question much more, msnbc political analyst jonathan alter, columnist with the daily beast, msnbc analyst michelle goldberg new york times and danielle moodie-millmoodie-mill. what did you think, michelle? this isn t a new observation, but we were ill served by having these two parallel debates. totally, i appreciate that the dnc is not ruthlessly hierarchical the way the rnc so they didn t want to do the overcard/undercard debate. you had this very weird situation where it was idealogically polarized. you had byrne and elizabeth warren and a bunch of these sort of ringer moderates, right, who were standing in for joe biden. and then you had the reverse the next night where you had biden, warren, booker and then bill de blasio over there basically trying and kind of failing to channel what bernie sanders might say. and so in some ways, the central issue of this debate remains unresolved.
promises just to get elected, like who? yeah, and she didn t bite. actually, it s funny. we do mock debates where we have ten very gifted, or 20 in this case, very gifted producers who are super smart and study up on the candidates they re assigned. and that answer was given by kristin donnelly, one of my senior producers, who played amy klobuchar in the mock, which was, well i mean, she s talking about, i m guessing, bernie sanders and elizabeth warren, but she won t name them. so she pivoted to, donald trump makes promises he can t keep, which is what kristen donnelly, our superb senior producer who played klobuchar, did in our mock, so it didn t surprise me. everybody s making promise on this this stage was her answer. right. one of the things that s interesting about the way the dnc is doing debates, the previous debates in 2016, there wa be an undercard debate. you d have the top 10 candidates then whatever five, ten on a
sounds like a really smart way of doing it because if randomly those four were in just one debate then there would be an undercard debate so-called. but this way all the top polling people are divided. so who do you think people will be watching for the matches against each other? which ones of those will be most compelling? you know, i think people are interested in a potential biden-harris rematch from miami, right, where senator harris really took it to vice president biden. i think that s one thing people are looking for. but as you ve seen over the last several days this health care debate inside this democratic nomination race has been fully engaged. i would imagine if bernie sanders and joe biden were on the same stage, that would be a very healthy debate there as well. and remember what you said, alyson, in miami when they did the draw, you were right, four of the top five ended up on one
case. what about the washington post headline, shermichael, that says the drawing has been lopsided. do you see it that way? isn t it possible someone on night one can benefit not sharing the stage with the front runners? i think so. but to put most of the well-known individuals on night two does a disservice to some of the candidates who are lesser known candidates. i do think, however, it will be a great night for elizabeth warren because it will given her an opportunity, i would argue, to really sort of get into some of the nuances of many of the policy proposals she s put forward, i think translating tonight too, joe biden needs to be steady and firm and show why he is the front runner. i also expect to see kamala harris and mayor pete do very, very well, which could benefit their numbers. what about the republican undercard debate which i m sure you remember, lauren. in 2015, serve kaenven candidat, main debate had ten. what are the lessons from those packed debates?
how about the debates, amber? is there any expectation that those back-to-back debates in three weeks and change are going to do a lot to win over the field? i think the democratic national committee, the ones who are setting up this debate, really hope so. there are too many candidates right now for them to even have on the debate stage. so they ve had to limit the number of candidates based on donors and polling. they re going to narrow that even more in the next debates in september. what s really odd about these debates that makes it difficult for me to answer your question based on my own analysis is we re not going to have like front runner debating front runner potentially. the democratic national committee is going to put names in a hat and put them on the stage. they have a little bit of rules in place to try to prevent a total undercard debate and then vice president biden and sanders on one stage. but we ve never seen this dynamic before. we haven t seen two debates back