Twelve U.S. Democratic presidential candidates squared off in a spirited debate Tuesday night, all looking to confront President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, even as their Democratic congressional cohorts have accused Trump of political wrongdoing and opened an impeachment inquiry against him.
The dozen challengers all support the four-week-old impeachment probe, although Trump’s removal through impeachment remains unlikely. The candidates, however, wasted no time before telling a national television audience why Trump should be impeached by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives to face trial in the Republican-majority Senate.
In his opening statement, former Vice President Joe Biden, one of Trump’s top challengers, declared, “This president is the most corrupt … in all our history,” an assessment echoed across the debate stage.
‘No one is above the law’
Another leading candidate, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, said, “Sometimes there are issues that are bigger than politics. Donald Trump broke the law. No one is above the law. Impeachment must go forward.”
Tuesday’s debate was the fourth in a string of almost monthly get-togethers for the Democratic challengers seeking to win the party’s nomination to face Trump. But with the 12 candidates lined up on a stage at Otterbein University in the Midwestern state of Ohio, it was the largest such gathering and came as new drama has engulfed the U.S. political world about a year before voters head to the polls in the national balloting.
House Democrats opened the quick-moving impeachment probe after a whistleblower in the U.S. intelligence community raised questions about whether Trump had put his own political survival ahead of U.S. national security concerns when he asked Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for “a favor” in a late July call. Trump called for Kyiv to open an investigation into the role played by Biden in helping oust a Ukrainian prosecutor when he was former President Barack Obama’s second in command, and also to probe the lucrative service of Biden’s son Hunter on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.
Both Bidens have denied wrongdoing, although the younger Biden, 49, told ABC News this week that he exercised “poor judgment” in serving on the Burisma company board because it had become a political liability for his father.
The elder Biden said he had never discussed with Hunter Biden his decision to join the Ukrainian company’s board, which he left earlier this year. Hunter Biden now has pledged not to work for any foreign company if his father is elected president.
Trump’s criticism
Trump has repeatedly described his call with Zelenskiy as “perfect,” said he has done nothing wrong and assailed the impeachment probe as another attempt to overturn his 2016 election victory.
The elder Biden, at 76 on his third run for the U.S. presidency, is the nominal leader in national surveys of Democratic voters of their choice as the party’s standard bearer to face Trump, 73, and he often defeats Trump in hypothetical polling matchups. So does Warren, a former Harvard law professor, who has edged close to Biden or sometimes even surpassed him in national polls of Democrats as their favorite presidential candidate.
Biden and Warren, 70, were at center stage Tuesday, alongside Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described Democratic socialist who currently stands as the third choice among Democrats. Sanders, 78, recently suffered a heart attack, raising questions about his health as the oldest of the presidential contenders.
The nine other candidates on the debate stage faced a daunting challenge: how best to distinguish themselves from the front-runners and gain new traction in national polls and surveys of voters in states where Democrats are holding party nominating contests starting in February.
All nine currently are polling in the single digits, compared with Biden and Warren in the upper 20% range, with Sanders about 15%.
Next debate
The national Democratic Party has set standards even higher for those who want a place on the stage for the next debate on November 20. The candidates must have bigger polling numbers — at least 3% support in four national polls or 5% support in polls of people in states that are early on the voting calendar — and more financial support, from at least 165,000 individual donors.
The nine other challengers Tuesday night were California Senator Kamala Harris, who has slipped in the polls in recent months and has refocused her efforts in going after Trump; South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg; New Jersey Senator Cory Booker; Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar; former U.S. Housing Secretary Julian Castro; former U.S. Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas; tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang; U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii; and Tom Steyer, a wealthy environmental activist who launched national television ads calling for Trump’s impeachment long before Washington political figures undertook the current inquiry.