increasing the following to 1.69 million. clinton added 18,000 increasing her following to 5 had the 4 million. he got more google search traffic than all the other debate candidates. and then there was the focus groups. raise your hands. do you think bernie sanders won this debate? most of you. okay. how many of you walked in here supporting hillary clinton, raise your hands. half of you. how many of you are still supporting hillary clinton? only a small percentage. so who won the debate? bernie sanders. they point out there is nothing scientific about focus groups or google searches or social media followers. i think it s plausible like ben carson that national exposure from last night s debate could give him a boost in nogs anatio polls. joining me is the democrat from minnesota. congressman, i want to play an exchange about guns last night which was one of the more
you got this. i thought hillary did her job. she got through it. i prnlly thought she won the debate. i thought bern yea was off. he was not doing so well. i felt that other people shouldn t even be up there to be honest with you. i thought a couple of them were ridiculous. but you know , it s always tough when people shouldn t there be and they re taking up a lot of time, effort, and a lot of everything else and you d like to hear from the people that have a chance to win. in all fairness, the republicans have the same situation going. it s one of those things. donald trump offering up his critique of the democratic debate and of his own competition in the republican party where the front-runner
that s less i think that is less on the debate moderation and more on a very specific point and strategy on the clinton campaign to essentially do as much as possible to erase that distance and they have executed that incredibly well. that is really coming from them. angela you need to be in the weeds to really understand how she was parsing in some ways. in many ways, she s adopting president obama s strategy from 2008. is that sort of your feeling about that kind of hillary clinton managing the kind of allied the differences as much as possible except on guns, obviously? i do think that hillary clinton has a record of being progressive both before she was ever secretary of state and before she was a senator in new york, before she was, you know, a country speaking first lady of the state of arkansas.
what was your impression of last night? i m decided in a sense that i m voting for the democrats for president. i know that s not a major news break. a couple of observations. first, i just my wife connie and i were sitting there and watching the debate last night. we watched and we both watched two republican debates in the contract was just incredible between our debate and their two debates in terms of substance and in terms of informational and in term of the candidates respect for the voters and for each other. all of that and the other thing that i think is what you just said that i think is so important, chris. and that is clearly this party is the party of a little guy, little woman. this is a party clearly now where i want it to be for all my political life, a party that fights for progressive values. a party that fights for fair trade. a party that looks to raise the minimum wage significantly, not
fight was way different from the republican food fight. i understand that governor and all in starts right now. good evening from new york. i m chris hayes. following a pair of circus like debates. last night americans got to experience something quite different. an engaging and legitimately substantial exchange of ideas between democratic presidential candidates that was at times contentious but never nasty. the debate drew 15.3 million viewers, a record for a democratic primary debate. a number that blew away the expectations. that number fell short of the 25 million who tuned into the first gop primary debate. 15.3 million is a striking number especially in light of the relative seriousness on display throughout the evening. in this debate, we tried to deal with the very tough issues