These Key Issues Took Center Stage At The New Hampshire Debates

By Ella Cerón and Lauren Rearick


Despite the surprising quantity of unity, laughter, and even a hug that started Friday (February 7) evening’s Democratic presidential primary debate, the night rapidly gave way to contention and personal attacks.


In the initial debate since Monday’s Iowa caucuses, seven qualifying candidates — former Vice President Joe Biden, former mayor Pete Buttigieg, Senators Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, and also businessmen  Tom Steyer and Andrew Yang — gathered in Manchester, New Hampshire to create their case to voters ahead of the state’s Democratic primary on Tuesday (February 11).


Before the candidates dug into the issues, they addressed recent events, including the careening  aftermath of last Tuesday’s Iowa caucus. Biden admitted that he“took a hit” in the state, and prematurely predicted the same results for New Hampshire, while Sanders applauded younger voters for their increased turnout.


Turning their attention to this week’s acquittal of President Donald Trump, Warren promised that if elected, she intended to follow through on the creation of a independent task force that would investigate the Trump administration. None of her fellow candidates expressed the same intentions, nevertheless Sanders and Steyers did call out the Republican party. “The saddest aspect of this whole thing is you have Republicans in the Senate who knew better. They knew that Donald Trump is a crook. They knew that Donald Trump is a cheat,” Sanders said.


With the candidates officially caught up on what went down since their last debate, the focus turned to key issues, including abortion rights, climate change, and America’s ongoing opiod crisis. Below, catch up on the hugest issues from the New Hampshire Democatic debate stage.


Abortion Rights


Friday’s debate saw the candidates finally addressing abortion rights at span. Nevertheless previous debates touched on the matter, moderator questions about the topic have remained relatively scarce, Media Matters for America notes. The lack of abortion-related debate conversations had also caught the eye of voters and reproductive health organiations like Suggested Parenthood, who harnessed the hashtag #AskAboutAbortion in a task to bring the offer problem of access and rights to the debate.


On Friday, Biden affirmed his support of an abortion litmus test for Supreme Court judges, ABC News reports; as explained by The Hill, such a test would affirm that any judges nominated to the Supreme Court should disclose their stance on abortion rights prior to being nominated.


Biden argued that a potential litmus test “relates to the fundamental value of the Constitution,” saying that a woman has the correct to pick. Nevertheless, he didn’t make clear what his standards for that test would look like, and that’s crucial, because he once supported the Hyde Amendment, a measure that prohibits the use of federal funds for abortion services, despite the procedure being legal across the nation. He later reversed that support, yet his stance on abortion hasn’t habitually been clearly defined.


Warren, meanwhile, argued that Roe v. Wade should be codified, a view also taken by Sanders and Klobuchar. As MTV News previously explained, codifying Roe v. Wade would permit the ruling to be and stay law while in federal courts.


“States are heading toward attempting to ban abortion outright, and the Supreme Court seems headed in exactly that direction as well,” Warren mentioned. “If we will protect the people of the United States of America and we plan to protect our rights to have dominion over our own bodies, then it’s going to mean we can’t simply rely on the courts. Three out of every four people In America believe now that the rule of Roe v. Wade should be the law...It is time to have a national law to protect the correct of a woman’s choice.”


Criminal Justice and Race


Throughout Buttigieg’s tenure because the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a Black person was four times more likely than a white person to be arrested for marjuana possession, ABC News reports. ABC News Live anchor Linsey Davis asked the candidate twice about the statistic throughout Friday’s debate, and both times, Buttigieg dodged a direct answer. “The reality is, on my watch drug arrests were lower than the national average and specifically to pot, lower than Indiana,” he noted. Davis disagreed, and alternatively pointed to an increase, a fact which Buttigieg again disputed.


“One of the strategies that our community adopted was to target as soon as there were cases where there was gun violence and gang violence, which was slaughtering so several in our community, burying teenagers, disproportionately Black teenagers, we adopted a plan of action that mentioned that drug enforcement could be targeted in cases where there was a connection to the most violent sort or gang connected to a murder," Buttigieg said.


Following Buttigieg’s response, Davis turned to Warren, asking if she imagined the mayor supplied an answer to the question. Warren responded with a “no,” and then pointed to a need to “rework our criminal justice system from the very front end on what we make unlawful all by means of the system and why we help people come back inside the community.”


Climate Change


Sanders and Steyer addressed climate change, with Steyer calling it the world’s biggest crisis, ABC News announced. The businessman argued a response required “diplomacy and allies and interaction with other countries,” while Sanders shared his vision for a global that would collectively use its military spending to fight climate change together.


Opioid Crisis


Prior to Friday’s debates, the candidates had spoke little of their plans for dealing with America’s continuing opioid crisis, Vox reports. Nevertheless, a moderator question directed at Yang gave at least two of the potential presidential candidates a chance to further explain their stance. Unfortunately, with only a five-minute concentrate on the supply, the spotlight on the supply was limited — and that’s troubling, given an estimated 10.3 million Residents of the United States struggled with opioid use in 2018. And while Trump bragged about a resist in drug overdoses throughout the State of the Union, he really can’t take credit for that shift. (That doesn’t mean he isn’t going to do it anyway — yet it should be noted that his administration’s rollbacks of Medicare and other healthcare options will most likely make substance use issues worse in other, devastating ways.)


Yang shared his support of supervised consumption sites and also a mandated three-day treatment program for those struggling with opioid use. He noted that help should be readily accessible without the fear of potentially going to prison for reaching out. Klobuchar, who mentioned that opioid manufacturers should be contained financially accountable for treatment, questioned how Yang would finance his mandated treatment.


What’s Next?


It won’t be long before the presidential hopefuls gather for another round of debating. As Time reports, two more debates are already confirmed for February 19 and 25. From there on, the remaining Democratic candidates are expected to face off only twice more — once in March and once in April — before the party’s 2020 presidential candidate is selected.