NBC News has announced who they think was the winner of Wednesday night’s first of two debates between about half of the Democratic 2020 presidential hopefuls, their pick may very well surprise you. The said the clear winner was –Donald Trump!
NBC News analyst, author and reporter Jonathan Allen declared President Trump the winner of the first Democratic presidential debate of the 2020 election cycle.
In assessing the debate, Allen “expressed surprise” that Trump emerged “largely unscathed” as the field of 10 candidates mostly avoided direct attacks on him.
Allen said the Democrats seemed more focused on positioning themselves furthest to the left to win over primary voters, rather than appealing to the swing voters that decided the 2016 election.
“For long stretches, it seemed, they completely forgot about the man who has been at the center of pretty much every discussion among Democrats for the last two-plus years — the man they’re competing to take on next year. The obvious reason, their motivation to beat each other was, on this night, more urgent than defeating Trump — a life-or-death moment for some of their campaigns. Trump was the chief beneficiary of that dynamic,” Allen wrote in his column.
Trump Not Totally Absent
Allen continued saying, “of course, he was occasionally thrust into the spotlight, such as when Washington Gov. Jay Inslee identified the President as the greatest threat to the country — a line that drew hearty applause from the crowd.
But for the most part, he was an afterthought.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., suggested that was intentional.
“You can’t just make this all about Donald Trump,” she told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews in an interview after the debate. “He’s an old show that people are getting tired of.”
Instead, she said, voters want to know what Democrats plan to do with the presidency if they win it.
Allen said that Warren accomplished her pre-debate goal of delivering the message that the economic and political systems need major structural changes if lower- and middle-class Americans are to see their standing rise.
But concluded that, by largely ignoring Trump as they did, Democrats could allow the President “to exploit their divisions and position himself for re-election” and “he was one step closer to that after Wednesday’s debate.”
The sentiment was shared by MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, who said it was “a missed opportunity” for Democrats to not go after frontrunner Joe Biden or President Trump.
Another MSNBC commentator, Donny Deutsch declared confidently after the debate that none of the 10 candidates on the stage could defeat Trump next year, including Warren.
