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The First Democratic Debate

There was seldom a dull moment during the Democratic debates in Miami, Florida, last night, but a few candidates emerged clear winners. Tulsi Gabbard, an Iraq War veteran and Representative from Hawaii with little name recognition, experienced a huge bump in Google searches for her name after the debates.

The Drudge Report, a conservative news site, conducted an informal poll of debate watchers and found that 45 percent said Gabbard won the debate. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and former Maryland representative John Delaney came in second and third place.

Chris Cillizza, an analyst for CNN, says the candidates who walked away the winners were Julian Castro, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker. The losers were Beto O’Rourke, Amy Klobuchar, and Bill de Blasio.

Cillizza described Beto O’Rourke as “Hard to watch. Badly out of his depth from a policy perspective. Too rehearsed in his answers. The idea of him starting his first answer of the debate by speaking Spanish might have seemed like a good idea in his debate prep room but it played as pandering and overly planned in the moment. If one of O’Rourke’s goals coming into this debate was to show he was more than a good-looking but sort of empty vessel, it, um, didn’t work.”

Cillizza jokingly included O’Rourke on his “losers” list twice, writing, “He was so bad that he needs to be on the list twice.”