick Martin O’Malley as the winner. Fourteen percent called it a tie.

Among Democrats, Clinton is seen as winning by more than two to one, while independents are split between Clinton and Sanders. […]

Saturday night’s debate shifted much of its focus to foreign policy, terrorism, and addressing the threat posed by the Islamic militant group ISIS. On these topics, Clinton scores a commanding lead over her rivals. More than six in 10 Democrats and independents who watched the debate think Hillary Clinton would do the best job on each of these measures, compared to about a quarter who pick Sanders, and about one in 10 who pick O’Malley.

But on domestic issues, views are more mixed. While Clinton has a slight lead over Sanders on handling gun policy (43 – 36 percent), Sanders beats Clinton by almost two to one on handling income inequality. When it comes to the economy and jobs, Clinton and Sanders are about even. O’Malley trails both candidates on all of these by a wide margin.

Max Fisher argued at Vox that all three candidates “flunked Saturday’s debate on Paris and ISIS.” I never vote based on a candidate’s foreign policy stands, because I assume no president will stick to anything s/he said about such things during a campaign. But it’s worth clicking through to read Fisher pick apart the way Clinton “rambled incoherently,” with “gibberish” and “nonsensical” statements “strung together in a way that makes little sense.” O’Malley “made every mistake Clinton made but a little bit worse,” in Fisher’s view, while Sanders “said nothing of value about what he would do” but “at least did a good job of articulating what he would not do.”

Preliminary Nielsen ratings indicate that about 8.5 million people watched the debate, far fewer than the estimated 15.3 million people who watched the first Democratic presidential debate. The Donald Trump spectacles on the Republican side have drawn even more viewers. That’s the fruit of inept scheduling, dictated by Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. Incidentally, she blames the major television networks:

According to Vox, since 2000 only seven debates across both parties took place on a Saturday.
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In an interview, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said the weekend dates are because four of the DNC’s six debates are on broadcast networks, which are hesitant to move blockbuster prime-time shows like “NCIS” or “Scandal” — with guaranteed high ad dollars — in favor of a debate.

“The networks really drove a lot of that. Once we’re on broadcast networks, they have a lot more programming issues during the week and were less willing … we have CBS, ABC, NBC, Univision and PBS. We have a whole bunch of different folks to talk to about settling on a date, but when my folks on staff negotiated, these were the dates that came back,” Wasserman Schultz said.

Broadcast networks reach far more viewers than cable, since any television can access them. But Friday and Saturday nights are, on average, television’s two lowest-rated nights of the week, while Thursdays and Sundays are the highest. The average Saturday night for a broadcast network such as CBS brings in about 4 million viewers, far higher than the average weekday night for cable, though it can reach much higher for special events like sports or a debate.

A broadcast network executive, speaking on background, said broadcast networks are much more limited on time slots than cable, so they have to work within the schedule in place.

The Republican Party of Iowa provided some unintentional comedy in the form of this press release from spokesman Charlie Szold, which referred to Clinton’s “disastrous night.” I expect the other party’s flak to highlight statements that may be used later against candidates. But claiming it was a “disastrous night” for Clinton when all could see it wasn’t only hurts Szold’s credibility with his intended audience of political journalists.

Second Bernie Sanders tv ad in Iowa: “Rigged Economy” (starting to run this weekend)

Hillary Clinton ad: “The Same” (uploaded on October 27)

Hillary Clinton ad: “Together” (uploaded on November 3)

Hillary Clinton ad: “Compact” (uploaded on November 9)

Cover photo credit: Ruth Lapointe.