They have always been battling each other in head-to-head polls. Even with candidates low in the polls relegated to the “happy hour” forums, the main events were inevitably unwieldy: The top-tier debate on August 6 featured 10 participants.
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That makes Tuesday night important for them since the Democratic National Committee is only scheduling six debates for its presidential candidates, half the number the Republicans will hold.
If Biden does not run, Clinton’s support jumps significantly to 70 percent. Clinton herself has made wooing immigrants a keystone of her campaign; she announced her immigration policy approach at a Las Vegas high school this spring.
Will he be tough on her?
Also crucial for her is how she deals with questions surrounding her decisions as secretary of state from 2009-13, in particular on the killing of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, and numerous questions still arising about her use of a private email server for government communications. The Republican candidate claimed that Sanders has “always said socialist before and now he’s changing it and wants to be a little more mainstream”. You can connect to a livestream of the debate at CNN.com’s homepage and on the CNN Politics’ live blog. The controversy has overshadowed virtually every other aspect of her campaign and contributed to a decline in her favourability rating with voters who increasingly view her as untrustworthy. During the debate she will need to emphasize their differences and argue why her ideas are better, but without looking like she’s going too hard on him. Sanders, however, scored major points with the leftist grassroots when “Late Night” host Seth Meyers spotlighted his folk album from 1987, “We Shall Overcome”.
For Sanders, the challenge is to convert his populist fire on the stump into a more personal and engaging approach that draws contrasts with Clinton’s past positions without appearing to directly attack her.
2 Martin O’Malley and Jim Webb have the resumes of serious candidates, but are going nowhere.
The former two-term Maryland governor entered the race in May hoping to give primary voters an alternative to Hillary Clinton. Martin O’Malley, former Virginia Sen.
So who are these three relative-unknowns? He was once written about as one of the rising stars of the party – along with Barack Obama – by Bloomberg in 2005, who called him the Democrat’s “go-to guy on protecting the homeland”.
Watch for how they distance themselves from the president.
– Does Mrs. Clinton still believe the “Russian reset”, carried out while she was secretary of state, has served the interests of global security?
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Carly Fiorina is one lesser-known candidate who benefited from millions tuning into the first two Republican debates.
